Why would someone want to keep some other person, or some other group, small? Because they feel small themselves, and want to protect themselves from awareness of this fact.
Why would someone want to fear someone else? To rationalize irrational fear that is stable that they do not want to acknowledge and process.
Anyone who wanted to build a Mass Formation has to first denigrate individual judgement–for example by building a cult where the Expert is the High Priest, and by ritually expelling all qualified people unwilling to speak Orthodoxy–and then by generalizing anxiety with violent media, weakening of the nuclear family and religious communities, relentless hysteria in the news, and isolating people in their homes with TV’s as cultural altars that they control.
Thinking about it this morning, the core problem we have in much of the world is that people have been made to NEED enemies. This is the true disease.
The symptom is that they reject dialogue. They reject efforts at negotiating difference in conditions of mutual respect, that is at least contingent on achieving understanding before judging.
The root problem is not that people believe, for example, that men can become women, fully and completely. The problem is that they become hysterical when anyone doubts it, for example by referencing the whole of Biology as it existed until a few short years ago, when like most of science today, it was politicized, and ceased speaking open truth as presented by the evidence, and started speaking possibilities as needed to get grants and avoid denunciation and cancellation, and depersoning.
I talked for a half hour or so yesterday with a lifelong Deadhead. He had by his estimate attended 500 Grateful Dead shows. He claimed it was the world’s longest continuous work of cultural art. I liked this idea. It’s tenable.
Since he was also a bit of a Dead historian, who taught me a lot about the culture, he noted that the whole thing came out of CIA/military experiments. I had not realized it, but Ken Kesey himself participated in MK/Ultra at Stanford.
This whole article is quite interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_lysergic_acid_diethylamide
At Stanford in 1959, Kesey volunteered to take part in a CIA-financed study named Project MKULTRA at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital. The project studied the effects on the patients of psychoactive drugs, particularly LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, cocaine, AMT, and DMT.[40] Kesey wrote many detailed accounts of his experiences with these drugs, both during the Project MKULTRA study and in the years of private experimentation that followed. Kesey’s role as a medical guinea pig inspired him to write the book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1962.
On this guy’s account, the whole counter-culture that emerged in the 1960’s arose from that period. This is also a tenable hypothesis. Ken Kesey was the Uber-hippie and the way LSD came to be used and seen in the 1960’s could without too much trouble be traced to his Acid Tests. And since Neal Cassady was their driver, he was sort of the bridge between the Beats and the Hippies.
So I got to wondering: what if this whole culture was created in some respects as a matter of POLICY? This guy was claiming the CIA was trying to see if they could get people to dance in the streets. If so, they succeeded.
And as support he pointed out that the whole Dead thing could have been shut down at any time. It wasn’t.
So being me I got to wondering if this whole bifurcation in our society was not engineered long ago. The Left, as it exists today, traces its cultural roots to the acid and marijuana culture of the 1960’s.
This is their happy place. Their happy time. Their colorful time, in a world where Gray is literally and figuratively becoming a dominant color. This is where they MADE A DIFFERENCE.
If the Freedom Riders were not dropping acid, the people who were supported them strongly, at least after the fact, and after the real danger, conflict, and struggle were largely over.
All of this kind of coalesced eventually into a world where the United States, in principle, as constituted, was the enemy. They grew not to oppose this or that, but the WHOLE THING. Obama was the apotheosis of this, in that we still have no idea who he really is–whether, for example, his real father was Frank Marshall Davis, as to me seems likely for many reasons–and of course Joe Biden is his retarded and morally vacuous successor, whose sole job is to rubber stamp whatever people whose names we don’t know cause to be put in front of him.
We live in a world where, to modify a cliche, more and more people know less and less about more and more. I don’t think most Antifa members could give a coherent two paragraph summary of who the historical Nazis were, what they believed and why, and what they actually did and how. Yet, in their own minds, they oppose “fascists”. How do they define a fascist? Anyone who opposes THEM.
I will remind you Mussolini defined fascism as “Everything inside the State [Us], nothing outside the State [Us], and nothing against the State [again, Us].”
So the fundamental Fascist activity is eliminating opposition and genuine diversity of opinion. Who is trying to do that? Well, they have many names and exist in many places, but their militias–their street mobs morphologically identical to the SA and Black Shirts–are Antifa and BLM. Their job is to intimidate people into compliance that they cannot win with persuasion. They are functionally terrorist groups, intended to build terror. Say the wrong thing, they show up at your house. Hitler or Mussolini would readily recognize, for example, what these mobs are trying to do, and being allowed to do by Joe Biden, to the Supreme Court justices they have identified as outside the State as they want it constituted.
What is a traitor? Anyone outside or against the State AS THEY WANT IT CONSTITUTED. What is an “insurrection”? Any group protesting openly against the State as they want it constituted.
The mob that was allowed, and even directed, into the Capital on Jan. 6th was not there to overthrow the government of the United States. This is obvious. They went into the Capital, took selfies, then left peacefully. Their arrests by and large happened later, one by one.
As I have said before, the whole Hippy thing really amounted in many ways to an abdication of adult responsibility. It amounted to a decision to remain, on some level, a Flower Child. The conceit is that they are harmless, innocent, loving, good, because outside the system where nations contend for power and prestige.
But living in a Liberal democracy, or Republic, was not compatible then with the aims of the sociopathic narcissists running the Communist world. It had to be opposed. Choosing “peace” in a world where fights had to be fought was never an option.
And as I will never tire of pointing out, our decision to retreat from Vietnam AFTER WE HAD WON, caused horrific pain and suffering in South Vietnam. Hundreds of thousands were executed outright. Millions of families were broken apart, and villages that were perhaps in some cases a thousand years old broken up and destroyed. Torture was common. Misery was nearly universal, and for many years.
Here is another core problem: Leftists–people who came out of this culture–have got to admit THEY WERE WRONG. Nixon does not have to be made a good guy to admit that leaving Vietnam–and Southeast Asia generally–the way we did creating completely unnecessary and unimaginable suffering. Laos suffered, and continues to suffer. And Cambodia saw a third, perhaps, of its population murdered in more horrific ways than most people can begin to imagine. A great many were literally tortured to death, as a matter of policy. They were not looking for information. There was no goal: just the infliction of as much pain on people whose sole crime was, perhaps, owning eyeglasses, which marked them as potential intellectuals, and thus Outside or even against the State.
For my part, I can listen to anyone tell any story without judgement, and I have heard some doozies, and had solid reason to suspect crimes which were not confessed. Judging individuals as individuals is more work than I normally want to do.
But judging groups for the behaviors which arose from their core beliefs is something that in my view is necessary. And that judgement, for me, takes the form of stating obvious truths, such as that mass murder is a bad thing in all cases, and if we support it, then that is bad.
But who supported mass murder in Vietnam? The Left. The hippies. In no small measure, and no doubt mostly passively, the Deadheads. And to be sure, the DEMOCRATS, who literally condemned millions of people to gruesome deaths when they cut all funding to all of Southeast Asia and forced the withdrawal of all troops. Among other things, that created the space for the emergence and military victory of the Khmer Rouge, who were at one time allied, if memory serves, with the North Vietnamese Communists.
With the Plumbers Richard Nixon was trying to protect the victory he and his policies won in Vietnam, which resulted in the Paris Peace Treaty. Nihilistic liars sacrificed all that on the alter of their narcissism and belligerent stupidity.
There is a current in our society that stems from all this that says “Just live for now”. YOLO. Live like a child, free from the cares of adult responsibility and accountability.
But no sane person would call this good. It IS good to be present to the present. It IS good to be aware and focused on living well. But you also need intelligence.
Abstraction is how we predict and CREATE the future. Behavior organized around governing principles defines the direction of our cultural order as a Complex system. I have called this a Telearchy.
Living for the moment is a telearchy destined for collapse. Living without thinking is a telearchy destined for less and less authentic, real, spontaneous order, and one which more or less demands an externally imposed order of the type fascists–or their predecessors, who were religious zealots of one stripe or another–are only too happy to provide.
This nation cannot survive with so many people hysterically attached to childishness, to a primitive and atavistic narcissism.
And I will add one more comment: animals are functionally narcissistic. There are cases of one species interacting harmoniously with others, but rarely in the wild. Some species take care of their own; some, like sharks, literally eat their own. But animals are not people. They do not possess the capacity for abstract reflection, and for truly empathizing with other animals, truly understanding them. There is a certain capacity for altruism in some higher species, but it is instinctual.
So here is what I have suggested before, and will say a bit more strongly: I don’t think the vegetarianism of the Buddhists and Hindus had to do, primarily, with the killing of animals for food being wrong. Tormenting them clearly is, but our entire Earth is covered with animals who readily consume one another for survival. Within a block of you birds are eating worms, and larger birds are eating smaller birds.
I think the axiom to not hurt came from an effort to reform social orders based on sacrifice–which is to say primitive narcissism–by making their fundamental element anathema. Sacrifice, and probably including human sacrifice, was an essential element of Hindu culture for a very long time. As Frits Staal discovered in funding an Agnicayana in India perhaps back in the 1970’s or 80’s, the original instructions for that ritual included a human head built into the base of the altar, presumably from sacrifice. The Ashvamedha certainly included the sacrifice of a horse.
Human life is not so complicated that we cannot abstract useful governing principles from it, and the more ideas we allow and discuss and investigate, inevitably the smarter we get.
What we are facing is in effect a global Primitivism, an atavism, an apparently induced instinctual obsession with returning to an earlier and worse state of human consciousness, all buttressed by an ubiquitous and less and less surmountable technology; all of which is rooted in primal fears we could and should have overcome long ago.
We could institute meditation in schools. Biofeedback and Neurofeedback. Audio-Visual Entrainment. Training in Cognitive and Behavioral Psychology. We could legalize all psychedelics for research by qualified professionals, and introduce those which work into our mental health system. This would cause, among other things, though, a huge loss in revenue to Big Pharma, who–no doubt among others–has been and can be expected to continue to oppose all this.
What sane person would oppose all this? No sane person would. So who DOES oppose all this? I honestly don’t know. It remains a mystery.
We live in a world where individual psychopaths can and do exercise more and more disproportionate influence.
All I know to do is continue to see as clearly as I can, and in all honesty hope for a miracle of some sort whose source I cannot see.