by Brett Stevens on February 19, 2009

We’d all love to hear that we’re gods. That way, we can choose what we want, and we’re immune to consequences in reality.

As mortals, instead we not only face consequences, but suffer under them. If we guessed wrong about how the world was going to respond to us, we get screwed.

Even worse, our fellow enlightened monkeys (humans) are constantly talking a good game into our head. This or that is hot; this or that is cool; this or that is the way to beat the system. They’re influencing our ability to predict with our fear of results.

As a result, if you put a group of humans together and they have no forward agenda, the first thing they do is make a kind of tacit internal treaty: I won’t point out publically where you’re out of step with reality if you won’t point out publically where I am. Done deal, contracted sealed, and a crowd is formed — a crowd of individualists who behave like a mob.

Before we start talking about liberty, freedom and other negatively defined (freedom = not unfree) absolute symbols, we should look at the effects of liberty: tyranny — by the mob.

In the last few years, I have woken up – late in the day, but better late than never – to the way in which individual liberty, privacy and human rights have been sliced away in Britain, like salami, under New Labour governments that profess to find in liberty the central theme of British history. Almost every week brings some new revelation of the way in which our government has taken a further small slice of our liberty, always in the name of another real or alleged good: national security, safety from crime, community cohesion, efficiency (ha ha), or our “special relationship” with the United States. As Dominic Raab writes in his excellent book The Assault on Liberty, this government “has hyperactively produced more Home Office legislation than all the other governments in our history combined, accumulating a vast arsenal of new legal powers and creating more than three thousand additional criminal offences”. The peculiarity of Britain is that we have nibbled away individual liberty on so many different fronts. The Guardian

Timothy Garton Ash is correct in noting that liberty is being eroded; he’s being silly in demanding more of it. We’re talking about New Labour here, the most liberal government Britain has ever had. They’re in favor of diversity. They want equal rights for gays. They want you to be able to do whatever it is you want to — to act like a god without fear of consequences — but in return, you’re going to have to empower the mob to crush those who don’t agree.

That’s the devil’s bargain of every Revolution.

In Russia, they murdered the aristocracy, and reduced one of the most cultured places on earth to a backward third world mafia.

In France, they destroyed their aristocracy and began the process of slowly relinquishing the dominance on the arts, culture and letters that France had held for centuries.

In the New World, the domesticated natives have risen up and overthrown those who built the infrastructure that defines New World countries as separate from the third world ruins that went before.

Revolutions revert nations to third world status through this mob-mentality. The mob wants the powers of a god, so it takes revenge on those who will know the difference between reality and illusion — those naturally gifted with intelligence.

This is why Nietzsche termed the liberal impulse — all liberal movements aim at Revolution — as “revenge”: it was designed to compensate through cognitive dissonance and violence for those who were not given what others got, namely the beauty, brains and health.

I don’t think Lars Hedegaard realizes how accurate this quote is:

In a society where religion cannot be criticized, everything becomes religion — from the length of your beard to what hand to use when wiping your backside.

My only caveat: what about when that religion is secular? Like, say, liberty or Revolution.

We know that the broad Left â€“ which in Europe would include various shades of the hard, Communist or Marxist Left, the New Left, which has now transformed itself into tree huggers, and the traditional Social Democratic parties â€“ has vacated its traditional ideological positions in order to preach ideologies that used to be hallmarks of the far right. Positions such as the need for censorship, kissing up to demands that â€œreligionsâ€ (i.e. Islam) must not be criticized or ridiculed, the institution of ethnic or tribal special privileges and inequality before the law â€“ depending on what ethnic, tribal or clan chief or holy man can ingratiate himself to the top of the totem pole as most aggrieved victim. This new weltanschauung takes us back to a legal order â€“ or rather lack of order â€“ the like of which we havenâ€™t seen in the civilized world since â€“ when? The democratic revolutions of the 19th century, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, Englandâ€™s Glorious Revolution, John Miltonâ€™s Areopagitica, Magna Carta? The road chosen by the parties on the Left permits no return. Having alienated â€“ not to say discarded â€“ large chunks of their traditional working class voters, they are now increasingly dependent on the Muslim vote, which they hope will guarantee them a perpetual foothold at least in the major populations centers. International Free Press Society

Every human action has two layers.

The public layer, or how it is explained to others. The inner layer, in which the biochemical workings of the mind are laid bare — in contrast to how the mind explains itself, which is part of the public layer. The mind sees itself from outside. The inner layer however can only be studied on the level of biology, sociology/psychology, and impetus to power.

Hindus and their offspring, Buddhists, explain this as mind/body dualism: the mind sees itself from outside, so its perception is part of that outside, in which we form ostensible reasons for our actions using the language of civilization and its reward structure. “I fired John because we need some order on this team” frequently masks “He challenged my authority or competed with me for females, so I had to destroy him.” Mother Nature triumphs over all our pretentious little justifications.

In the case of the modern liberal, the private layer comes out when they’re given power. All those justifications — help the poor, justice, liberty — get thrown out the window and we see liberalism for what it really is: a group of monkeys throwing out the more qualified monkeys because, since the Revolutionists have more numbers, they can grab power and wealth — so they will.

These liberty-monkeys use whatever groups they can to support them in their power grab.

This is why liberals on all continents always support the importation of foreign workers. Why? These people should be grateful and dependent on the liberals, for a generation or two. They’re soldiers in the war against the Majority, or those who’ve done well in life thanks to their inherent smarts, health and beauty.

This is why liberal movements all tend toward Stalinism as they gain power. They need to assert total control in order to legitimize their power grab, and to cover their basic incompetence at ruling — if they’d been good at anything, they would have been in power before the Revolution.

That reversal in action:

TWO decades ago, on 14th February 1989, Salman Rushdie received one of historyâ€™s most notorious Valentine greetings. Ayatollah Khomeini, then Iranâ€™s Supreme Leader, issued a fatwa (a religious edict) calling for the death of the Indian-born British author in response to his novel, â€œThe Satanic Versesâ€. Horrific though these consequences were, many argued that freedom of speech itself was at stake. To cave in, by withdrawing publication or sale of the work, would represent the crumbling of a defining principle of liberal societies. Yet critics today, such as Kenan Malik, a writer and broadcaster, argue that the detractors have gradually won their war. Mr Malik and others suggest that free speech in the West is in retreat. Other publishers, faced with books that were likely to cause widespread offence, have been less resolute. In 2008 Random House was set to publish â€œThe Jewel of Medinaâ€, a misty-eyed account of romance between Muhammad and his wife Aisha. The firm reversed its decision after a series of security experts and academics cautioned them against publication (one American academic described the work as historically inaccurate â€œsoft core pornographyâ€) warning it would be dangerously offensive. Gibson Square, another publisher, took up the novel and saw its offices firebombed in September 2008, 20 years to the day after the publication of â€œThe Satanic Versesâ€. â€œThe Jewel of Medinaâ€ has since been released in America, but it remains under wraps in Britain. The Economist

The term “civilized” belongs to the public layer. It means that we censor things by making them politically unpopular, thus taboo, thus economically unpopular, so those who were trying to use them to make a profit then withdraw them. No one had to ban NWA’s albums back in 1987, but you couldn’t find them in most record stores.

Now these Revolutionists want to tell us that we’re ignorant and primitive, and they know better — and somehow, the new power grabbing liberty-monkeys have paired up with their old nemesis, The Corporate State:

Elite members of the World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, Switzerland, recently considered a proposal for a new global television network to usher in a state of â€œglobal governance.â€ The concept strikes some as authoritarian, even totalitarian. But the parent company of Fox News was one of the sponsors of this year’s gathering. The WEF is an exclusive club of very rich and powerful people from around the world. It describes itself as â€œan independent international organization committed to improving the state of the world by engaging leaders in partnerships to shape global, regional and industry agendas.â€ This yearâ€™s conference featured speeches by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Chinese Premier We Jiabao. Many U.S. corporations, including some getting Wall Street bailout money, were sponsors. News Corporation, the parent of Fox News, was a â€œstrategic partnerâ€ of the event. Other members of the Council on the Future of Media were Betsy Morgan of the left-wing Huffington Post (former general manager of CBSNews.com); Rui Chenggang of China Central Television, an official political propaganda arm of the communist regime; and Zafar Siddiqi of CNBC Arabiya, a subsidiary of General Electric which is described as a 24-hour Arabic language financial and business information channel. World Tribune

It’s not left-wing or right-wing propaganda.

It has one message: don’t rock the boat. We know what we are doing. Our way is the best, and you are an uneducated hick who doesn’t know anything. Accept what we tell you, and don’t rock the boat, because there’s profit to be made.

Profit for the post-Revolutionary elites, that is.

The Soviet Union lost a generation of genetics research to the politicization of science when Trofim Lysenko, director of biology under Joseph Stalin, parlayed his rejection of Mendelian genetics into a powerful political scientific movement. Yet the spectre of Lysenkoism lurks in current scientific discourse on gender, race and intelligence. Claims that sex- or race-based IQ gaps are partly genetic can offend entire groups, who feel that such work feeds hatred and discrimination. Pressure from professional organizations and university administrators can result in boycotting such research, and even in ending scientific careers. Nobel prizewinner William Shockley became a subject of controversy in the 1970s, after his work turned to racial differences in intelligence. In recent decades, the writings, statements and teachings of Arthur Jensen, Michael Levin and John Philippe Rushton, also on racial differences in intelligence, have met variously with acclaim, outcries and demands for job termination. So have writings of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray on the differential distribution of IQ by race. And Frank Ellis, a lecturer at the University of Leeds, UK, took early retirement in the face of an ethical storm that developed after he suggested in a student newspaper that intelligence levels were related to ethnicity. The list goes on. Many have been dissuaded from even looking at the research topic for fear of condemnation. The outcries against those who speak of racial and gender gaps in IQ have become deafening, at times resembling Lysenkoism in language if not in deed. Nature

This is why we must not allow politics to dominate us: it blocks our view of reality, and replaces it with an ethic of convenience that acts so we don’t rock the boat.

200 years after Darwin, we cannot discuss Darwin’s effects on us as people.

And there’s an even more threatening aspect of social censorship of science:

Analyzing the last 40 years of data from the tens of thousands of Americans who contribute to the count, the Audubon Society has found that 177 of 305 species of birds common in early winter have “moved” as much as 300 miles north to follow warmer temperatures. More bluntly, they are being evicted by global warming. Sightings that were once “preposterous,” according to ornithologist Wayne Petersen of Mass Audubon, are continental evidence of planet alteration. Boston Globe

Have we, er, come to a conclusion on Global Warming yet?

I’m pretty sure the elites want us to not rock the boat. Recycle those condoms. Buy those fluorescent bulb replacements. Get yourself a new pair of Green(tm) cigarette lighters. But don’t talk about overpopulation or ecocide through humans consuming too much land for natural habitats to exist.

Climate change — which is a subset of the issue of human effects on the environment, at least in part — cannot be discussed because we’ve politicized it.

Are you in the pro-camp? Or the con-camp?

There’s no voice for those who believe the Revolution has brought an elite which has allowed humanity to grow out of control. Climate change is just one part of it. We’ve made our groundwater toxic and full of hormonoactive chemicals. We’ve divided up the earth with fences and roads, and shattered ecosystems in doing so. Even worse, Malthusian man keeps growing — with no plans for stopping — and the worst damage is in third world populations (first-world populations in Europe and North America are breeding below replacement levels).

We’re out of control, thanks to our liberty, and the liberty it gave us to squash dissenters who rock the boat. And what it leaves us with is empty debate, castrated science and lots of lies to keep us company as we watch our world crumble around us.

Liberty creates tyranny. What prevents tyranny? Using power responsibly. That means recognizing that to stay in power is to defend yourself against others; that we are biological/sociological creatures, and almost all ideology is just justification; implementing some form of Social Darwinism and being able to use censorship and law responsibility to eliminate destructive behaviors.

That probably requires too much maturity for those who want easy, one step answers like “just implement liberty!” or “just implement democracy!”, which they tell you with cheerfully blank faces, because everything else is too complicated — and crosses that public/private barrier described above.

Tags: cognitive dissonance, democracy, passive aggression

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