Friday, June 19, 2020

Resisting the Resistance

There are degrees political sickness, from neurosis to psychosis. I suppose there's also political normality, but it's so rare as to be nearly non-existent. Still, we can't have neurosis or psychosis unless there first exists normalcy. Unless a certain degree of abnormality is inevitable, in which case normality can only exist as an ideal. Crooked timber and all that.

But in any case, in a political order under our present tyranny of relativism, there can be no such thing as normality. Nor can anything be called objectively sick, perverse, or abnormal. And now you understand how the left gets away with it. Just as leftism is a religion with no God but countless demons, it is a political ideology with no truth but an army of enforcers hunting down and punishing deviations from it.

Really, -- and we've seen this playing out on our TV screens over the past several weeks -- the left is just a violent mob with an ideology attached. And it works. The non-crazy and non-evil are always victimized but the crazy and evil.

The first act of violence is always to language, AKA Logos. Being that it is the vehicle of truth, the maiming of language is always of vital importance to the left. Is this torture of the Logos but a simultaneous reenactment and undoing of the Crucifixion? Yes, of course, but we'll come back to that universal metacosmic truth in a subsequent post.

Brief timeout for pedantry. To simplify, there are two types of patient: the neurotic and the psychotic (or relatively mature and immature-to-infantile). The neurotic is plagued by intra-psychic conflict (e.g., insecurity, excessive and irrational worry, impulsive behavior) but is nevertheless in contact with reality, while the psychotic has more or less lost contact with reality.

But it really comes down to a different set of psychological defense mechanisms. You might say the neurotic uses a handgun to deal with his psychic demons and persecutors, while the psychotic goes nuclear every time.

Some of the common neurotic defenses include intellectualization, repression, and reaction formation. The latter has become ubiquitous on the left, what with legions of racists crawling over themselves to signal their innocence of racism to each other.

For that matter, it is why one should never trust a male feminist, because he is simply hiding the fact that he is neither. Likewise, what is a self-proclaimed "ally" of BLM but a fellow racist? People who are innocent of racism couldn't care less about signaling the fact.

Note also how the left doesn't just deploy pathological defenses, but wants to eliminate the mature ones, most conspicuously humor.

The immature defenses are nearly synonymous with the left, especially projection and acting out. But every day we see how the garden variety versions of these have become frankly delusional, e.g., President Trump is a Russian agent, Blacks are victims of genocide at the hands of law enforcement instead of each other, the imaginary campus rape epidemic, etc.

Every day a new delusion, really. By the way, there are also "negative delusions," for example, that Joe Biden is neurologically normal, or that CNN is a news network, or that Al Sharpton is anything other than what he so obviously is.

Here's an extended passage from The Politics of Truth. It has to do with a proper "politics of resistance," which is very much the opposite of the self-styled "resistance" that has been plaguing the country since late in the evening of November 7, 2016. (To be sure, they are resisting, the question being what.)

The reasonable response by the unaffected to perverse education [i.e., indoctrination into ideology] is resistance.... We are obliged to become our own physicians through the therapy of common sense and a steady appeal to the givens of common reality as experienced in the concrete consciousness of everyman and accumulated in the evidentiary treasury of history.

You may know this proper resistance to perversion by its opposite, for example, oh, vandalizing or tearing down statues of George Washington, Winston Churchill, Christopher Columbus, and other icons of our precious civilizational inheritance. (Speaking of logocide, those statues are surely forms of incredibly rich and compact speech.)

However, forgive them, for they know not what they do, for they all attended college. And they are also in denial of the oedipal implications of murdering the father of our country.

Since experience shows that the vanguard of perversion and pneumopathology is the debauchery of language [see paragraph four above], so fashionable now in the forefront of the political-correctness onslaught, it is important to recall the insight of George Orwell in a memorable sentence:
"The purpose of Newspeak," he wrote, "was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc [the English Socialist Party], but to make all other modes of thought impossible" [emphasis mine].

Those who control your language will control your thoughts. The result is to make the asking of questions impossible, socially irrelevant, or ludicrous -- and thus de facto prohibited within the new orthodoxy of closure and deformed souls.

Deformed souls. Ah, but there'a an easy way around that one: not only denying the reality of the soul but rendering its existence impossible, irrelevant, or ludicrous. Which is certainly one of the purposes of state indoctrination, since there one is despoiled of the very means through which to perceive and resist the pathological political system. The polite name for it is soul murder.

To live in truth requires at all times resolute resistance to untruth and tyranny as the first courageous step.

Recalling the words of C.S. Lewis, "Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality." I'm ashamed to admit I don't have the courage to put up an ALL LIVES MATTER sign in my front yard, because I'm afraid of my house being burned down by my moral superiors.

This was published in 1996, so call it prophecy if you like: "Polarization of American society has proceeded so far through the influences of socialism, Marxism, multiculturalism, and the welfare state's collision with traditional attitudes," that we are in danger of "a slide toward sedition and civil strife on a scale perhaps not seen in America" since the last time Democrats acted out to this extent and created the tyranny of Jim Crow.

How to resist this resistance to reality? Via

intellectual and spiritual resistance to untruth, conducted by reason and persuasion. It is resistance in the name of liberty and truth to revolutionaries who are succeeding in wresting major universities, academic professional associations, and much public discourse to radical control....

The connection with the Murder of God movement as the revolutionaries' common ground must be repeatedly demonstrated as inspiring their onslaughts.

A reminder that useless and idle RINOs are the favored tools of the Devil, who can accomplish nothing without their collaboration.

16 comments:

julie said...

For that matter, it is why one should never trust a male feminist, because he is simply hiding the fact that he is neither.

Just had a conversation the other day talking about reports of rape in CHAZ; friend was surprised it was happening. Of course it's happening, male feminists are frequently predators, they use their leftist bona fides to get close to women who would otherwise have nothing to do with them, and to avoid suffering penalties when they act like creeps (eg. Clinton, Biden, etc.). If you're female, you should never trust an avowed male feminist.

Heh - using the same logic, if I were an obviously black person I would be very careful about being around leftist "allies," who are far more likely than normies to be harboring some seriously, dangerously racist opinions for which they wish to atone. For examples, consider the huge number of leftists who enjoy dressing up in blackface for fun; not saying they shouldn't be allowed to do that, but the very ubiquity of it is just weird, and it says something about who they are.

julie said...

I should have read the rest of that paragraph before finishing my comment...

julie said...

The immature defenses are nearly synonymous with the left, especially projection and acting out. But every day we see how the garden variety versions of these have become frankly delusional, e.g., President Trump is a Russian agent, Blacks are victims of genocide at the hands of law enforcement instead of each other, the imaginary campus rape epidemic, etc.

Finished watching Mindhunter last night, where they worked to catch the Atlanta Child Murderer. It was interesting how some things never change. The black community in Atlanta was convinced that the murderer had to be a Klansman. To even suggest it was a black man was literally unthinkable for them, and saying so publicly brought the possibility of riots. Even now, every few years someone tries to make a documentary about how it was actually Klansmen who did it.

Anonymous said...

The polarization of America is part of the rigged game.

I've seen it on the small scale, the corporate workplace, where the sociopath arrives and does everything it can to divert attentions onto anything but themselves. It's a favorite tactic of alcoholics, two year olds, and Monopoly game cheaters too. Look over there! Get the naive sheeple to waste all their energies fighting amongst themselves, so you can continue to get rich working the Wall Street K Street game, paying off Obama, Clintons and Trump to accomplish little of anything good for the nation.

Politicians on the take always proclaim that the other side is worse, without actually trying to see things from the other side. The MSM on the take can get their loyal tribe all worked up about what the other worser tribe is doing so you keep coming back and they get their ad revenues from all their crappy product maker sponsors. It's how losing sports teams keep their fanbase up while refusing to pay for player upgrades.

But you've heard all that before.

It just feels good, as Christians, to overturn the tables of the Pharisees and those misgodly Romans. Except it's not our Pharisees or Romans who are being affected in the slightest.

CHAZ worked because Trump signed his executive order which at least in part, helps reform a police department starting to go statist rogue.

Anonymous said...

Hello Dr. Godwin:

This post is an interesting tit-bit of propaganda but I think you've cast your net too wide; we cannot sure where the demarcation line between the good and the bad is located.

Let's call the good "blue" and the bad "red."

There are large numbers of individuals in whom a mixture of political attitudes co-exist to the point where they are "maroon."

Suppose there are 20% blue, 20% red, and 80% maroon. How then do you diagnose a political pathology, when the majority have diseased tendencies? You might be forced to declare some redness as normal.

In your post you have consistently ignored the middle of the road, not so vocal majority. AS a result, all of your posts come across as errata to a greater or lesser extent.

Until you can confront and deal with the fact that things are very muddled out there, in various shades of gray and maroon, you will come across with a flavoring of "crack-pot."

Not that you are one. You just have the flavor.

You cannot get mainstream attention with your attitude. You might want to clean up.

Cousin Dupree said...

Bob does what he can to avoid attention, but he can't force you to go away.

Anonymous said...

Julie commented "male feminists are frequently predators, they use their leftist bona fides to get close to women who would otherwise have nothing to do with them, and to avoid suffering penalties when they act like creeps..."

I think you are right.

Leftist women are pressured for sex from males who use intense virtue signaling and ostentatious victim status to coerce a woman, making her feel guilty for refusing. The tactic works pretty well. Much of the time the male is a phony putting on an act.

Some leftist females resort to lesbianism as a way to escape this onslaught of unwanted suitors.

Older leftist women sometimes turn the tables on men, using their leftist credentials and bona fides to prey on young men. These younger men can end up being forced into providing intimacy and companionship when they would rather not, in service to the "great woman" who has "done so much."

Leftist sexuality is sadly often a distorted, twisted and sordid ordeal the individual must navigate through. By the time the leftist is age 40 the genitals are so worn from excessive copulation they have to be put out to pasture.

In the area of sex conservatives are greatly superior. The traditional heterosexual courtship followed by marriage and children which conservatives routinely enjoy, engenders happiness and peace of mind a leftist can only fantasize about having.

Truly the leftist has damned herself.

Anonymous said...

Julie, remember that Occupy thing in NYC? Didn’t take long for that to turn into a sexual assault fest and open-air crack house. And police were near, nobody was stopping them from entering the “occupied” zone granted to them by DeBlasio. I can imagine that eventually every creep west of Salt Lake City is going want to visit whatever they’re calling it now, CHAD? What creep wouldn’t want to visit a no-cop zone?

Charles Manson was, in his own charming way, a champ of a male feminist. Before he did his thing in LA, he was being his creep-self in another “occupied” zone, Haight-Ashbury district of SF where cops tended to not patrol in great numbers. He could definitely talk the hippie peace n love talk, took full advantage of it. He’d have loved CHAD or CHAZ or CHOP, whatever it is .... is it CHOP now? Are they sending us subliminal French Revolution semiotics now? ...

Will

Anonymous said...

>> How to resist this resistance to reality? Via

intellectual and spiritual resistance to untruth, conducted by reason and persuasion <<

Persuasion? Is it possible to persuade them through reason when they have abandoned reason? In my few distasteful encounters with the far-lefties, I’ve found you can momentarily frustrate them with reason, just a few simple facts, but then they go onto the usual evasive maneuver of ignoring what you just said and moving on to another subject that enrages them ....

I think there’s two things that ultimately will persuade them:

(1) when their Prog Dream withers and dies on the vine and they give up hope for its continuance.

(2) the resistance of physical force, if it comes to that.

I’ll do all I can to reinforce our side of things, keeping the faith, praying, trying to be as virtuous as possible, and so forth, but I’m not going to try to persuade them, that’s playing on the devil’s ground. So no, no persuading unless, you know...... if it comes to that.

w.

julie said...

Will, sadly you're right. I love so many people who are kind, loving, courageous, etc. ... yet they get all their news from CNN and MSNBC. During election years, they just can't help getting political, and the stuff they spout is just... well, about what you'd expect from people who still trust the leftist media. When they start spouting off the crazy, I just back away slowly and wait for things to settle down.

The sad thing is, I don't know that they even have a leftist utopian dream, they just believe OrangeMan Bad and that all those crazy kids over in CHwhatever are just having some fun and reliving the summer of love Seattle style, and that the protests were mostly peaceful and Blacks Should Definitely Be Mad because Most Whites are Racist. In other words, they believe the facade. They haven't seen the other side of things, because a) they don't really want to know, and b) the censoring is pretty effective if you believe that all those leftist media sources are telling the truth.

Even if something were done to change all that today, with leftist media being essentially taken down somehow, and things began to actually get better, they'd never see it. The indoctrination is just too strong.

Anonymous said...

I've watched Tucker Carlson's satirical bits about CHAZ. And I've watched CHAZ folks explaining their own reasoning.

For too many, Reason is only ever perception, when a critical part of human nature is that everybody wants an enemy, to defend "their tribe" against.

ted said...

What if your tribe is Truth? It's not like the Raccoons meet for an annual committee conference. May be kind of scary if we did. We just like being Coontained (sorry, non-racist phrase implied despite BLM definitions) by Bob. There is something universal about Truth, and yet many want to dance on their own slippery slopes of hopes. But the center is welcoming to all on Truth's terms.

Anonymous said...

ted,
How do you know Truth?

Prove to us that had you been born and raised in a completely different environment, let’s say Islamic Palestine, that you would have still used your Reason to arrive here in this very same place, regardless, just because Jesus whispers to you nothing but The Whole Truth.

Does this make every culture legitimate and correct? NO! And of course not. I’m only saying that it’s human nature to have Reason hijacked by one’s own need for a dopamine fix (for whatever is specifically happening, chemically) to where cognitive bias now becomes Reason and the other team is always the bad one. And it becomes incredibly hard to for most, but not all, to detach from this to become objective again.

I saw this dynamic up close and personal when I was workplace mobbed.

Most people around here confuse my attempts to explain the dynamics of such social insanity, with whining or progressive crying that life isn’t fair and people shouldn’t sin and boy are you a fool to believe that people don’t sin.

The people who were the most forceful in spreading completely false rumors about me which resulted in my career destruction, were Christians. In hindsight, I understand that those people were just trying to defend their tribe against perceived evil But I still lost my faith anyways.

I am not whining. I am warning.

There were good Christians at my workplace, like Gina and Rob, who did meekly tell me that what was happening to me was completely wrong and messed up, but they wouldn’t stick their necks out for me since they had their own families to feed and the PTB who were instigating the mobbing were just too clever and powerful.

As a then staunch conservative, I got to see firsthand how Reason can be hijacked by “personal responsibility” to rationalize evil, regardless of one's own heartfelt intentions.

Anonymous said...

Hello Ted:

There is an annual Raccoon Conference. We have had them in hotels and in campground facilities in the past. Last year's was cancelled due to low attendance in 2018. This year, 2020, the meeting is at the Flamingo Hotel/Casino, Las Vegas, September 5-7.

Hope to see you there. Everyone makes their own arrangements. Clandestine meetings will be announced on the day of. Codes will be issued via secure email. We will obtain your email contact information if you pass our background screening.

Sorry about the secrecy, we've had a mole infestation which needs to be controlled.

Thanks, Organizer X

Anonymous said...

I remember a conservative blogger once describing how Palestinians were all losers, because "Just look at the Gaza!" They described that place as the height of Palestinian cultural achievement. And then they told us all the Truth as to why that was. Islam, Satan, and leftism were the causes.

Now I'm no expert on the Palestinian condition, but even I knew that it was a refugee camp.

Most of those people had been systematically pushed out of their lives and were now living there. It was a cross between an indian reservation and the Warsaw ghetto. And like native Americans and Nazi era Jews, the further away they could get from that place the better their lives tended to be. Palestinians living in Jordan were living somewhat better lives. Those in Israel even better. And Palestinians who'd moved to America seemed to be living largest of all.

The Truth was that the further away they were from that environment, the better their lives were. But the Deeper Truth is what's debatable. Why cant people just pull themselves up by their bootstraps and create a better life for themselves, regardless of the condition they find themselves in? Why do they instead, tend to be prone to the worst of human emotions, ideas and lifestyles?

Regarding CHAZ, this is why I'm a big fan of creating fertile environments, and protections, for people freely finding their own way to better lives. If those people had decent jobs, careers, families and homes to work towards, there would be no CHAZ.

Blaming the bad team for their condition is just too simpleminded.

Anonymous said...

Our country was built on looting — the looting of Indigenous lands and African labor. African-Americans, in fact, have much more experience being looted than looting.

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