"The basic problems for the man tamer are rather simple," writes Meerloo. "Can a man resist a government bent on conditioning him?" You can certainly fool some of the people some of the time, and even most of the people most of the time, and the left makes up for the difference by cheating.
They call it Our Democracy, which means that there is an annoying middle man between would-be tyrants and the levers of power they crave.
The taming is carried out by Big Education, Big Government, Big Media, Big Tech, and corporate Big Woke. It seems that most people don't even notice they're being smothered under a pillow of lies, perhaps because "the seducer conditions [them] to catchwords, verbal stereotypes, slogans, formulas, symbols," etc.
Others, such as our readers, notice the suffocation and don't like it. Meerloo describes victims of tyranny for whom "the most upsetting experience they faced... was the feeling of loss of logic, the state of confusion into which they had been brought -- the state in which nothing had any validity."
In other words, like hell, or like CNN being piped into your head 24/7 (but I repeat myself). Interestingly, Meerloo highlights the now obvious fact that it is the educated who are more vulnerable to the indoctrination, oftentimes precisely because of their intelligence -- or an intelligence that has lost the plot. Conversely,
Often those with a rigid, simple belief [AKA, Deplorables] were better able to withstand the continual barrage against their minds than were the flexible, sophisticated ones.... The simple man with deep-rooted, freely absorbed religious faith could exert a much greater inner resistance than could the complex, questioning intellectualist.
The question is, "Why is there in us so great an urge to be conditioned, the urge to learn, to imitate, to conform, and to follow the pattern of family and group?" We provided a partial answer in the previous post, in that man is a social animal, so we were subject to selective pressure to conform to the group.
But we depart from sociobiology in affirming the existence of a unique soul which is in an open vertical relationship to its Creator and to the Truth that surpasses us. It is precisely this that must be quashed by the Big 5 referenced above, hence the unyielding hostility to religion:
the doubting, inquisitive, and imaginative mind has to be suppressed. The totalitarian slave is only allowed to memorize, to salivate when the bell rings.
Ding! Cue the trolls. Yesterday, for example, a credentialed troll argued that "real Christianity" teaches that
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 The serpent told the truth.
This is, of course, an old Gnostic heresy, but notice that one must be educated -- somewhat, but not too much -- to even know about it. Perfectly tamed!
At this point I want to shift seers over to Josef Pieper, who wrote a timelessly true essay called The Abuse of Language and the Abuse of Power; we might say that its timelessness goes to the timeless temptation symbolized by the Serpent, a threat which "exists in every society and in every age." It is
an eternal temptation which, throughout the course of history, man has always been, and always will be, called upon to resist.
Indeed, God himself teaches us to pray for nonlocal assistance in resisting it, so the temptation must be rather primordial and ubiquitous.
This reminds me of something Hayek writes about the two forms of rationalism, one of which is deeply irrational, the other being rational presicely because it recognizes the limits of reason. He calls the irrational kind "constructivist" or "naive" rationalism, the reasonable kind "evolutionary" or "critical" rationalism. We'll have to get back to Hayek later, but Pieper is quite correct in pointing out how
A person must not have progressed very far in his education if he has not discovered good reasons to justify the worst behavior. All evil which has been done in the world since Adam's time, has been justified by means of good reasons.
If Tradition is traces of the Spirit left in time, we might say that the paragraph above adverts to traces of the Serpent left in time.
For example, the other day I caught my son watching a debate between Charlie Kirk and a guy (a former guy, it turns out; he now calls himself a she) who was defending Stalin. This fellow was clearly not stupid, and I could tell that he had read his Chomsky. But he might as well have been demon possessed. How does this happen?
How does it not happen? It reminds me of what Thomas Sowell says about poverty: the question isn't why it exists, since it is the default position of mankind. Rather, how is it that a particular people in a single place and time began generating so much wealth and lifting itself out of poverty? Always and everywhere the left wants to destroy the very conditions that produce such wealth and affluence.
It's the same with our "psychic affluence," so to speak. Most obviously, it results from a free and open engagement with all of reality, in which there can be no privileged, safe spaces from such enquiry. How have we come to the inversion of this, in which universities are islands of intolerance and repression in a sea of freedom?
Again, it begins with the corruption of the Word:
It is above all in the word that human existence comes to pass. And thus if the word decays, humanity cannot fail to be affected, cannot fail to be harmed (Pieper).
But what exactly is this Word, and what are its proper functions? Pieper cites two: first, "reality becomes manifest through the word."
One speaks in order to make known something real in the act of calling it by name..., to make it known to someone else.
This latter goes to the second function, "its character as communication. The word is the sign of a thing as well as for someone else -- namely for that person to whom one wants to reveal reality."
Of reality and for communication of it. So simple, and yet, so full of implications, both good and bad.
For it seems that with great verbal power comes great linguistic responsibility, for which reason there is always the temptation to misuse language -- something which the SwampState almost can't not do. Now it's insisting the recession isn't a recession, but since when did the Swamp ever speak truth because it is true and not just expedient?
Note that both essential functions of language are deeply problematic to the left. We could write a month of posts on this subject alone, but the best minds of the left insist that words refer only to other words, and that the whole enterprise is motivated by power, not truth. I guess we'll leave off with an aphorism:
The devil reserves the temptations of the flesh for the most naïve, and prefers to make the less naïve despair by depriving things of meaning
To be continued...
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