The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”
Gustav Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind
Joost Meerloo, in Rape Of The Mind, described totalitarian methods throughout the ages used to force obedience. Modern society, with its refined techniques in marketing and mass communication, he wrote, “tends to robotize and automatize man.” Where competing interpretations of reality are censored, what is constantly repeated “fixes patterns of thought”, which patterns assume realities of their own. “He who dictates and formulates the words and phrases we use, he who is master of the press [and TV], is master of the mind.”
Countering totalitarian technique calls for critical thinking, a pattern of thought hesitant to accept information immediately at face value. Critical thinkers look for inconsistencies within narratives. It’s said that critical thinking can’t be taught, because accumulated life experience is a factor in its ultimate development, if it ever develops at all in a lifetime. On the other hand, critical thinking is open to cultivation, and presumably its cultivation is a feature of liberal education.
The Overton window was forced open and the Pandemic is the tool being used to obtain major globalist goals such as a global Raj, extermination of billions of people, consolidation of patent designs, technology In as few hands as possible In certain family lineages and ownership of all life. There Is a long train of thought In the West on this dystopia for about 200 years and the more we learn about our present the more able we are to follow the river of ideas wending to the sea. Now as last ditch fallback to prove something is there arises lab leak story. Worse perhaps is the relentless drum beat about mRNA and Spike sickening and killing the vaccinated. La Quinta Columna: ‘98% to 99% of the vaccination vial is graphene oxide’ https://www.naturalnews.com/2021-07-20-la-quinta-columna-vaccination-vial-graphene-oxide.html
From a genomic image to injections the Big Lie rolls out and death by lethal injection arrives and injected whose immune systems crash are catching ill and told it is Covid based on PCR test. Further masks do nothing but hide the face and instill servility. And I see masked people driving, shopping, acting normal and I am depressed.
Of all tyrannies,” C.S. Lewis stated, “a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
To use Del Noce’ own words concerning “the affluent society”:
It is a society that accepts all of Marxism’s negations against contemplative thought, religion and metaphysics; that accepts, therefore, the Marxist reduction of ideas to instruments of production; that, on the other hand, rejects the revolutionary-messianic aspects of Marxism. . . In this regard, it truly represents the bourgeois spirit in its pure state. . . triumphant over . . . transcendent religion and revolutionary thought.
Here Del Noce surprises us yet again. What emerged in the West was not the victory of liberty or democracy (as interpreted ad nauseum by contemporary media), but rather a “new totalitarianism,” along with a new atheism, in a sense more pernicious than those served up by the older atheistic totalitarianism in the East. To those accustomed to reduce democracy to the vote, Del Noce’s claim appears ludicrous. Yet again, Del Noce’s thought goes to the depths. The deepest roots of totalitarianism are not the mere absence of ballot boxes, but the curtailing of rationality, the ultimate denial of reason’s scope and depth. If there is no transcendent, immutable truth that our reason has access to, then there is no immutable ethics determined by reason, and political authority is in a position to define for itself the right and the wrong. Ethics and culture become subsumed by politics. Under this regime, anyone who attempts to formulate an argument against the state cannot do on any recognizably rational basis. The attempted criticism will be interpreted along the lines of the class/ race/ gender triumvirate. The state need not even get involved in “exposing” such critics. There is never any shortage of academics who are happy to do it; to reveal the class, race and gender biases of “conservatives”puts them on the cutting edge. This is the deepest root of totalitarianism, and Del Noce saw it progressively taking hold in the West. The only truth that exists is that defined by the scientistic-technocratic way of thinking that came to the fore once scientific positivism came to prevail.
Let us take a closer look at how Del Noce characterizes the culture that emerged in the West in the 1960s until the end of the Cold War. Del Noce saw the post-sixties culture in the West as grounded in three pillars: eroticism, positivism, and secularization. These three are all aspects of the same underlying reality, which is atheism. https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2020/12/14/atheism-the-core-of-modern-western-culture-in-the-thought-of-augusto-del-noce/
MENTICIDE: the systematic effort to undermine and destroy a person's values and beliefs, as by the use of prolonged interrogation, drugs, torture, etc., and to induce radically different ideas.
Alone, confused and battered by waves of terror, a population under an attack of menticide descends into a hopeless and vulnerable state. The never-ending stream of propaganda turns minds once capable of rational thought into playhouses of irrational forces and with chaos swirling around them, and within them, the masses crave a return to a more ordered world. The would-be totalitarians can now take the decisive step, they can offer a way out and a return to order in a world that seems to be moving rapidly in the opposite direction.
But all this come at a price: The masses must give up their freedom and cede control of all aspects of life to the ruling elite. They must relinquish their capacity to be self-reliant individuals who are responsible for their own lives, and become submissive and obedient subjects. The masses, in other words, must descend into the delusions of the totalitarian psychosis.
And they have.
https://ko-fi.com/thejournaloflingeringsanity
Hi Stegiel,
Just finishing a semester of assisting public school English teachers here in Japan, and in so doing, also finishing my 2 year contract. Haven't had much time to read, much less write ... but I thought here is as good a place as any for a foothold on lingering sanity.
In the evenings after a long day at the elementary schools or Jr. Highs, I often veg-out on a YouTube watching binge while scarfing down another microwave dinner. Most recently, the topic of the day is ChatGPT, MidJourney, and other A.I. empowered software.
I was chatting in comments with a poet and friend here on substack who is accepting the gauntlet of the challenge, and defending human artistic creativity as, at least for now, safe and distinct from A.I. 'art". I am just beginning to struggle with what is to come.
In what appears to be a conveniently forgotten meme-in-the-making ... in the movie named after Isaac Asimov"s "I Robot", Will Smith challenges the robot's 'humanity' by asking if it can write a symphony ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfAHbm7G2R0
In my comment, I mentioned how human-like the fallibility of ChatGPT showed itself to be in attempting to answer something posed beyond its data set, but then how above-average the response when asking it to briefly list the problems in reconciling globalist-collectivist agendas with Kant"s ethical stance. Maybe not 'artistic' in the most inspirational sense of the word, but I doubt one in a hundred acquaintances could have given as good an answer. That led me to think a bit more deeply on what I've so far concluded are three salient variables (from my perspective) regarding emerging A.I.
1 — The previously mentioned difference between art and artifice. At least for myself, 'art' as opposed to entertainment includes a spark of the divine, 'inspiration' as in filled with the spirt of god ... my god being the god of Spinoza, Emerson, and Einstein ... a metaphor for nature in its entirety. but also the Platonic ideals of 'the good., 'the true, and 'the beautiful' as facets of something fundamental. That led me down the rabbit whole of expanding 'entirety' to include more than 'quanity (of data) has a quality all its own'. For example, the instincts, emotions, temperaments through which entirety is funneled, and the limits of quantifiying and defining 'data' ('smaller' than a planck unit? 'before' the Big Bang? Russell"s Paradoxes, Wittgenstein"s Ladder, Gödel's Incompeteness Theorems) ... and the potential of reason (fractal theory, emergence theory, chaos theory, etc.). This led me to what I think is a related variable, but slightly different domain of discourse ...
2) Language and Logic. I am a believer in the strong version of Whorf-Sapir (linguistic relativity) and believe that anything which can be shared through symbols ... from grunts to algorithms ... are sometimes predictive ... but necessarily parochial, metaphorical, provisional social constructs. Just as ants may communicate through pheromones, honey bees through dances, birds through displays ... we also communicate through symbols. But I don't think there is a qualitative difference. I think it is quantitative. Our language and logic expands the spans of time and place through which we can share information .... in essence, both a time machine and "space ship. Compared to pheromones, dances, and displays ... a very powerful tool. But there is no such thing as a free lunch.
The price for using a space-time machine is a loss of the mystery and inspiration (and the loss of immediate access to the aesthetics and moral imperatives of those three Platonic ideals) of the immediate 'now" to which great art aspires, to which 'spiritual' wanderer's seek. But if language and logic are a double edges sword, so is silence ... the silence of death, of nothing to say and no one to say it to. Or the pregnant silence between notes of a Miles Davis solo, or the meaningful 'emptiness" between the stems of an Ikenobo arrangement. I kind of like John Cage's 4'33'' too. 😂 But along with the virtuosity of that double edged sword comes an even more dangerous, third edge and salient point ...
3) Sociopathy. As language and thought are so fluid, I guess we could call this 'Cluster B personality traits', dark triads, or just permutations of pathological narcissism. There does seem to be genetic component, as some people are simply born without the morphological features necessary for more neurotypical empathy.
But such morphological change can also develop through sickness, physical trauma, or emotional trauma. Lobaczewsky's book on political ponerology explores this as a process, though is a book I am still mired in, exploring and finding as much insight in footnotes as I am in the main text. Where I have my doubts is in his faith that this can be reduced (expanded?) into a 'science' and therefore be controlled. I doubt it simply because the predators among us are the first to pick up on quantification and commodification of data ... including data that would otherwise be used to constrain themselves.
It is that small minority of predators, feeding off the rest of humanity as the lowest hanging fruit, who are most likely to use the space-time machine of communication through symbols. From grunts to algorithms, they reflect Schopenhaur's insight into "the world as will" ... only it is a short-sighted to blind ambition of social primates who either are unable or unwilling to reach the peak of maturity for social primates ... altruistic behavior. Rather, they would outsource losses to anyone but themselves, feeding even on each other in the their childish game of thrones.
I still feel the impact of the first three paragraphs of Chomsky's 2011 Chapel Hill speech, "Human Intelligence and the Environment" https://chomsky.info/20100930/ ... and can't help but side with Ernst Mayr in thinking that human intelligence may prove to be nothing more than the fatal mutation of a social primate. We've had a good run, and according to Mayr's calculation of the evolutionary record for 'apex' species (lots to unpack there and plenty to disagree about), we've just about reached our shelf life. Perhaps the answer to the Fermi paradox is that any species capable of reaching the stars has an equal if not greater capacity for self destruction. I've often felt that urge in my self.
Ooops ... gotta go. One of my "bosses" didn't know I would be at school today, and suddenly made 'busy' work for me.
Cheers from the bowels of Japan Inc.
steve
This is a good stack. It's filled my head all day, in a depressing way as for you.
Voting is just a front of course.
What to do on voting day, oops I mean voting season as it goes on for ages.
I'm thinking that not voting doesn't achieve anything, so I will vote for a crazy nutcase fringe party.
Thank you for including the link about the graphene, it was old, but I hadn't seen it before, only reports on it.
I see now why so many say that there's no mRNA in the clotshots. A glimmer of hope was that the body maybe can divest itself of a little of this graphene oxide.
Had a man from the guvmint bring census forms yesterday. Our dog loves people but not that man. First time ever that the dog hasn't liked a person.
I always thought that censi was a good idea. Certainly proves that I have had a big mind upheaval.
Liars and connivers the lot of them. As one of your other ( forget which, but probably yours) stacks said, they have lied so much that they don't even recognize the truth.