Leftists love to mock conservatives when they talk about mind control. Yet, historically, mind control, thought control, was a MAJOR component in particularly Maoist iterations of Communism.
I will feel better about humanity, about the future, when the full horror of these projects is common knowledge. People were made to work 10,15,20 hours a day, intentionally malnourished, beaten often, the women (and probably in some cases men) raped (or given reduced labor in exchange for sexual favors), forced to repeat mindless slogans for hours on end, and forced to “confess” to crimes they had not committed in group sessions.
The whole process was intended to break people. I don’t think most people, in this overly comfortable country, can truly grasp how awful this was. People think it is bad having a mean boss. Imagine the worst, most sadistic boss you have ever had being given a billy club to beat you with, license to use it, and literal control over your life and death.
In Vietnam, as most people know, they would not infrequently lock people in small bamboo cages that were not big enough to stand up or sit down in. To this day, Special Operations soldiers and combat pilots have to endure a day or so in these things. Some people, not unnaturally, have panic attacks, and fail to complete the training. But imagine spending YEARS in these things, in the heat and bugs, in your own filth, shitting and pissing on yourself, being fed rice with maggots or sand in it.
This is Communism. This is the creed that many academics to THIS DAY will not disown, will not denounce.
The simple, ineluctable fact is that small differences matter, and that in what is called Marxism (as I have said often, Marx himself offered an economic hypothesis that was falsified by history, which means he should be irrelevant) the unit of measurement is the society. The reason for this is that economic conditions can be MEASURED, whereas individual qualities like love, compassion, and the like cannot, and our academics to THIS DAY retain a passion for pretending that there is a single correct answer; or alternatively, join the leftist cult because they have failed utterly to develop their own morality, and want to be submerged in a conformitarian creed, a desire they signal by dealing daily in meaningless gobbledy-gook.
Basically, we have the narcissistic power mongers, and the would-be slaves. This is what I’ve seen in our houses of power. This is the state of the state when it comes to our “best” universities. Genuine Liberalism is almost nowhere to be seen. This is why the crimes of the Communists STILL are not widely known. Nobody wants to talk about them. They want to eat their meat and not ask its history.
I will submit here a personal detail. I have always wanted this blog to not be a “Daily Me’. I want it to deal with issues of instrinsic importance and to do so in what I hope is a qualitatively unique and substantive way, thus differentiating it from much of what is out there.
At the same time, any long term readers I may have will have seen that I struggle daily with ghosts of my past. I am making progress, and what follows is intended to help facilitate my own healing by publicly announcing some personal truths I have only recently uncovered.
I know what it is like to lose your self, to live in a totalitarian regime which has no respect for the individual, because both of my parents were (and of course are: a particular nature of the malady is that that those who have it worst recognize it least) clinical narcissists. They would both of course deny this, and both of course have learned over the years to do a passable impression of empathy.
But this fact, in tandem with frequent moves when I was a child, severing me from enduring friendships, the ability to form meaningful relations with other family members, teachers, or others, caused me to fail to develop any useful sense of self, and more importantly a capacity to feel like I controled my own destiny. This led, in turn, to decades of deep depression, and difficulty thinking.
In my view, the reason I am capable of analyzing things on a deep level is that these facts of my experience forced me to deal with first principles, for myself. They forced me, in effect, to create my own social and moral world to inhabit, since everything was taken from me. Depression is like weight training for the cognitive faculty. Because everything is hard, you have to learn to focus. You have to develop a strong will, and you have to develop independence of thought, since assaults on your person are constant and usually hidden. That is why the arrows in my dream of a few weeks ago were so small. Assaults on self are subtle, and missed by many.
Ayn Rand’s mother was in my view plainly a narcissist, as was Ayn herself. Her obsessive thinking, thinking which proved useful for many, was a protective emotional reaction to her mother’s declaration to her, in that hidden tunnel of real communication that happens when all outward words are lies, was that she didn’t exist. Her entire life’s work was dedicated to the proving that she did, in fact, exist, and had the right and even duty to exist.
That was been my own project as well. To the point here, I know what existing as a working member of a totalitarian regime is like. You do your work daily, don’t ask questions, and feel a bit sad, but don’t know why, and don’t know how even to ask the question, or even assign a name to what you feel. People like that are what the State wants: good soldiers who just do what they are told. That such conformity breeds sadness and emotional ill health–and certainly a lack of creativity and initiative–is to them unimportant.
And the assault on the self is virtually invisible. As I have said often, the trickiest task is often not explaining what is there, but seeing what is NOT there, and wondering about that. Bad economists don’t see the jobs NOT created as a result of their policies. Many will see the Obama layoffs, but fail to account in their thinking for all the jobs that WOULD have been created, but weren’t, because Obama and Obamacare scare the crap out of them.
For me, it was not that I was told I didn’t exist. I was simply never told that I DID exist. Obviously, I was praised for this and that. I was good at taking tests. But there is this quality of attention that says to people “You exist, you matter”, that is the essence as I see of love–it is what I definitely do give my own children–but not something I got. My value was as a reflector of someone who themselves did not really exist either. I lived in a house of mirrors that reflected nothing.
I say this not out of maudlin self pity, or even to engage in our confessional culture. I say this because it is true, and the truth sometimes needs to be broadcast. I think putting it out there, in this concrete form, will be useful for me, healing for me, and quite possibly useful to someone else as well.
I will add, that I have at times wondered if being too open would create at some future point greater access to my psyche for some future torturer. People forget, but torture chambers exist in dozens of countries even now, and I suspect the likely actual author of Obama’s books–Bill Ayers–has a place in that stone he calls his heart for them even now.
But MY GOD, if what I have already posted isn’t sufficient to develop a plan, I am dealing in any event with amateurs. I have already undergone a minimalist version of brainwashing and reeducation. I have already spent far too many hours with my body racked with pain and my mind filled with confusion, to fear much. I know it can be much worse, but I have no phobias, and see no reason to suppose I would not react like everyone else to everything else.
This is a bit of an odd post, and I actually have some positive things to say about our political climate later today, but my feeling–and how can one ever justify or need to rationalize feelings?–is that this needed to be said.