If you’re reading this you may be asking yourself what is going on in the country, and, more broadly, in the world. This is a good start. It means you’ve recognized that something is out of order. Things don’t appear normal to you any longer. Welcome to the real world.
Normalcy is what we experience when we project our own individual psychology onto the world and see something that fits neatly within it. We can discern motives and make predictions with reasonable assurances. We cannot now do this. These are not normal times.
The reference to psychology above now becomes an important point in helping you to understand what is happening. The original conceptualization of a “meme” was put forward by Richard Dawkins in a text that described the nature of inter-meme competition as “viral.” Memes, in this original context, are ideas that are competing for space within the minds of men. Ideas, as it turns out, have consequences.
When one is indoctrinated into a cult they are often subjected to circumstances, and ideas (memes) that have the effect of weakening them mentally. This is often done through the creation of a particular set of ideas that one views the world through – a worldview, or “lens” – that is not in accordance with reality. This is the very nature of a psychopathology: a way of viewing and acting in the world that is not in accordance with reality.
Once this link to reality is broken through the adoption of a psychopathological lens one cannot view the world as you and I do any longer. They, themselves, are no longer able to make sense of things, and so they begin efforts to adapt the world itself to fit their pathology. Of course, this can’t work. The schizophrenic man is not able to fix the world by finding all the CIA devices in his home: they aren’t there.
There is now such a cult ascendant in America. This cult has deep, and old roots. Without belaboring the history, we will start at a suitably modern point for our purposes: Columbia University and its German Philosophers.
Around the time of Hitler’s rise our country took in many Germans who were being persecuted by Nazis. Some of these Germans were the philosophers of the Institute of Social Research at Frankfurt University. Upon their arrival here they began to contemplate why things had not gone for them as they had hoped, and shortly thereafter they published an essay: Traditional vs. Critical Theories. This essay, and its follow-on works, formed the basis for what we now see all around us.
Do not confuse the “critical” in Critical Theories as meaning critical thinking. It most certainly does not mean that. In fact, any time you hear the world “critical” nowadays you should not make the mistake of thinking “critical thinking,” even when it is uttered in that context. The “critical” of Critical Theories simply means to criticize, and mercilessly. Criticize what? Everything. The purpose of Critical Theories is to instill a “critical consciousness,” which is another way of saying a psychopathological lens through which the viewer finds reality itself unsatisfactory and aims to break it.
Unlike previous adherents of the philosophy of critical consciousness those now in America did not limit their undertaking to the realm of materialism (as in dialectical materialism), but reinjected the source code of idealism (the philosophy of ideas)(Hegel) back into the dialectical formulation to attempt to bring about a new revolutionary class around the concepts of identity. They succeeded wildly in this. Everything around us is all identity all the time. It is all sex, gender, race, disability, etc. It is all rebellion against reality itself.
But wait. How could such a crazy thing happen? How could so many people fall under its spell? “You must have it wrong” you now think of what I am telling you. But this is hardly the first time that this has happened. We are not the first to experience this. There is another name for this cult that is rising all around us. It’s called Communism.
But… but… Communism is about class, not race!
No, not necessarily. The traditional Marxian version of Communism is centered around class because that was, at the time, the useful societal division on which to build out this rebellion against reality. But class is not central to Communism in any meaningful sense. The essential aspects of Communism include Gnosticism, Statism (state worship), the “perfectibility” of man, and society, and the dialectic of colliding “contradictions” into synthesis. The German philosophers of the Frankfurt School, and later Columbia, Berkely, etc created a version of Communism centered around identity because those were the useful fault lines in America to attack.
They built up their library of essays producing such pieces as Repressive Tolerance and One Dimensional Man (Marcuse), borrowed significantly from Gramci (The Prison Notebooks) and central figure to the failed Hungarian Communist revolution Georg Lukacs, who created the precursor ideologies to modern Queer Theory: a critical theory seeking to break heterosexuality, sexual taboos, and the innocence of children. In doing they wrote an instruction manual for all we currently see happening around us.
Central to these instructions are ideas such as “disrupt and dismantle,” the use of extreme violence against political opposition, the weaponization of institutions against political opposition, population reduction, the inversion of relations seen as oppressive, the sexualization of children, “equity” in applying punishment – including corporal – to innocent people based on identity groups (men, whites, straight, cisgendered), etc.
Now, as any good cult does, these Communists have an eschatology, or end-times mythology. This mythology is based in alchemy, and the belief that just as there is a seed of gold under the nugget of lead there is, too, a perfect world under the bad one. They believe that by stripping away the bad world that they will reveal this utopia. They, being structural determinists (believing people do not have agency or free will, but are simply products of their culture), believe that by tearing down the pillars of society (believing they are a dam holding back utopia) they will collapse the bad world into the good one. All of the destruction you now see, and cannot comprehend, is being done on purpose. It is an attempt to end the (bad) world.
However, before they can truly end the (bad) world they need to awaken a revolutionary critical consciousness in enough people. It was Marcuse who came to believe – after the western Marxist revolutions failed – that the development of the “middle class” after the industrial revolution caused too many people to become too contented with their lives to be revolutionaries. He, as part of writing this grand plan, made quite clear that the masses must be made miserable to make revolution preferable to continuing on with their nine-to-fives. This is the heart of it. This is a tough pill to swallow. Take a look at all that is wrong now. They are hurting people on purpose.
Lessons:
· Do not attempt to project normal psychology onto these ideas and events in order to rationalize what is happening around traditional ideologies. They are psychopathological.
· Hanlon’s Razor no longer applies: they have adopted a playbook of malice, and so incompetence should never be assumed.
Remind me not to play Scrabble with you!
Their struggle for “Utopia” seems just a mask for oppression. Sooner or later the revolutionaries eat their own. Great article!