Page won’t open for some reason. Internet working fine. For whatever reason, I am often blocked from posting on blogs, left and right. This is intended just as a basic catechism of my ideas. Bit disconnected, but the basics are there.
Ideas have consequences. Seeing this, and articulating where things lead, is the proper role of what are typically called intellectuals, and what I prefer to dress in overalls and call “thought workers”. This class has not done its job in 50 years, by and large, with the exception of William F. Buckley, Brent Bozell and the like.
What instead is presented is a pretend game, an artificial world in which everything is possible, and ideas never lead to concrete outcomes other than protest and other ritually useful forms of social interaction.
Now, it is in my view imposslble to lie to yourself–to ALL parts of yourself–which means that sustained lies necessarily lead, for self described “nice” or “loving”, or “compassionate” people to cognitive splitting. What happens is that if internalized violence is projected “out there”, that the sense of responsibility for it disappears, limits on its use disappear, and that massive and intractable rationalizations become necessary. Psychologically, this is how people like Noam Chomsky or Bill Ayers justify their support of programs of mass torture–physical and mental–rape, capricious imprisonment, suppression of basic human rights, generalized poverty, and of course the implementation of insurmountable systems of class.
When I look at the landscape particularly of our supposedly best universities, what I see is pervasive psychopathology, and cognitive dissonance suppressed only with the power of the routinization of nonsense.
Moral abandonment leads necessarily to cruelty. Any person incapable of a non-ironic, non-contingent moral code will necessarily join a group which tells him or her what to do. If conformity is the only virtue, then power is the arbiter of right and wrong. Those who seek power, seek it to use it. Hence the first sentence in this paragraph.
I explore these issues at some length in this piece, which is nominally about the Vietnam War, but which really just uses that as a jumping off place: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page19.html
It is not perfect, but it is in my view solid, and gets to the meat of the matter.