The Left, in its present iteration as a culture destroying virus, has taken the added step of using the superstructure, the imprint, of an ideology, but removing all the content. They have created moving targets, where the mob marches first one way, then another. They go up, and they go down, and are forced to, and required to, use continual back and forth signalling as a means of confirming they are still in the pack. This, obviously, requires repeating publicly the continual drip of nonsense being put out by the synchronizing organs, principally the media.
An ideology without fixed ideas.
Here is the thing: to remain in such a state of continual change, you have to become emotionally and intellectually incurious and superficial. I’ve of course said this many times, and in my own world, the image of the Headless Ones I described from a dream in the leadup to the 2012 election remains the most salient.
To stay in lockstep, you have to be taught, little by little, to surrender some important part of your humanity. You have to surrender the right to say “I believe this, but not that”, or “This is OK, but that is not.” You surrender the right to ask for consistency from your leaders. You cannot say “but I thought we believed in ALL human rights”, when they, for example, bury completely the abuse of Mexican children, when they find out it happened during the Obama years; or when they refuse to discuss the profound misogyny and abuse of women in cultures they are wanting to protect. You can’t say “you are saying rape is wrong here, but then saying it is perfectly OK when done by cultural others. This cannot mean you believe rape is wrong. Why?”
It’s maddening. Clinically. I have been watching some things over the past few days, and people who are college educated, who should know better, are offering and getting angry over arguments that would earn a “C’mon, man” from an average high school teacher.
When we speak of rationalism, I, in any event, get an image of Immanuel Kant taking his walk at the same time every day. Rationalism as a sort of cognitive windup clock, where you always know what you are going to get.
But in its best form, in the form invented and in the process of perfection in the Western world (if our many demons do not destroy us, as indeed they are trying very hard to do), rationalism is an effort to integrate emotions into our perceptual worlds. In its first phase it is an emotional pause, in which you consciously try to step back, and look at the world analytically, and empathetically. You ask “what am I missing in this situation? In what respect is this person making valid arguments?”
It begins, perhaps, with the principle that no one person knows everything, that we are all prone to failure, and that negotiated understandings are a vast improvement on the use of violence, whether physical, emotional, or intellectual.
And I think it can be stated accurately and succinctly that thinking rationally requires a calm spirit. It is precisely the demonic restlessness of the Leftist mob which prevents any use of reason at all.
And calmness is a function of mental health. Rational thought is an Emergent Property of emotional health. It is not a substitute for courage, for seeing things the way they are, but rather that desirable process purified and perfected.
Emotionally mature people are rational proportionate to their health. Conversely, emotionally immature people are irrational to the extent they are lacking.
None of this should be controversial, but it is. These are all ideas I grew up with, but which the kids today are NOT growing up with. These are not obvious to them at all, or so it seems to me. And far too many people who grew up learning all this have forgotten it. Life got to them, and they picked a stale alleyway of a “philosophy” to avoid the work of thinking, feeling, and learning.