Key Points:
- Mass movements awash in revisionist history and guilt culture seek equilibrium via identity fragmentation, appeals to vanity and meaningless forms of societal destruction.
- The suppression and scarcity of honor and rigor causes the worst of history’s down-cycles to repeat in rhyme. The trap is set when there are too many people who refuse self-awareness. Digital media has sped up the associated chaos.
- Since the inception of “political correctness” 100 years ago, the initial good intentions surrounding morality-based policies have mutated into a mind virus—repeatedly evolving fresh techniques to commandeer virtue in a way that promotes dogmatic devotion to hardline control.
- The US public education system, now established as a “progressive” social experiment, places a high value on totalitarian overreach; students are methodically damaged by the torpor of Marcusian indoctrination (a.k.a., “groupthink and ritual stupidity first, freethinking and meritocracy last”), loaded with prattle packaged as wisdom—the kind that makes people feel inferior if they do not “understand” or get it.
- Even Switzerland knows how difficult it is to remain neutral in a world that ultimately thrives on raw power, competitive inequality, unfairness and money.
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[ image©Andy Gilmore]
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“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.” –Bertrand Russell
The scope of such wintry admonition is vast. It pertains to the perseverance of supremacy over individual thought, crowd psychology and the forfeiture of freedom for an illusory parcel of safety.
Let’s face the cliché—we live in an increasingly unstable, fractious society. You can cut the political tension with a knife. One side looks at the other and sees weak men and unhappy women, a sour and insular otherness. There also seems to be very thin lines of order between categories of people—race, religion, gender and class warfare destabilize relations, make headlines and get amplified by hostile ideologues in activist movements. One could argue something menacing and unhealthy is forever brewing, but the cycle sustains flash points and sudden shifts in intensity like the spiraling murmuration of starlings. The survivalists shout that our world is in a pressure cooker; at some point a seal on the lid is going to blow. Practicality and moral high ground can be lost, opening the door for disorder. It isn’t a bad idea to have some basic survival skills under your belt just in case the heat reaches your doorstep. It goes back to the essential: Everything human-made, including our social constructs, can and will fail you. Survival without those things is not fun.
As past catastrophic revolutions and failed revolutions have shown us, there’s a precipice where social utopian dreams will be realized as nightmares, usually in some form of fascism. The outer limits of endurance are tested, supply lines gets severed, cars run out of gas on the highway, fires ravage, infrastructure collapses and innocent people are obliged to navigate the aftermath. The old timers say there are no more hitchhikers near the roadside because we live in a crazy world. You must prepare for and expect the craziness.
The deluded masses—unable to pull themselves together against a larger and more sophisticated corrupting force—cannot understand their own oppression. Their voluntary forfeiture of autonomy and self-sufficiency requires an immense audience, stabilized by coercive media modules and dutiful applause that appeals to a warped egocentrism. It’s like an endemic illness, concealed by the enforcers of political correctness, which is neither correct nor strictly political. In the quote above, what Bertrand Russell was getting at was the Dunning-Kruger effect, where people who are bad at something think they’re geniuses at it (while people who are good at something tend to think they are bad at it). This extends, naturally, to a primitive state of cognitive bias and illusory superiority. That’s what they want, and that’s how the fates unravel against the winds of sane realism. The term illusory superiority was first used by the researchers Van Yperen and Buunk, in 1991. The phenomenon is also known as the above-average effect, the superiority bias, the leniency error, the primus inter pares effect, and the Lake Wobegon effect, named after the fictional town where all the children are above average.
Many free-thinking individuals have correctly established that we are now living amidst a Great Delusion, one aimed at cultivating an inversion of Orwellian proportions. This phenomenon has surfaced throughout history, which should make it less mysterious given the reference points and case studies we can see in cycles.
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[ image©Andy Gilmore]
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Aspirational PC and Modern Education Theory, Decoded
One catalyst of a societal inversion is the lack of rigor in a world where—by prehistoric design, and despite the riggings—nothing is actually fair, equal or free. Some will unavoidably discover how integrity bends the hard way, through opaque messaging that induces a submissive trance or urgent FOMO. Lights dimmed by disinformation, with a soothing propagandized spin on arrested development and/or life’s manifold failure-to-launch scenarios. Some of us eventually find out that even if we knew a great deal, we had learned too many things wrongly. This leads to a shadowy, atomized existence.
There is an agenda that actually promotes such an existence. Mainstream media and social media are proven to be under technocratic state control. They spare no effort to indoctrinate pliable minds with a multipronged false narrative. It gets harder to do the actual, needed research in this environment—and that’s the way they want it. Here’s how they did it:
In western democracies previously neutral, value-free, formal aspects of learning and teaching now become, on their own grounds and in their own right, political, which anti-capitalist social critic Herbert Marcuse encouraged as “radical criticism throughout” and “intellectual subversion.” Cognitive dissonance arises from the fog when we are taught stupidity and herd mentality.
The student of the current age seeks to be among those who vanquish their natural prejudices simply to clear a space for new prejudices, a political reality Marcuse well understood. All the way down to granular notions about how the English language itself determines “a priori” the direction in which the thought process moves.
Without any outer limits, a “heads I win, tails you lose” strategy starts getting what it wants from the unaware. Suddenly your dissent needs to be locked down or otherwise purged. Here we go, Blade Runner.
The shiny new thing inspires erasure of its preamble, often killing the thing that built it, and that’s a super-old story. It is sped up by the recalibration of tolerance boundaries, the denial of the intrinsic limitations of tolerance, and a collective shift across the range of acceptable discourse, known sometimes as the Overton Window (which I’ve previously discussed in detail here). Next up, we just replace you with sentient AI-driven robots gone rogue? In a lazy state of deluded apathy, some people won’t even fight it. This moment becomes, in turn, a fantastic business opportunity for the worst people in the world.
The contrived intellectual framework for political correctness emerged in the 1920s and ‘30s. The newthink—and the newspeak, and the political correctness attached to it—is theoretically neo-Marxist and threaded to authoritarian regimes like China, so it is also an ancient device. That is to say it is also atheist in nature, or—as some would argue—worldly rather than spiritual (a.k.a., secular). Most of all, an overt hatred of our (western) civilization, and those who embody it, has enlisted our culture’s unique concept of “tolerance” as an instrument for its own destruction.
Hence the split personality of political correctness, which, in the name of tolerance for “marginalized” people, enforces a rigid code of speech and behavior intolerant of dissent. Meritocracy and the competition that drives individual liberty fades or expires in this echo chamber. The kids get lost in navel-gazing obsessions that include the inscrutable pretzel logic of microaggression or the multiplying outgrowth of perceived grievances blasted from the canons of Critical Race Theory, which is a form of racial essentialism that divides and defines individuals by their racial and ethnic identity groups and then assigns them a place within structures and hierarchies of power. CRT is itself a byproduct of Marxism and the application of microaggression is a tool to control and censor speech, which is common in that ideology. They want you believe in something: believe in the Thought Police and thoughtcrime, believe in being forced to clap only at the things we say you can clap for. Forget any access to the higher power beyond what we are forcibly painting into your neural network.
Promises, covenants and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, have less hold on an atheist than those who do not deny the being of a God. The United States was founded on such precepts. The founding fathers believed that any taking-away of that God, though but even in thought, removed the anchoring ballast and dissolved all. So for the sake of a modern argument in the 21st century, let’s experiment with ignoring the founding leadership, and see how it goes. In league with a Marcusian goal, the base gets demoralized and splintered, and easier to control. Sun Tzu waits uncomplainingly in the cloaking haze. Totalitarianism is not a distant concept. It’s right around the corner.
We come into this world as helpless slaves to our appetites. No one’s born bad, but that’s the way it is. It’s the starting point of “what’s possible?” If we persist in pursuit of our lusts and desires, we descend into licentiousness; if we educate ourselves and tame our appetites through training and virtue, we attain liberty and spiritual fulfillment at the apex of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. If the system of education and training for such liberty is rerouted along the blueprint of a mass formation psychosis, liberty is disrupted.
Such wretched pathology can take a generation or two to gain traction, so the purveyors of today’s neo-socialist revolution are instructed to be patient. The worst of our would-be “reformers” begin by conflating licentiousness, the permission to do as one pleases, with liberty, which is the right to do what one ought. Today few appreciate the difference between these polar opposites, but this distinction is essential to self-government. Benjamin Franklin observed, “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”
“Today tolerance appears again as what it was in its origins, at the beginning of the modern period—a partisan goal, a subversive liberating notion and practice,” wrote Marcuse. “Conversely, what is proclaimed and practiced as tolerance today, is in many of its most effective manifestations serving the cause of oppression.” The Father of the New Left considered tolerance a value-neutral tool that could be harnessed for good or for ill. Just as, in Marcuse’s mind, the capitalist system exploits tolerance to stamp out individuality and oppress the masses, radicals could wield tolerance as a weapon of liberation to tear down the system. And to be on the “right” side of history, barring the rest.
But never barring the scare tactics… in good times or bad, the fear factory accumulates its new orders. As soon as the traditional standards (of speech, etc.) and behavior are abolished, new codes are demanded to replace them. Yes, here comes another “nature abhors a vacuum” rinse-and-repeat in generational cycles. That’s no mirage, or should we say “Hey don’t ask us to explain the mirage!” Shimmering off the asphalt, here comes the mirage:
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[ image©Beeple]
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Hanlon’s Razor on the Hot-Button and the Mirage
Hanlon’s razor impels us never to attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Whether through dishonesty or ignorance, it begins with a lie. Re-found the founding… re-write the history… glossing over key details to focus solely on the old sin and the transgressions etched into dead history, which creates a distraction from the new sins presently embedded in society. If at first you failed on the facts, in the long run you may yet succeed, as fact succumbs to framing. Show us history through the lens of resentment, rewriting standards and speech codes for the benefit of allegedly aggrieved groups.
Which brings us to a most contentious point, stemming from research that’s easy to do independently: Contrary to popular propaganda, not only did the West not invent “racism” and “sexism,” but it has uniquely eschewed both. Unlike closed and tribal cultures everywhere else on earth, Western civilization has welcomed and integrated new peoples to enjoy and contribute to its superior cultural achievements. In fact, no civilization in history has shown women and minorities greater respect. Yet many exploit that singular difference to undermine the civilization itself. In the collapse of reason tainted by moral relativism, and through their judgment the earth and sky appear as a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. And to what goal? The ruthless criticism of all that exists. Lacking a vision for the public good, but possessing a clear sense of the public evil. Oppressive tradition impedes progress, so to open itself to the future, society must close itself off from its past. “PC” advances by redefinition and inversions railing against the “other”—the perceived and needed ideological foe.
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[ image©Beeple ]
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The Recursive Nature of Mass Movements and Revolution
A movement is pioneered by men and women of words, materialized by fanatics and consolidated by people of action. In this situation, the total surrender of a distinct self is a prerequisite for the attainment of both unity and self-sacrifice; and there is probably no more direct way of realizing this surrender than by inculcating and extolling the habit of blind obedience. This theory is not new and has already been laid out by a wide spectrum of social-psychological political scientists and philosophers including the “ordinary everyman” Eric Hoffer. I apparently exist to sum it up for you and bridge ourselves a proper context into 2023 and the rest of the 21st century:
Blind obedience can be obtained through the depreciation of the past. At its inception a mass movement serves to champion the present against the past. It sees the established institutions and privileges as an encroachment of a senile, vile past upon a virginal present. To pry loose the stranglehold of the past, there is need for utmost unity and unlimited self-sacrifice.
Not only does a mass movement depict the present as mean and miserable—it deliberately makes it so. It fashions a pattern of individual existence that is dour, hard, repressive and dull. It decries pleasures and comforts and extols the rigorous life. It views ordinary enjoyment as trivial or even discreditable, and represents the pursuit of personal happiness as immoral. To enjoy oneself is to be in cahoots with the enemy—the present.
It is strange, indeed, that those who hug the present and hang on to it with all their might should be the least capable of defending it. And that, on the other hand, those who spurn the present and dust their hands of it should have all its gifts and treasures showered on them unasked.
It’s never what it seems to be; it constantly blames the other for doing the thing it itself is doing (i.e., projection and gaslighting, etc.). Even the mass movements which arise in the name of freedom against an oppressive order do not realize individual liberty once they start rolling. So long as a movement is engaged in a desperate struggle with the prevailing order—or must defend itself against enemies within or without—its chief preoccupation will be with unity and self-sacrifice, which require the surrender of the individual’s will, judgment and advantage. According to Robespierre, the revolutionary government was “the despotism of liberty against tyranny.”
In the quest for cultural conquest what seems to count more than possession of instruments of power is faith in the future. Where power is not joined with faith in the future, it is used mainly to ward off the new and preserve the status quo. On the other hand, extravagant hope, even when backed by actual power, is likely to generate a most reckless daring. For the hopeful can draw strength from the most ridiculous sources of power—a slogan, a word, a button. Ask why you’re forbidden from saying All Lives Matter since 2020. It’s not a clever trick, and it doesn’t have to be, the trap is sprung—they turn us loose on each other to pick sides. No lives Matter. If you have an opinion that goes off script, they’re going to make you take it back; you’re freedom’s dead, and they’re calling you trash in the corrosion of conformity. The argument becomes unwinnable.
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Chaos Stabilized in the Aspic of Hope (Crusade Behavior)
Those who would transform a nation or the world cannot do so by breeding and captaining discontent or by demonstrating the reasonableness and desirability of the intended changes or by coercing people into a new way of life. They must know how to kindle and fan an extravagant hope. It matters not whether it be hope of a heavenly kingdom, of heaven on earth, of plunder and untold riches, of fabulous achievement or world dominion. If the neo-Marxists win over a large part of the world, it will not be because they know how to stir up discontent or how to infect people with hatred, but because they know how to preach hope.
There is a deep destabilizing push underway, one formulated to fundamentally transform the United States and other advanced countries. Beyond the clarion call to political optimism, it requires a multilevel betrayal of the status quo and enlists millions of recruits to back it with their vote.
When our individual prospects and interests do not seem worth living for, we are in desperate need of something apart from us to live for. All forms of dedication, devotion, loyalty and self-surrender are in essence a clinging to something which might give worth and meaning to our futile, spoiled lives. Hence the embracing of a substitute will necessarily be passionate and extreme. In pre-Hitlerian Germany it was often a toss-up whether a restless youth would join the Communists or the Nazis.
Mass movements are usually accused of doping their followers with hope of the future while cheating them of the enjoyment of the present. Yet to the frustrated the present is irredeemably spoiled; comforts and pleasures cannot make it whole. No real contentment or comfort can arise in their minds but from hope. One of the most potent attractions of a mass movement is its offering of a substitute for individual hope. This attraction is particularly effective in a society imbued with the idea of progress.
To the frustrated a mass movement offers substitutes either for the whole self or for the elements which make life bearable and which they cannot evoke out of their individual resources. Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.
The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy/woke cause. A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business.
The burning conviction that we have a hallowed duty toward others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft. What looks like giving a hand is often a holding-on for dear life. Take away our sacred duties and you leave our lives puny and meaningless. There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. In pouring through the memes of dichotomy we arrive at a paradox: The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless.
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What Drives this Mass Flux and Will-to-Power?
Since all mass movements draw their adherents from the same types of humanity and appeal to the same types of mind, it follows: (a) all mass movements are competitive, and the gain of one in adherents is the loss of all the others; and (b) all mass movements are interchangeable. One mass movement readily transforms itself into another. A religious movement may develop into a social revolution or a nationalist movement; a social revolution, into militant nationalism or a quasi-religious movement; a nationalist movement into a social revolution or a religious movement.
Where mass movements are in violent competition with each other, there are not infrequent instances of converts shifting their allegiance from one to the other. The swap is neither a rarity nor a miracle. In our day, each proselytizing mass movement seems to regard the zealous adherents of its antagonist as its own potential converts.
The inert mass of a nation is in its middle section. The decent, average people who do the nation’s work in cities and on the land are worked upon and shaped by minorities at both ends—the best and the worst of us. As Hoffer once said: “The superior individual, whether in politics, literature, creative works, science, commerce or industry, plays a large role in shaping a nation, but so do individuals at the other extreme—the failures, misfits, outcasts, criminals, and all those who have lost their footing, or never had one, in the ranks of respectable humanity.”
The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle. The reason that the inferior elements of a nation can exert a marked influence on its course is that they are wholly without reverence toward the present. They see their lives and the present as spoiled beyond remedy and they are ready to waste and wreck both: hence their recklessness and their will to chaos and anarchy. They also crave to dissolve their spoiled, meaningless selves in some soul-stirring spectacular communal undertaking—hence their proclivity for united action. Thus they are the early recruits of revolutions, mass migrations and of religious, racial and chauvinist movements.
The discarded and rejected are often the raw material of a nation’s future. A nation without dregs and malcontents is orderly, decent, peaceful and pleasant, but perhaps without the seed of things to come.
Though the disaffected are found in all walks of life, they are most frequent in the following categories: (a) the poor; (b) misfits; (c) outcasts; (d) minorities; (c) adolescent youth; (f) the ambitious (whether facing insurmountable obstacles or unlimited opportunities); (g) those in the grip of some vice or obsession; (h) the important (in body or mind); (i) the inordinately selfish; (j) the bored; and (k) the sinners.
Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing.
We dare more when striving for superfluities than for necessities. Often when we renounce superfluities we end up lacking necessities.
There is a hope that acts as an explosive, and a hope that disciplines and infuses patience. The difference is between the immediate hope and the distant hope.
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[ image©Getty ]
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The Diffusion of Hypocrisy
They who clamor loudest for freedom are often the ones least likely to be happy in a free society. The frustrated, oppressed by their shortcomings, blame their failure on existing restraints. Actually their innermost desire is for an end to the “free for all.” They want to eliminate free competition and the ruthless testing to which the individual is continually subjected in a free society. This is why in 2023 we see certain Western political factions that don’t want a free society, the very thing that built their platform in the first place. They use the system to tear down the system, while inflaming the passions of mass formation psychosis.
The passionate fanatic is perpetually incomplete and insecure. The fanatic cannot be weaned away from his cause by an appeal to his reason or moral sense.
Where freedom is real, equality is the passion of the masses. Where equality is real, freedom is the passion of a small minority. Equality without freedom creates a more stable social pattern than freedom without equality.
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A “New Normal” Forged by Selfishness and Fanaticism
The permanent misfits in society are those who, because of a lack of talent or some irreparable defect in body or mind, cannot do the one thing for which their whole being craves. No achievement, however spectacular, in other fields can give them a sense of fulfillment. Whatever they undertake becomes a passionate pursuit; but they never arrive, never pause. They demonstrate the fact that we can never have enough of that which we really do not want, and that we run fastest when we run from ourselves.
The inordinately selfish are particularly susceptible to frustration. The more selfish a person, the more poignant their disappointments. It is the inordinately selfish, therefore, who are likely to be the most persuasive champions of selflessness. The fiercest fanatics are often selfish people who were forced, by innate shortcomings or external circumstances, to lose faith in their own selves. They separate the instrument of their selfishness from their ineffectual selves and attach to it the service of some righteous or holy cause. And though it be a faith of love and humanity they adopt ostensibly, they can be neither loving or humble.
Boredom and ennui, meet social media. When people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored. The consciousness of a barren, meaningless existence is the main fountainhead of boredom. It also promotes detachment from the realities of life itself, and opens up the individual to inculcation via doctrine—because the readiness for self-sacrifice entails a tabula rasa contingent on imperviousness to the realities of life.
The ritual of unification through sacrifice is then romanticized. Dying and killing seem easy when they are part of a ritual, ceremonial, dramatic performance or game. There is need for some kind of make-believe in order to face death unflinchingly. To our real, naked selves there is not a thing on earth or in heaven worth dying for. It is only when we see ourselves as actors in a staged (and therefore unreal) performance that death loses its frightfulness and finality and becomes an act of make-believe and theatrical gesture.
Hate is the most accessible and comprehensible of all unifying agents. It pulls the individual away from his own self, makes him oblivious of his wounds and his future, and frees him of jealousies and self-seeking. This attitude becomes its own chicane, and then morphs into a steady state of carefully-crafted ignorance. They no longer see the consequences of corollary: To wrong those we hate is to add fuel to our hatred. Conversely, to treat an enemy with magnanimity is to blunt our hatred for them.
People whose lives are barren and insecure seem to show a greater willingness to obey than people who are self-sufficient and self-confident. We have seen that the acrid secretion of the frustrated and hateful mind, though composed chiefly of fear and ill will, acts yet as a marvelous bonding agent to cement the embittered and disaffected into one compact whole. Suspicion too is an ingredient of this choking slime, and it too can act as a unifying agent.
Mass movements do not usually rise until the prevailing order has been discredited. The discrediting is not an automatic result of the blunders and abuses of those in power, but the deliberate work of men and women of words with a grievance. Where the articulate ones are absent without a grievance, the prevailing dispensation, though incompetent and corrupt, may continue in power until it falls and crumbles on itself. On the other hand, a dispensation of undoubted merit and vigor may be swept away if it fails to win the allegiance of the articulate minority.
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Vanity Undergirds the Superstructure
Regardless of political affiliation, there is a deep-seated craving common to almost all “people of words” which determines their attitude to the prevailing order. It is a craving for recognition; a craving for a clearly marked status above the common run of humanity. “Vanity,” said Napoleon, “made the Revolution; liberty was only a pretext.” There is apparently a lasting insecurity at the core of every intellectual, be he noncreative or creative. Even the most gifted and prolific seem to live a life of eternal self-doubting and have to prove their worth anew each day. Even the salted author of this fine article incriminates himself as he builds his bulwark against critical rebuke. No one is immune.
Eric Hoffer understood this as well, and better than most. It is easy to see how the faultfinding man of words, by persistent ridicule and denunciation, shakes prevailing beliefs and loyalties and, as Hoffer observed, “familiarizes the masses with the idea of change or the ordeal of change.”
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[ image©DEM ]
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Conclusion: The Scarcity of Honor and Rigor Triggers the Down-Cycle
Before everything breaks and falls apart, good men and women will often step in to salvage what the deluded masses have nearly driven off a cliff. There are, of course, rare leaders such as Lincoln, Gandhi, FDR and Churchill. They did not hesitate to harness humankind’s hungers and fears to weld a following and make it zealous unto death in the service of a holy cause; but unlike a Hitler, a Stalin or even a Luther or Calvin, they were not tempted to use the goop of frustrated souls as mortar in the building of a new world. The self-confidence of these exceptional leaders was derived from—and blended with—their faith in humanity, for they knew that no one can be honorable unless he honors humankind.
The remedy is simple, not easy: Remain grounded in values of respect and tolerance (that which defines and cultivates greatness both individually and collectively). Three skeletal steps that beget multitudes:
- Separate good ideas from bad via principled debate free of bullying and deceit. We salvage the most hope for harmony when we approach our ideological combatants as fellow truth-seekers.
- Never abandon the moral clarity and confidence necessary to oppose false standards of political correctness, lest the belligerent and ignorant accumulate every advantage.
- Don’t ignore the present reality of those dedicated not to truth (by the light of particular premises) but who instead married themselves to the methodical replacement of every old rule they “deconstructed” with the new rigidities of political correctness (cue music that evokes a mesmerizing, assimilative, borg-like quality, and fade…).
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[ image©Andy Gilmore ]
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Expensive Afterthoughts, Solutions + Top Quotes
Throughout history, the dominant societies’ decline phases typically came from internal economic weakness together with internal fighting, or from costly external fighting, or both. Typically, the country’s decline comes gradually and then suddenly.
We collectively took our eyes off actual problems that are costing an eye-watering sum of money we do not have. This, in turn, will jam a giant stick in our spokes. We can’t discern intoxicated acts of illiquidity, discord and treachery while we’re busy staring at the wave (e.g., everything outlined above).
Maybe it comes down to who wants to explore the Jungian “collective shadow”—the unknown dark side of society—versus those who don’t have time, are oblivious to it, or otherwise don’t care. Poisoned apathy is an ugly cudgel. When lulled into complacency, we ignore all the things we do not wish to be. The shadow is not always an opponent. In fact, when reduced and personified, he is like any human being with whom one has to get along, sometimes by giving in, sometimes by resisting, sometimes by giving love… whatever the situation requires. We have shadow work to do—an effort full of various qualities and potentials constructive and destructive, imperfect while seeking balance and re-balance in the realm.
If you made it this far there appears (above and below) a vapor trail of legendary quotes curated for your consideration—seasoned across time, yet resonating in a deconstruction of the now, before vaulting into the future of reason and clarity.
Why does any of this matter? Because a good portion of society seems enchanted by the tormented dream of a neo-Marxist caste/welfare system, never minding the rivals who find their manifesto Bohemian, quaint, luxurious and spoiled rotten when stacked up against the practical threats humanity and American society are currently facing. Mass media-addled drones don’t protest Albert Camus’ notion that “the welfare of society is always the alibi of the tyrant.” If we collectively lose eternal vigilance over the Republic we are all going to pay for it, and we are going to pay a lot for it. We’ve become an unproductive nation that’s nearly $40 trillion in debt. We are broke. And now it’s going to cost you more than money.
In the United States, there’s a rising sentiment toward blaming the far left of the Democrat Party with an equally complicit corrupt media for our current mess. Independents and their centrist fidelities mull myriad ticket-splitting options on one side, with some shared sympathies and goals enmeshed, while Republicans will argue if there was ever a case that supply-side economics works, just contrast the results of Reagan/Trump policies against Obama/Biden policies and their results. There’s no contest on that measure. Biden and his cronies (including the legislatures of states like California and New York) are slowly but surely pushing this country to the edge of economic collapse. There are millions of citizens in all three parties asking—why do these people refuse to put faith in the economic engine of capitalism that made America the world powerhouse of the 19th and 20th centuries? Perhaps it stems from there being too much power and wealth to be grabbed, too easily. One group prefers bribing Americans with the earnings of other Americans. Power and wealth is never more concentrated than it is in socialist societies. Observe the critical thinkers and statesmen who’ve seen it all before as they tune in to us from the grave:
“We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes non-work” —Milton Friedman
“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money” —Alexis De Tocqueville
“There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.” —Robert Heinlein
“There are people in need of help. Charity is one of the nobler human motivations. The act of reaching into one’s own pockets to help a fellow man in need is praiseworthy and laudable. Reaching into someone else’s pocket is despicable and worthy of condemnation.” —Walter E. Williams
We’re fiercely debating: Who has helped you emerge from impaired vision? Who owns the culture, and therefore the future? Each side pretends they command the high ground. That’s a key challenge for those with a counter-argument. We also see—across parties and the ideological spectrum—those among us who do not give the faintest damn about the end game of such busted cultural hegemony. While we drown in the consequences of their thoughtlessness, they blithely munch digital steak in the allegory of The Matrix.
At that point stupidity is sort-of transcendence; something people will actually convince themselves is worth chasing.
And what’s the corollary of pain produced from such fake comfort? It is this: obedience/subservience and poverty (subsistence-level survival) is never more widespread than it is in socialist societies. Nanny state was just the beginning. You got it because you unwittingly voted for it. You are now an accomplice in the decay of American society. It will happen because the majority of Americans celebrate stupidity, they are brainwashed by mass media effects, and so they took a jaundiced eye off the real problem. Famously, sooner or later, you run out of other people’s money to spend. The end of free money is here. You will never see it again in your lifetime. The resulting budget crisis will be brutal and will be leveraged (in a different way, as a gift, and to the hilt) by our adversaries in the world order.
Solution: We must dump all static sentimental-driven, need-centric, consumption-focused, short-term thinking and policy setting. Instead, return to the dynamic, productive, supply-focused work-centric policy setting for the long term—the one that built America over so many generations, now being lost to the last two. There’s excessive taxation, and massive compulsive confiscation of private wealth created by dynamic risk-takers, and the talent they assembled through their voluntary associations. This colossal redistribution, now in the trillions, and the unearned handouts from failed static central planning in a faraway capital city creates no wealth and only raises inflation—further spiraling costs in a vicious cycle of tax-and-spend by the devious, the clueless, and yes even the well-intentioned.
No matter how you slice it, it’s still beyond suspicion that all this money-printing is a politicized form of default.
Joe Biden, Janet Yellen, Jerome Powell & Friends didn’t get inflation wrong, including the current crest in runaway inflation not seen in more than two generations; they created it. We must once and for all dispel the most failed practice of Modern Monetary Theory. Their deficit goes beyond the budgetary. It leads to political extremism that shows up as populism of the left or of the right. Those of the left seek to redistribute the wealth while those of the right seek to maintain the wealth in the hands of the rich. This is the anti-capitalist phase, when capitalism, capitalists, and the elites in general are blamed for the problems.
Economic recovery and growth happen when individual spending comes not from a redistributed handout and the Federal Reserve’s fiat-currency printing press on steroids—but from a well-controlled money supply spent from productive work. If you thought otherwise, you thought wrongly.
My polemic tells you precisely where I stand and where we are now. And I’ve done my level best to remind us that it’s all repeating in cycles.
“Inflation is made in Washington because only Washington can create money, and any other attribution to other groups of inflation is wrong. Consumers don’t produce it. Producers and trade unions don’t produce it. Foreign sheiks and oil imports don’t produce it. What produces it is too much government spending and too much government creation of money and nothing else.” —Milton Friedman
“If taxes are laid upon us in any shape without our having a legal representation where they are laid, are we not reduced from the character of free subjects to the miserable state of tributary slaves?” —Samuel Adams
“Note, besides, that it is no more immoral to directly rob citizens than to slip indirect taxes into the price of goods that they cannot do without.” —Albert Camus
“The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.” —Vladimir Lenin
Lo and behold the echoing riposte to Bertrand Russell’s opening quote:
“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.” —Charles Bukowski
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[ image©Beeple ]