I was in the grocery store today, buying a few things. I am very fond of fermenting things, and bought the ingredients to make some more beet kvass and some kimchi. I have a pot of sauerkraut, too, that has been bubbling and which I have been pulling from from time to time for six weeks now.
And I was looking at all the people wearing masks. I was the only one without one. Most of those people have been taught since childhood “you have to be nice”, and if you don’t wear a mask–we are being told this time around–you are going to kill someone’s grandma.
Unless, that is, wearing masks makes infection rates HIGHER–as I believe–in which case objectively I am the ONLY one worrying in an intelligent way about grandma. The rest of them are following bad science and ignoring their own natural repulsion to such an unnatural practice as covering your face.
But I was thinking: they are TRAINED. The people running this society are trying to change SOCIETY by changing our collective habits, and the way they are changing our habits is through indoctrination both in regard to specific habits and in regard to the perceived need to conform generally.
In building a better society, you can always start from two places: the “society” itself, which does not exist, or the individual, which does.
Classical Liberalism is about giving individuals the freedom and moral training to learn to judge events and people locally and specifically. Classical Liberalism is about diversity of thought and opinion and behavior, all of which are integrated through reason, through dialogue, and through principled tolerance.
Classical Liberalism can maintain borders, thresholds, lines which should not be crossed, all while allowing for considerable and indeed nearly unlimited variety short of those borders.
In Classical Liberalism you teach people HOW to think. You teach them moral reasoning. You put them through scenarios. You ask them “what do YOU believe, and why”, and you allow a wide range of answers, as long as they are honest and not obviously pathological.
All of this is reversed with what we have today, with the propaganda being deposited on our children in our schools.
With Leftism you teach people WHAT to think, and if they want to know why, you accuse them of being an outsider, which depending on context might be a racist, or redneck, or homophobe, or xenophobe, or anything else that tickles your fancy. You just have to shut down the thought, and teach them shame at being different in the process. That is the main goal.
With Leftism you build HABITS, but these habits are paper thin. People act a certain way in public, without necessarily having ingested and digested and UNDERSTOOD why, as one example, racism is wrong. They are simply taught THAT it is wrong.
This is how people can easily and generally deploy the same bigotry and stereotyping that make racism wrong, and NOT EVEN REALIZE IT, if they are deploying it against an approved group. What is being taught is not that bigotry is wrong, or that viewing individuals by perceived and largely inaccurate traits you assume about the whole group they belong to is wrong. You can’t say anything about “blacks” because that is “racist” but you can talk about “whites”, or “white men” all day long, in the most bigoted, prejudiced, hateful way imaginable and no bells go off.
Again, this is because our kids are taught WHAT to think, not how or why. They literally have NO IDEA what it would have been like to receive a traditional Liberal education worthy of the name. They just know that they get praised for saying the “right” things and condemned and ostracized both for saying the wrong things, and for not saying the “right” things fast enough or loudly enough.
It is Orwell’s Two Minutes of Hate, writ small.
And here is the point I would make: when you create a seeming peace through conformity to paper thin virtue, you have not created a happy or good society. You have taught people the habit of ignoring their own latent impulses towards anger, and hatred, and tribalism. You have not taught them to process and transcend these things, but to SUPPRESS them. You have, in the end, created an attractive billboard with a cesspool reality behind it.
You have created what we see in most mass media. You have created the zombies and vampires and werewolves and serial killers and endless dead bodies, mutilated in a thousand ways. We are not a happy nation. We are not an emotionally open nation, no matter how much self disclosure people are taught to throw out at the world. You cannot confess something you can’t honestly feel, and most of us lose that ability in the endless desire to conform, to not stand out, to be “good” in the only way we were ever taught.
We have not done the work to become better as individuals, and our society is actually secretly getting WORSE, as we lose all possible touch with our personal emotional realities.
The core truth is that the individual is the only POSSIBLE locus for any perception, for any social betterment that is lasting and real, and for any action. Psychology, not sociology, is the doorway.
In an ideal society–and I think much of America used to be like this–the moral codes of most of the individuals correspond well to those of each larger group, even if perhaps less and less as the scale expands. The family fits into the community, the community into the city, the city into the State, the State into the nation. And if we are ever to build a world peace not based on Hitlerian oppression, the nations in turn need to form a congruent whole with the “world”, which is to say with each other.
Every part of a fractal contains the whole fractal. Every part of a hologram contains the whole hologram. Morality needs to be like this. And to be clear, never exactly the same, but broad stroke, and particularly in terms of principle.
Why is racism wrong? Because it is unfair. Why is it unfair? Because all individuals differ in their morality, their intelligence, their diligence and other attributes, and all people deserve the chance to be judged based on who they ARE, not on who we assume them to be based on the accident of how and where they were born.
These are Liberal principles, ones which assert that everyone gets a chance. This represents an ideal which is the peak of an arc which is even now declining again back into humankinds ancient history of tribalism, hatred, and group based violence.
Literally everything the Left is pushing is intended to return us to the bad old days, but with modern technology. Our morality is declining even as our abilities to destroy and control one another are growing exponentially.
Every day I wonder how all this ends well. Every day I wonder how so many smart people can be so fucking stupid. Every day I wonder how EVEN WITH the effective indoctrination so many kids get that they can’t think their way out of the patent and ridiculous lies they are told.
People’s impulses are towards the good, but they are being TRAINED to aim for the bad and call it the good.
All of this is very hard to watch. Very hard. None of it is necessary. All we need are good people to wake the FUCK UP and start opposing all this bullshit.