As we've no doubt said before, progressivism is the opiate of the tenured, but in order to achieve its psychoactive effect, it requires a hated out-group.
To restate the obvious, hatred is not necessarily an unpleasant emotion, otherwise Christ wouldn't have had to advise followers to "love your enemies."
In other contexts, holy hatred is perfectly acceptable and even necessary, but the limits on its exercise make it hard to abuse. "Hating the sin" is likely to boomerang on the self, and that's no fun.
Pieper writes that when speech is no longer deployed to communicate reality to others, it "is deprived of its nature and degraded to the level of a 'hormone' or a drug which is administered to the other person."
A hormone? What, like estrogen? Is "soy boy" literal and not figurative?
I'm not an endocrinologist, but I do know a thing or two about hormones, since I myself am personally missing one: insulin. As far as I know, insulin as such isn't particularly psychoactive. You know when it's low, but that's because you're not getting enough glucose in the brain, which seems to happen every morning as I'm composing these vertical murmurandoms. It's why they may end not in a caffeinated bang but a hypoglycemic whimper.
Based upon my day-to-day experience as a psychologist, I would guess that the most consequential hormones are testosterone, estrogen, thyroid, and cortisol -- or male, female, metabolism, and stress, respectively. Men who are high in estrogen are more vulnerable to depression, bitchiness, manboobs, and dementia, but it's difficult to say whether progressivism is a cause or consequence of low T in men. Probably both.
Back to our subject: why is it that people enjoy being lied to, and will actually seek out lies that would seem to be unpleasant?
I am reminded of a song by Tom Waits called Lie to Me: "I have no use for the truth," so "Lie like a dog / I really don't care if you do / Never stop telling me lies." I sometimes wonder what happened to her...
This goes to the difference between the hard totalitarianism of, say, the Soviet Union, and our soft totalitarianism, in which citizens beg the media to tell them lies that are alternatively comforting (what recession?), terrifying (we're all gonna die from global warming!), rage-inducing (structural racism!), or bracingly hateful (Trump supporters are white supremacists!).
On the one hand, the question is, why do people want to believe unpleasant lies? On the other, the question answers itself: what do you mean, "unpleasant"? Unpleasant for whom? Yes, it's unpleasant for police to be vilified by the left, but not for Obama or Al Sharpton or Joy Reid. They get high from the scapegoating. Which is the purpose of scapegoating.
The "divisiveness" of our culture is at once obvious, but that doesn't mean it's predictable. We don't know what will happen as a consequence of speech becoming detached from reality, only that it will be catastrophic (i.e., non-linear and abrupt).
life necessarily unfolds within the medium of the word. In short, the threat to society lies in the threat of the decay of communication and the danger that reality and truth may become unrecognizable to us all (Pieper).
We're halfway there, in that half the population is already there:
genuine communication is replaced by something for which the term "power structure" is far too positive a name. Actually, it is replaced by something more like tyranny....
Once the word, as it is employed by the communications media, has, as a matter of principle, been rendered neutral to the norm of truth, it is, by its very nature, a ready-made tool just waiting to be picked up by "the powers that be" and employed for violent or despotic ends.
In truth, there's nothing "neutral" about this, because it results in the word itself bringing about "an atmosphere of epidemic susceptibility to the disease of despotism" and "the degeneration of language to an instrument of force."
The left insists that narratives are simply pretexts for political power. Be careful what you wish for:
the sophistical corruption of the word [and] the abuse of language by the communications media could actually be diagnosed as a symptom of the despotism to come (Pieper).
That little preview of coming attractions was published in 1964, just before LBJ (Brandon the 1st) won in an epic landslide and subsequently defeated poverty, fixed education with a tsunami of federal dollars, instituted medicare for only $10 billion, solved the border crisis with the Immigration Act of 1965, made blacks forever happy and grateful with the Voting and Civil Rights Act(s), and generally made our Society Great again. What could go wrong?
Maybe this:
once we have lost sight of what is truly real, an illusory reality may take its place..., a pseudo-reality which looks so real that it is virtually impossible for me to find out the truth.
And maybe you don't like this pseudo-reality, but reality is a democracy, and with the god of government all things are possible!
The progressive's needs are few: for someone else to do something, for an unrealistic policy to hope for, and for someone to hate.
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