Category: Gramsci

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What if there were no witches?

Well of course there are no witches, you say! No one in their right minds believes that witches exist. No one believes that people are conversing with the devil to get power over others. No one believes that people will sell their soul to the devil for worldly gain. So obviously there is no point in extracting confessions through torture because witches do not exist, right? Nor for that matter does the devil. (Despite what some might like to think about political leaders).

I use this thought experiment to draw attention to the European witch craze of the early modern period 1600-1700 because it relates to a comparable problem of modern society. Though the penalties may differ, the modern equivalent of the witchcraft craze is all around us.

Transgenderism is the latest mania of collective delusion sweeping society.

A very few people of mature age believe they have been born into the wrong sex (as if that were a possible or meaningful statement). They engage in sexual reassignment surgery.

The idea spreads and takes new forms. (Which requires a history of its own).

Some body decides that, in their sovereign and autonomous will, people have a right to declare themselves male or female and further, and, because this assertion is in tune with the spirit of the times, laws are passed that oblige all others in the universe to recognize the right to change “gender”, despite the bearers of this new bundle of rights displaying the inevitable marks of sexual development as a former male or female, as the case may be.  Ideology or self will trumps not merely biology, but all previous social conventions. Obvious genetic males invade women’s sports and, thanks to having passed their earlier years as a genetic male, break previous women’s sports records. Thus their performances prove the genetic consequences of testosterone  while simultaneously society insists they are female, so denying the reality of genetic consequences.

Moreover, parents apparently have the right to determine that their children, before the ages of puberty or consent, are “transgendered”, and have the right or even obligation to have their sons castrated and dosed with female hormones and surgically altered to mimic the sexual apparatus of a female, however inadequately. These children have never reached the age of consent. They are not allowed to vote or drive a car. Yet they have been compelled to undergo radical alteration of their biological natures for the sake of  gender ideology, or as some may prefer,  the right of a person to affirm their identity under any and all conditions.

At the same time laws are passed, custody judgments are rendered, and regulatory agencies rule in such fashion as to make it impossible or illegal to draw attention to the obvious facts of sex that might prevail over the self identification referred to as “gender”. Conformity is imposed upon society. Speech is controlled. To permit  biologically based arguments against transgenderism otherwise is an impermissible affront to the evolution of our understanding of human rights. Being, in blunt terms, the right to castrate or spay your children and seek to change their sex by invasive surgery and continuous lifelong dependence on drugs to maintain the illusion that people can change their genetic nature to conform to gender ideology.

I know I have presented this in the crudest possible terms because future generations  of man (if they are to exist at all) will look back on this age with the same distaste and inability to understand as we look back on the European witch crazes if the 16th and 17th centuries.

The analogy does not hold in all respects, I grant you. Instead of murdering witches we surgically and chemically castrate them. Instead of condemning them, we celebrate their autonomy of will to become who they truly are. Instead of believing in supernatural entities like the devil we believe that people have rights (other forms of metaphysical entity) to affirm their identities at almost any cost imposed on the rest of society.  We are forced to abrogate immemorial customs that have governed the relations between the sexes, and  people are compelled to violate the plain evidence of their senses.

Yet the essence of the matter is the same: society has become deluded on a massive scale. There are no witches, and never were. Likewise there are no “transgendered” people, and never shall be. No one is born into the wrong sex. The term “gender” as applied to sex is a neo -Marxist null category, an empty set, pure cant.  Gender is what you apply to nouns in French and similarly gendered languages (le ou la; der, die,oder das). Gender is a construct of the mind, sex is a construct of billions of years of evolution. One is an epiphenomenon of contemporary craziness, the other the basis of life.

The transgender cult believes that society is on the cusp of recognizing new rights of self affirmation and seeing them recognized by social convention and law. To the contrary, society in contemporary North America is going mad. And a lot of apparently sane people are among them. But there are no witches, just as there are no transgendered people.

Many people are deluded into believing they are Napoleon or Jesus Christ or other culturally specific figures. I imagine the looney bins of China are occupied by many who think they are Mao Tse-Tung ot Chinghiz Khan. We put them on drugs and confine them if necessary. But if I declare myself a female, when I am a male, I am celebrated for my bold self affirmation. We should look on such people with the  compassion we have for the mad. Yet contemporary society is rife with enablers affirming that the transgendered delusion is not merely a fact but the newest form of civil right.

It is the enablers of this pernicious nonsense who owe themselves a long talk in the mirror. Madness is not confined to the actually insane, it appears. Otherwise rational people actually find it convenient to believe in transgenderism, the latest phase of progressive moral posturing.  Nevertheless, they are factually and morally wrong, and they will do a great deal of harm before they recover their senses.

 

“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”

Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

From Jonathan Kay in Quillette

“Genderwang is something completely different. It’s a quasi-religious ideological movement that demands public acceptance of the claim that all humans are infused with a soul-like ether known as gender identity—a spirit whose nature trumps the objective reality of biological sex when it comes to policymaking and even interpersonal relationships. Genderwang channels the magical thinking of Christian transubstantiation by demanding that acts of verbal attestation and other sanctified rites serve to literally transform men into women and vice versa. It also casts small children, even toddlers in diapers, as savants whose unfalsifiable pronouncements in regard to their “true” gender identity must be affirmed by doctors as holy writ.”

 

“One of the most constant characteristics of beliefs is their intolerance. The stronger the belief, the greater its intolerance. Men dominated by a certitude cannot tolerate those who do not accept it.” ~ Gustave Le Bon

further reading:

The European Witch Craze of the 16th and 17th centuries, by Hugh Trevor-Roper

 

Mass Psychosis now and forever

A friend came to use the swimming pool and on her way back to her house she commented on the fact – as she believes- that the world is burning up. There has been smoke in the air from distant forest fires. At church on Sunday in the prayers for the people, the speaker prayed for those not accepting vaccinations and for a respite from forest fires which were caused by out of control climate change. These are intelligent people, and the frame through which they perceive reality is that we are in an ongoing man-made  catastrophe. The alternative that I propose is that we are in a state of mass psychosis. It is equally man made, but one side is plugged into reality and the other is delusional. But who, you might ask?

 

If you can endure the reciter’s annoying voice and cadence, I recommend you work through this interesting video on mass psychosis, linked below.  Fear leads to menticide, menticide to totalitarian rule. The terror comes in waves. It is being generated and manipulated by elites. Does this sound to you like what you are experiencing? We live in an age which is at once technocratic, puritanical, and unforgiving. The obsession with power by today’s radicals is  the characteristic of the pagan world before Christianity. You will miss it when it its effects on people are gone. In truth you are experiencing a world which is increasingly de-Christianized. False gods abound.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09maaUaRT4M&ab_channel=AfterSkool

The video is based on the work of Joost Merloo’ s The Rape of the Mind, which is expensive, but worth considering buying.

 

 

 

 

Trumpophobia

I am surrounded by Liberals and Democrats. “Not my President” stickers can be found in the summer colony I inhabit in July and August. Conversations have to be carefully managed to avoid any serious discussion of the Donald. Known Trumpists gather in small groups and exchange significant winks. A sentence is sufficient. This is probably as it should be, or as good as it ever can get. It is Volvo territory, and the chattering classes are firmly convinced that the United States has been taken over by an uncouth narcissist who opposes all the good things in life.

I agree that Trump is uncouth and an egotist, and I don’t care. You ask why? Because every time the President gets into a spat with some sacred cow of the Left, the range of what can be said by others expands. The most recent example was his taking on of the Congressman from Baltimore, an American black politician. Trump called his district in Baltimore a rat-infested dump, and after all the outrage of the left (racist! racist!) , it became possible to talk about the poverty and lack of civic virtue of the black population of Baltimore, and by extension, of all the other violence- and rat-infested cities governed for too long by Democrats, sustained by black majorities. Racist indeed. We are allowed on occasion to point out realities, as long as we can bear the opprobrium of the Left. But it takes an ice-breaker like Trump to call spades, spades.

The best of anti-Trump invective comes from Andrew Sullivan in New York magazine. It should be read, despite everything that is wrong with it, because it is the best expression of the concerns that a certain class of American has about Trump. Never mind that it is overwrought, partizan, snobbish and ultimately even silly. Sullivan compares the American Republic to Rome, and gives a useful precis of how Rome transformed from a Republic into a dictatorship over the course of a century or two of political turmoil, civil war, faction war, and occasional massacres.

Sullivan’s main points regarding Trump are as follows:

” If republicanism at its core is a suspicion of one-man rule, and that suspicion is the central animating principle of the American experiment in self-government, Trump has effectively suspended it for the past three years and normalized strongman politics in America.”

” He has also definitively shown that a president can accept support from a foreign power to get elected, attempt to shut down any inquiry into his crimes, obstruct justice, suborn perjury from an aide, get caught … and get away with all of it. “

“But when the president himself declares the system he works in is rigged, when he opines that electoral fraud is rampant, when he accuses his own FBI and intelligence services of being corrupt, he accelerates this process of delegitimization.”

” The second case against complacency is that a key branch of government that can and should restrain presidential overreach, the judiciary, is being methodically co-opted for the cause of executive power.”

“And the third is precedent. If republican virtues and liberal democratic values are a forest of traditions and norms, Trump has created a vast and expanding clearing. What Rome’s experience definitively shows is that once this space is cleared, even if it is not immediately filled, some day it will be.”

” A republican president respects how the system works, treats power as if it is always temporarily held, interacts with other agents with civility, however strained, and feels responsible, for a while, for keeping the system alive. Trump simply has no understanding of any of this. His very psyche — his staggering vanity, narcissism, and selfishness — is far more compatible with monarchical government than a republican one.”

The whole of Sullivan’s article, except for his precis of Roman history, proceeds from of a lack of insight into several important features of US politics, which have been present since Hamilton and Jefferson went at each other with equal acerbity and suspicion in the 1700s.

Paranoia: the republic is always in danger from the plots, misdeeds, and of concentration of power in the Presidency, which in principle should be restricted to executing the laws that the Congress has passed (as people of this school maintain when the President belongs to a party they oppose).

Lack of historical perspective: power has been concentrating in the Presidency since Teddy Roosevelt, and not just in the regime of his distant cousin Franklin. You could look at the criticisms of Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus (the freedom from arbitrary arrest and seizure) in the Civil War as an example of Presidential concentration of power and suspension of civil liberties

Assault upon norms: Trump has consistently refused to take shit from a media class that has been determined to destroy him and whose animus against him and impotence is revealed daily. People elected him to fight back against the smothering liberal consensus and he has, successfully. He does not need press conferences when he can reach millions through tweets.

The case for Trump is most succinctly made by Conrad Black: that after 32 years of the family regimes of Bushes and Clintons, where a Bush or a Clinton was either a president, vice-president or secretary of state, something ended the soft-left passivity and decline. That event was the Trump election.

Nothing in the past three or four years has surprised me more than the hysterical and fact-resistant reaction of liberals to Trump. It is as if the totalitarian instincts of the American liberal – by which I mean leftist – have been given free range. Everything they accuse Trump and his followers of being: racist, ignorant, anti-immigrant, white supremacist, seems to have been the cover for a snobbery so gigantic it defies description, or in my case, understanding.

The useful portions of the American public, the people who drive ambulances, police the streets, fight the fires, build and repair cars, the genuinely civic minded, occasionally church-going, and non-fanatical American working class, and the rest of the civic core of American society, has been held up tp the opprobrium of people whose living is earned treating in symbols and information.

The people who have received university educations seem, by and large, to be anti-Trump, and I doubt not they cloak themselves in concern for the norms and practices of republican government. It seems to me however that the Gramscian long march through the institutions is bearing fruit, and that a class of people falsely and wrongly educated in American “educational” institutions is being told their views are wrong and that they are superfluous. As indeed they are. Hell hath no fury like a liberal scorned.

Anyone who doubts that Trump will crush his opposition in the next election is not paying attention. This certainty – as near as life and fortune allows – is becoming obvious even to some Democrats. I am taking bets.