A while back I read a book called The Rape of the Mind, by a Dutch psychiatrist named Joost Merloo. It was published back in 1956. It's a bit dated, but since we're on the subject of the abuse of language, I flipped through it again yesterday and found quite a few nuggets that help to explain the left's compulsive logocide (or verbicide and menticide).
I date the problem back to Genesis 3, when the serpent brainwashes the woman into accepting an alternate reality. Meerloo doesn't go that far down and back, but nevertheless
The rape of the mind and stealthy mental coercion are among the oldest crimes of mankind. They probably began back in prehistoric days when man first discovered that he could exploit human qualities of empathy and understanding in order to exert power over his fellow men.
Whatever the case may be, it certainly seems that when we are being manipulated, it is in service to power. It's obviously not in service to truth, and when Truth leaves the building, the Will is left in charge.
But this doesn't necessarily involve coercion per se; for example, the Serpent did not force Eve accept the lie. Likewise, no one forced me to be a liberal back in the day, for the same reason that no one has to force one to eat junk food. Rather, junk food is designed to exploit our innate preference for certain flavors.
Applied to the mind, we have innate preferences for truth, justice, beauty, freedom, and equality. Therefore, it seems to me that the junk ideologies of the left are designed precisely (whether consciously or unconsciously) to satisfy these intrinsic appetites.
When I was a Democrat, it wasn't because I preferred injustice and inequality! But it took awhile to realize that a steady diet of the underlying ideology was causing me so much mental and spiritual flab.
Also, I found myself in search of greater thrills -- I became habituated to the MSM, so I ended up getting high on people like Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and thrice-great uncle William Godwin.
Getting back for a moment to man's oldest and most primordial crime, it seems to me that this must involve the transformation from an open cosmos -- open to verticality -- to a closed one, or one that encloses us in ideology in one form or another. In olden times these ideologies took the form of myth, while nowadays myth takes the form of ideologies such as scientism, feminism, transgroomerism, CRT, et al.
As a matter of fact, this is exactly how Voegelin describes it, which is why one of his central insights is that modern ideologies are the same old Gnosticism, which always involves the reduction of transcendence to immanence. This vertical closure in turn leads to an eclipse of reality and deformation of the soul. In case you haven't noticed.
It's just another way of saying that the Zombie Apocalypse is not only real, but has its reasons.
Now, truth is intrinsically related to freedom, since truth can never be coerced; rather, it must be freely recognized, accepted, and assimilated. Here again we see why the left is self-disqualified from the pursuit of truth, since it always involves coercion, punishment, and censorship.
After all, no leftist is "free" to believe a man can be a woman. Joe Biden didn't wake up one morning and decide William is Lia or Bruce is Caitlyn. Rather, it became the new party line, such that everyone was compelled to pretend it is true, or else. They say the president is "the most powerful man in the world," but even he is powerless in the face of gender fantasists.
You could say that truth doesn't exert its power through efficient, but rather, formal or final causation: we are not pushed into it but pulled toward it. Indeed, this is what it means to "teach a child to think": for the child to recognize and be attracted to the Light, in the face of the inevitable coercion, not just from ideology but from social pressure more generally.
There was a time before time when this pressure was benign and even adaptive, since man is a social animal and groups with more social solidarity prevailed over those with more division and strife. Indeed, this is why China is not only laughing at us, but actively funds the division and strife.
Over six decades ago Meerloo recognized that
A fantastic thing is happening in our world. Today a man is no longer punished only for crimes he has in fact committed. Now he may be compelled to confess to crimes that have been conjured up by his judges, who use his confession for political purposes.
Today the crimes are White Privilege, or Transphobia, or Trumpism, or Christian Nationalism. They are always thought crimes, since they do not involve any actual actions; it is why we can have "institutional racism" without any racists. After all, the left is in charge of nearly all the institutions.
Brainwashing is "an elaborate ritual" of "systematic indoctrination, conversion, and self-accusation." How then is it different from an expensive college education?
Yes, that was a rhetorical question. "One important result of this procedure is the great confusion it creates in the mind.... In the end, no one knows how to distinguish truth from falsehood," and the result is "widespread mental chaos and verbal confusion."
Once we have reached this state of chaos and confusion, I suppose you could say that the average college-educated midwit does all of Satan's heavy lifting. Without being forced! Seems to me that this is an even greater trick than convincing the world he doesn't exist.
I guess that's enough for today. The daily Wall of Text probably only drives readers away.
10 comments:
Indeed, this is what it means to "teach a child to think": for the child to recognize and be attracted to the Light, in the face of the inevitable coercion, not just from ideology but from social pressure more generally.
Being a parent in current era has been really interesting, as my kids daily react to things the media considers important. To say that they are not onboard with wokeism is an epic understatement, but they come by it naturally, especially the boy. The more they see it, the more reflexively they react against it. If they were in a formal school setting, however, I suspect that their natural revulsion toward the unnatural would be much more muted, as the social pressure to conform would be hard to resist.
Natural disgust is an important reaction to cultivate and reinforce.
Our spontaneous revulsions are often more lucid than our reasoned convictions.
The effect of liberal rhetoric on taste is called nausea.
Indeed, this is why China is not only laughing at us, but actively funds the division and strife.
I've seen it said (though have no proof) that with TikTok (or whatever the Chinese version is), in China the challenges they launch/ permit encourage people to do intelligent or virtuous things, whereas here they boost anything incredibly dangerous or stupid - eating Tide Pods, strangling yourself, dancing next to a moving car... and sadly a lot of young idiots are perfectly willing to try it and post it on the internet.
Meanwhile, a classroom full of second graders all change their pronouns. Parents, of course, are the last to know.
On the plus side, it is apparently now permissible to identify as a different culture. Rachel Dolezal and Shaun King must be pleased, soon it will be acceptable to be a different race, too. We are all BIPOCs now!
1984 was only few decades premature. But history will look back and call it a bullseye.
I date the problem back to Genesis 3, when the serpent brainwashes the woman into accepting an alternate reality.
It is no surprise that a schmuck like you can't even get the basic stories of his own religion right.
The serpent encouraged Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil – a tree that had been created by god. The serpent did not seduce Eve into an alternate reality, it opened her eyes to an aspect of the one true reality that had been forbidden to her by God.
In fact it was God who lied to Adam, when he told him he would die if ate the fruit (Genesis 2:17). The serpent told the truth.
Whoever wants to know what the serious objections to Christianity are should ask us. The unbeliever has only silly objections.
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