On the Ignorant and Monstrous Mob
Douglas B. Olds
3 April 2017
People impressed by the ersatz leadership staged on "The
Apprentice" or taken in by the fraud that was Trump University might not
have the intellectual tools to consistently or even occasionally discern what
is fake. The complex of Trump and his political mob is marked by ongoing deceit and monstrous proposals of reactionary moral vendettas:
- The poor deserve less, while the rich more.
- The climate is not changing, so let’s revive coal and cancel environmental regulations.
- The aged and sick can be put on the curb.
- Progressives aren’t Christians, so let’s show them what these guns we true Christians, "Second Amendment people," wear are all about.
- Immigrants are terrorists who want to substitute their tribal sharia for the Founding Fathers’ religious nation.
- Resisters are paid foreign agents and can be ignored--or beaten.
And on it goes.
These are the propaganda that foreign hackers and domestic moral
cretins are exploiting to tear this country apart. And at the top of this money-fueled
pyramid of deceit and fakery is the Ignoramus in Chief, entrusted with nuclear
weapons.
George Orwell in The Prevention of Literature sums up the instability of an age that chooses manipulable emotion over factual truth:
"Totalitarianism does not offer so much as an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become tolerant or intellectually stable."
And Chris Hedges writes:
"The permanent lie turns political discourse into absurdist theater...The permanent lie is the apotheosis of totalitarianism. It no longer matters what is true. It matters only what is “correct.” Federal courts are being stacked with imbecilic and incompetent judges who serve the “correct” ideology of corporatism and the rigid social mores of the Christian right. They hold reality, including science and the rule of law, in contempt. They seek to banish those who live in a reality-based world defined by intellectual and moral autonomy. Totalitarian rule always elevates the brutal and the stupid. These reigning idiots have no genuine political philosophy or goals. They use clichés and slogans, most of which are absurd and contradictory, to justify their greed and lust for power."
Climate change denial, indeed censoring, is a venue where the self-indulgent and -loathing id conspires to take over our conscience in a conspiracy of lies and propaganda. These deniers make absurd arguments that liberals who hate economic opportunity and the Chinese are behind climate science. They adopt folk tales of a new earth: that we can trash this one because God can miraculously create the pristine healthily anew with just a word. Maybe, but folktales do not substitute for the deliberations of science and compassionate conscience. The righteous care more about flooding among the peoples of the Indian Ocean than about Chevron’s balance sheet.
“The venal political figures need not even comprehend the social and political consequences of their behavior,” psychiatrist Joost A.M. Meerloo wrote in “The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing.” “They are compelled not by ideological belief, no matter how much they may rationalize to convince themselves they are, but by the distortions of their own personalities. They are not motivated by their advertised urge to serve their country or mankind, but rather by an overwhelming need and compulsion to satisfy the cravings of their own pathological character structures. The ideologies they spout are not real goals; they are the cynical devices by which these sick men hope to achieve some personal sense of worth and power. Subtle inner lies seduce them into going from bad to worse. Defensive self-deception, arrested insight, evasion of emotional identification with others, degradation of empathy—the mind has many defense mechanisms with which to blind the conscience.”
George Orwell in The Prevention of Literature sums up the instability of an age that chooses manipulable emotion over factual truth:
"Totalitarianism does not offer so much as an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become tolerant or intellectually stable."
And Chris Hedges writes:
"The permanent lie turns political discourse into absurdist theater...The permanent lie is the apotheosis of totalitarianism. It no longer matters what is true. It matters only what is “correct.” Federal courts are being stacked with imbecilic and incompetent judges who serve the “correct” ideology of corporatism and the rigid social mores of the Christian right. They hold reality, including science and the rule of law, in contempt. They seek to banish those who live in a reality-based world defined by intellectual and moral autonomy. Totalitarian rule always elevates the brutal and the stupid. These reigning idiots have no genuine political philosophy or goals. They use clichés and slogans, most of which are absurd and contradictory, to justify their greed and lust for power."
Climate change denial, indeed censoring, is a venue where the self-indulgent and -loathing id conspires to take over our conscience in a conspiracy of lies and propaganda. These deniers make absurd arguments that liberals who hate economic opportunity and the Chinese are behind climate science. They adopt folk tales of a new earth: that we can trash this one because God can miraculously create the pristine healthily anew with just a word. Maybe, but folktales do not substitute for the deliberations of science and compassionate conscience. The righteous care more about flooding among the peoples of the Indian Ocean than about Chevron’s balance sheet.
“The venal political figures need not even comprehend the social and political consequences of their behavior,” psychiatrist Joost A.M. Meerloo wrote in “The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing.” “They are compelled not by ideological belief, no matter how much they may rationalize to convince themselves they are, but by the distortions of their own personalities. They are not motivated by their advertised urge to serve their country or mankind, but rather by an overwhelming need and compulsion to satisfy the cravings of their own pathological character structures. The ideologies they spout are not real goals; they are the cynical devices by which these sick men hope to achieve some personal sense of worth and power. Subtle inner lies seduce them into going from bad to worse. Defensive self-deception, arrested insight, evasion of emotional identification with others, degradation of empathy—the mind has many defense mechanisms with which to blind the conscience.”
These techniques and propaganda of the id-driven mob degrades
and drowns out the communal and private voice of God that expresses God’s will
for justice and communal harmony. They drown out truth.
The Electoral College did not perform its Constitutional function to repudiate an aberrant election of a true danger to civilization and the republic. Not just the man, but his mob fomented by damaged personalities and a decadent elite. It is a mob not only unable to discern fact, it is mob that does not even care if it can or cannot. Facts, to the slovenly and the brutal--the uncivilized--become manipulable matters solely concerned with control, not genuine deliberation.
It is a clear conscience based on honesty upon which we must depend to resist the supremacy of the individual and collective id. A conscience guided by the Holy Spirit and the Word is required—a conscience purged of the id’s structures that hate self and hate others. Too often other-directed hatred masks a self-hatred. To those who do not cleanse their conscience of hate, but instead give full vent to hatred, I say with Bob Coote, “shame on you, God does not speak to or through you. For God’s primary law is Love your neighbor as yourself. Your hatred is a lie.”
Listen to your conscience, listen for God’s voice cloistered from the gibberish of the depraved mob and the electronic world. Listen to the call of God to take a stand for God’s world and justice.
Albert Camus speaks optimistically of inwardness against a dialectically opposed social id:
In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love.
In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile.
In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm.
I realized, through it all, that…
In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.
And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back."
It is the individual and collective id of a greedy and fearful mob that foments the culture of nonsense and injustice around us. Our resistance to it enables righteousness, and righteousness can help us create springtime neighborhoods of shalom--where truth, beauty, empathy and justice endure.
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