People who lived through communism tell me that a big difference between the political lunacy then and now is that people today actually believe what they’re told. That seems true. There doesn’t seem to be an inner circle running things that recognizes the difference between prolefeed and what’s actually going on. For all I know George Soros does, but who else?
It’s shocking and horrifying, but so far as I can tell it’s so. I’m constantly puzzling over this. Why has everyone gone bananas?
Some brief thoughts:
- Globalism, and industrial society in general, mean people have no personal knowledge of most things that affect them. It all happens on the other side of the world.
- The internet etc. has disintegrated the world into a mass of images and soundbites that can be reassembled to look like anything. It’s a paradise for propagandists, who end up believing their own propaganda.
- Electronics also means that everyone and every place in the world are equally present to each other. The result is that particular culture based on particular local and historical experience disintegrates. When that happens the everyday good sense of ordinary people degrades.
- Weakening of background social connections like family, church, and informal local community mean people stand alone and have no way to resist what the authorities throw at them.
- As a substitute for good sense we have a cult of expertise, where “truth” is based on a combination of institutional consensus and imitation of the natural sciences –– emphasizing numerical data and specialized knowledge, and rejecting tradition, common sense, and informal pattern recognition as sources of knowledge.
- Disconnection of “knowledge” from everyday experience means it lacks a reality check, and emphasizing the consensus of specialists means it increasingly reflects institutional biases.
- There are cultural as well as structural aspects of the situation. For example, there are humiliation rituals, like forcing bakers and photographers to participate in celebrating gay “weddings.”
- There’s also some sort of secret knowledge thing going on. Things are not as they appear to the uninitiated, the adepts know e.g. that the patently male “Lia,” in spite of all appearances, is really a woman. That knowledge makes them superior to the cattle satisfied with conventional thought and the evidence of their senses.
- What’s odd though is that the “knowledge” doesn’t present itself as secret. It’s presented as clear-as-day public truth, the verdict of Science, and all must acknowledge it as such.
- That might seem like just another humiliation ritual, but people really do believe it. It seems the public view is that we are now living in a Golden Age in which the confusions of the past have been utterly transcended and the secret knowledge of the adepts has become evident public reality.
The result of all this is our current lunacy. Our extraordinary wealth and power has so far allowed us to endure it. That situation is coming to an end I think.