THE WEAPONIZATION OF STUPIDITY: “THE BEATINGS WILL STOP, WHEN MORALE IMPROVES” PART II
This is my all-time favorite quote. I didn’t create it, nor do I have any idea who did. (It’s on a T-shirt of mine). I love it because it captures, more than anything else I’ve seen, the capacity for people to live with absurdity. And in no time, in my life, have we ever been asked, by the powers that be, to accept so much concentrated absurdity. Millions of people have lost good paying honorable jobs; small businesses have been eviscerated and decimated; too many children to count have been traumatized and scarred; almost all major urban areas are living with murder and mayhem only seen, before, in movies about the decay of our civilization; and the cost of every essential is escalating at a scary and frightening pace. Add to all this, the disappearance of our southern border and the concomitant chaos of indiscriminate and illegal immigration, and we wonder why so many people are quietly depressed, aimless, or hating each other. And all of this, we’re told, is in the service of righting historical wrongs. It’s for our own good!
As I indicated in my previous blog, large numbers of people can only be stupefied if four preconditions exist. The first is the existence of a growing gap between entitlement and accountability. Ever since the end of the Second World War, our culture has done a truly remarkable job of creating opportunities for our citizens to participate in the American Dream. Housing, work, cars, and leisure came within the reach of the burgeoning middle class. A few decades later, luxuries joined these opportunities; and with the explosion of information, opportunities became entitlements. Beginning in the 1960’s, the foundation was laid to convince the populace that it was now their right to have everything they saw paraded before them.
Simultaneously, a shift was occurring that methodically undercut and de-valued the requirements for getting all the entitlements. At the root of this shift was the abandonment of accountability. Acquiring skills, working hard, perpetually learning, setting goals, and in our time, continually escalating one’s level of risk, all began to fall by the wayside. This has left us with a workforce with high demands and low productivity; family systems who perpetually infantilize their children (and invite them, as adults, to come back and live at their parents home); and an educational regime (from top to bottom) that has so dumbed down the process and the product, that each stage of human development is retarded by 10 – 15 years. Politically, the upheaval we are now experiencing, is the culmination of decades of promises made, with no concomitant demands. Make no mistake about it – Equity means,” I deserve what you have, without doing what you had to do, to get it.” The second precondition, is the flipping of disappointment, from an opportunity, to a punishment. Disappointment is a vote of confidence. It implies a belief in the person’s ability to do better, and be better. The lack of disappointment is a form of abandonment. We learn the most when we fail; the least when we succeed. Withholding disappointment and failing to use it as a learning opportunity, is simply a form of “soft discrimination.” Lowering demands, eliminating requirements, accepting inappropriate behavior, are all forms of politically correct racism. In the workplace, giving many workers a disappointing performance evaluation is experienced as an emotional catastrophe – it is so alien to their life experience, that they take it as a fundamental rejection of who they are. On the political front, the avoidance of communicating disappointment, has resulted in an obsession with making people happy all the time and validating their behavior, much like we do with young children and puppies. This has left us with a culture that can best be described as the “free for all, give away state.”
The third precondition involves the externalization of blame. This stipulates that everything bad in one’s life was caused by someone else. If I don’t like my job, where I live, or the people around me; I must be the victim of forces beyond my control. This belief is the fundamental bulwark of victimhood. Victims have come to believe that they share no part of the responsibility for the conditions they find themselves in. This serves, for both victims and their “leaders.” a very important purpose. If I have no responsibility for what happens in my life, I am exempt from making changes. Blaming is the ultimate act of resistance to change. And callous leaders use this resistance to control their followers. In a culture dominated by a hyper-accelerating rate of change, those that deny its applicability to them, are doomed to marginality, mediocrity, and ultimately, poverty.
The fourth precondition involves the replacement of individual identity, with group identity. In political terms, this is called identity politics. But it goes much deeper than skin color, religiosity, and economic philosophy. Group identity guarantees the ruling elite security. And it allows them to control every facet of individual life, precisely because the latter ceases to exist. One of the most vivid memories of a trip we took, years ago, to the former Soviet Union, was a discussion we had with our translator/guide (employed by Intourist, the travel agency controlled by the government). She picked us up one morning and had a look on her face that spoke of depression and shock. We asked her what had happened, and she told us that her close friend and colleague was not at his desk, and further, that his desk was gone. She asked her supervisor if she knew where he was, and her supervisor answered – “Boris who?” She subsequently found out that Boris had become “too friendly” with some tourists.
It is important to understand that the threat posed by our current adversaries (China/CCP, Russia, North Korea, Iran) goes way beyond, and much deeper than economic or military subjugation. It is their commitment to the utter and full destruction and obliteration of the Individual. Individuals represent the greatest threat to centralized, all-controlling governments because they never stop asking questions, and are relentless in influencing others.
So, what’s the goal of the Regressive Movement? I don’t think it has anything to do with their current lexicon of slogans. I’m convinced that the goal is to create and institute a “Cradle To Grave” society, in which all decisions and resources reside outside the individual and totally within the scope and control of an anointed elite. We need to remember, though, that in “Cradle To Grave” societies, lots of people ended up prematurely in graves.