The modern left is motivated by social status. They don’t really want the rest of us to believe the same things they believe, because then those beliefs will lose their status-marking ability.
The modern left WANT to live in a society full of “racist”, “sexist” etc people they can feel morally superior to.
This implies that rather than a 1984-ish police state, what the left wants is control of the messaging system – so they can establish what is high-status (what the left believes) and what is not (everything else).
So we’re probably not heading toward a 1984-ish police state, but we are well and truly in a 1984-ish system of memetic reinforcement and control.
They don’t really want the rest of us to believe the same things they believe, because then those beliefs will lose their status-marking ability.
I sympathize with them. Back when liking Monty Python, Star Trek, and zombie movies made me a deviant freak, I loved those things. Now that they are mainstream, I hate them. And it’s exactly because the tedious, conformist douches like them. Somehow, they contaminated it for me.
They don’t really want the rest of us to believe the same things they believe, because then those beliefs will lose their status-marking ability.
They do want the rest of us to believe those things, thereby confirming their status. To the extent that they succeed, they promptly adopt new and more extreme beliefs to differentiate themselves
Indeed: set the trend, move on to something new, repeat. If people are copying what you did last year, but you did it “before it was cool”, that shows status.
We’re heading towards a Soviet-style aristocracy with a diminishing conservative middle-class. The ideal Leftist world is one of elite status-seeking party members (privately practicing eugenics, of course) and unwashed proles who grow their food, clean their houses, and so-on. (e.g.: California.) They don’t really want pure egalitarianism because humans are simply not wired for that.
Those that seek status are not the true rulers – by definition, the rulers do not seek status, they give it.
The secular rulers very often seek legitimacy, by engaging in conspicuous acts of piety. The difference between seeking status and seeking legitimacy is of course fluid; many acts serve as both, and both are in many aspects similar.
But this does apply to people with real power. The great majority of “elite” have at most the power of a petty official or a small trader – and that is why they desperately seek status. The number of people with real power is vanishingly small, and they are mostly well hidden.
Secondly, at present everybody at top is engaging in heavy doublethink. Everything is constructed on the onion system – under a layer of disinformation, there is another layer – still of disinformation.
What is certain is that since 1968 the Left (which is supposed to be socialist) hates workers and is not interested in economy – at all.
On the other hand, the Right is not interested at all in a functioning army. At present the American army is being dismantled, at its budget is being stolen.
The Army is equally bad, but they are wasting money on losing idiotic wars, not on buying useless and faulty equipment.
All of top people in Navy and Air Force (and Army) must and know that they are destroying it; some may at most lie to themselves that it is unavoidable, and that despite that, the armed forces will be strong enough to do what is really useful.
Anyway, nobody is invading USA, and if it will be unable to engage in another stupid war, it is all for the best.
That way of thinking is everywhere. The leadership of USA is quite consciously destroying it – this is not disputable. What is disputable is why they are doing it, and how they are explaining it to themselves. How many of them are consciously hostile to the USA, how many want to sacrifice it in order to build the (mythical) New World Order, and how many think that its decline is unavoidable, so why shouldn’t they get rich in the process.
In other words, I think that all of people near real power would agree with Mencius Moldbug, or Nietzsche, or Heidegger, or some other prophet of anti-modernism. The university program has been anti-Western since 1968. One can blame it on Frankfurt school, but somebody employed them in USA to do what they did.
The people with real power have been enthusiasts of psychological control of population through mass-media since at least 1914 – but even earlier, eg the Spanish War.
“Early on Lippmann said the herd of citizens must be governed by “a specialized class whose interests reach beyond the locality.” This class is composed of experts, specialists and bureaucrats. The experts, who often are referred to as “elites,” were to be a machinery of knowledge that circumvents the primary defect of democracy, the impossible ideal of the “omnicompetent citizen”.
Therefore, the people with real power in USA believe in the democracy in the sense that they think they can manipulate people to vote for what they consider good:
It is quite probably that the rulers of America have devolved since the First World War and that their own propaganda has stupefied them – this certainly happens. Usually, however, there is some faction of the rulers which has prepared a plan to benefit from the coming disaster.
Of course, the visible elites are mostly without any idea. But the power of elites is growing ceaselessly, and this proves that the real rulers have at least enough contact with reality to increase their power in the short term.
In other words, I think that all of people near real power would agree with Mencius Moldbug, or Nietzsche, or Heidegger, or some other prophet of anti-modernism. The university program has been anti-Western since 1968.
We have the internal documents of the climate priesthood, and a few of the internal documents of those that pissed away all financial system’s money.
What I see is double think all the way down – they know the truth, but will not admit it even to themselves.
Now probably Briffa knew the truth, and did admit it to himself, but that characteristic, excessive ability to see truth, is what makes him a lowly menial in the climate conspiracy. To get to the top in a priesthood, one must demonstrate the ability to fully and sincerely believe six impossible things before breakfast.
Those people are entirely replaceable – they do what they are to do, or they are fired and somebody does it instead. Of course they have to believe every idiocy – that is what they are paid for.
Such people are on very short leash – and the higher the position, the shorter the leash.
That is necessary – a prole can be a white nationalist or a semi-Nazi, and the system is strengthened, since the main justification of the system is that it – and only it -defends us from the ultimate evil, Nazis. A treason at the top could overturn the whole system.
“In this regard, rather than Satan, it might be more helpful to compare Hitler to the Antichrist, which is to say: to a mirror Messiah, of reversed moral polarity. There was even an empty tomb. Hitlerism, neutrally conceived, therefore, is less a pro-Nazi ideology than a universal faith, speciated within the Abrahamic super-family, and united in acknowledging the coming of pure evil on earth. Whilst not exactly worshipped (outside the extraordinarily disreputable circles already ventured into), Hitler is sacramentally abhorred, in a way that touches upon theological ‘first things’. If to embrace Hitler as God is a sign of highly lamentable politico-spiritual confusion (at best), to recognize his historical singularity and sacred meaning is near-mandatory, since he is affirmed by all men of sound faith as the exact complement of the incarnate God (the revealed anti-Messiah, or Adversary), and this identification has the force of ‘self-evident truth’. (Did anybody ever need to ask why the reductio ad Hitlerum works?)
Conveniently, like the secularized neo-puritanism that it swallows, (aversive) Hitlerism can be safely taught in American schools, at a remarkably high level of religious intensity. Insofar as progressive or programmatic history continues, this suggests that the Church of Sacred Hitlerite Abomination will eventually supplant its Abrahamic predecessors, to become the world’s triumphant ecumenical faith. How could it not? After all, unlike vanilla deism, this is a faith that fully reconciles religious enthusiasm with enlightened opinion, equally adapted, with consummate amphibious capability, to the convulsive ecstasies of popular ritual and the letter pages of the New York Times. “Absolute evil once walked amongst us, and lives still …†How is this not, already, the principal religious message of our time? All that remains unfinished is the mythological consolidation, and that has long been underway.”
However, those people are hired. The firms that hire them are controlled by a network of other firms, etc –
“An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.”
“But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power.”
“The work, to be published in PLoS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What’s more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world’s large blue chip and manufacturing firms – the “real” economy – representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.
When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a “super-entity” of 147 even more tightly knit companies – all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity – that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. “In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network,” says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.”
Of course, any member of the inner group must still behave publicly in the approved manner – any heresy would endanger the whole group and would have to be immediately punished.
For that reason, the approved messages run on auto-pilot.
Certain messages are natural consequences of the fundamental principles – feminism and anti-racism are good examples. Racism will be always less pious than anti-racism, and therefore would be an exception, a surrender of piety to reality – and for that reason any faction can use it to gain power over the competition – and it happened.
More interesting are messages which are essentially arbitrary- eg global warming. There is nothing in the fundamental tenets of progressive piety that requires the climate to be warming.
Global Warming was first promoted by Margaret Thatcher. It tied in with her war against the coal-miners unions. As England found large deposits of oil in the North Sea, it was possible to replace coal with oil and gas. As oil and gas do not need large number of miners, it made it possible to destroy the coal-miner unions, which were the most important labor union in Britain, and overcome the labor movement.
The basic idea was proposed in 1907 in a novel by Ernest Bramah.
However, the idea found world-wide support and is promoted to this day. Interestingly, from the economical point of view, limiting the amount of energy limits the number of workers in production.
At a given technical level, to produce an unit of finished good, there is needed a certain number of energy, and of workers. If the production is limited by the amount of energy, the additional workers are not necessary.
This causes structural unemployment. The supernumerary workers can be employed in services (another popular message) – but since the services are only optional, the service workers have no strike power. The strike at the MacDonald would not overthrow the government. In that way, the labour movement was practically overcome, and the power of the elite immensely increased. (The government employee unions are another matter, and are only now starting to be dealt with).
The same applies to the anti-nuclear hysteria and to useless windmills – which work to increase the price of energy and limit the amount of available energy.
All modern innovations work that way – they always increase the power of the elite. This is rather obviously not an accident.
However, those people are hired. The firms that hire them are controlled by a network of other firms, etc –
“An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.â€
True, but these people, by and large, are responsible for Basel and Basel II, and Basel II led to politicized lending which pissed away large amounts of money, and, in the US, that money was for the greater part pissed away on mestizos, in large part illiterate unemployed no-hablo-English mestizos, who were the recipients of ridiculously large loans, typically close to a million dollars per loan.
So they did believe, all the way to the top. And the higher up they were, they more they believed.
The left singularity necessarily gets ever more repressive, until the system shatters. If we don’t get totalitarian levels of repression, it will be because of revolutionary change, for example the army remembering its oath to defend the constitution.
Jim, do you think the left is heading for a full 1984 style world state? Government repression is increasing at an alarming rate.
The modern left is motivated by social status. They don’t really want the rest of us to believe the same things they believe, because then those beliefs will lose their status-marking ability.
The modern left WANT to live in a society full of “racist”, “sexist” etc people they can feel morally superior to.
This implies that rather than a 1984-ish police state, what the left wants is control of the messaging system – so they can establish what is high-status (what the left believes) and what is not (everything else).
So we’re probably not heading toward a 1984-ish police state, but we are well and truly in a 1984-ish system of memetic reinforcement and control.
They don’t really want the rest of us to believe the same things they believe, because then those beliefs will lose their status-marking ability.
I sympathize with them. Back when liking Monty Python, Star Trek, and zombie movies made me a deviant freak, I loved those things. Now that they are mainstream, I hate them. And it’s exactly because the tedious, conformist douches like them. Somehow, they contaminated it for me.
They do want the rest of us to believe those things, thereby confirming their status. To the extent that they succeed, they promptly adopt new and more extreme beliefs to differentiate themselves
Indeed: set the trend, move on to something new, repeat. If people are copying what you did last year, but you did it “before it was cool”, that shows status.
We’re heading towards a Soviet-style aristocracy with a diminishing conservative middle-class. The ideal Leftist world is one of elite status-seeking party members (privately practicing eugenics, of course) and unwashed proles who grow their food, clean their houses, and so-on. (e.g.: California.) They don’t really want pure egalitarianism because humans are simply not wired for that.
Those that seek status are not the true rulers – by definition, the rulers do not seek status, they give it.
The secular rulers very often seek legitimacy, by engaging in conspicuous acts of piety. The difference between seeking status and seeking legitimacy is of course fluid; many acts serve as both, and both are in many aspects similar.
But this does apply to people with real power. The great majority of “elite” have at most the power of a petty official or a small trader – and that is why they desperately seek status. The number of people with real power is vanishingly small, and they are mostly well hidden.
http://alrenous.blogspot.com/2012/09/true-elites-are-not-upper-class-instead.html
Secondly, at present everybody at top is engaging in heavy doublethink. Everything is constructed on the onion system – under a layer of disinformation, there is another layer – still of disinformation.
What is certain is that since 1968 the Left (which is supposed to be socialist) hates workers and is not interested in economy – at all.
On the other hand, the Right is not interested at all in a functioning army. At present the American army is being dismantled, at its budget is being stolen.
http://cdrsalamander.blogspot.com/
Destruction of Navy.
http://elpdefensenews.blogspot.com/
Destruction of Air Force.
The Army is equally bad, but they are wasting money on losing idiotic wars, not on buying useless and faulty equipment.
All of top people in Navy and Air Force (and Army) must and know that they are destroying it; some may at most lie to themselves that it is unavoidable, and that despite that, the armed forces will be strong enough to do what is really useful.
Anyway, nobody is invading USA, and if it will be unable to engage in another stupid war, it is all for the best.
That way of thinking is everywhere. The leadership of USA is quite consciously destroying it – this is not disputable. What is disputable is why they are doing it, and how they are explaining it to themselves. How many of them are consciously hostile to the USA, how many want to sacrifice it in order to build the (mythical) New World Order, and how many think that its decline is unavoidable, so why shouldn’t they get rich in the process.
In other words, I think that all of people near real power would agree with Mencius Moldbug, or Nietzsche, or Heidegger, or some other prophet of anti-modernism. The university program has been anti-Western since 1968. One can blame it on Frankfurt school, but somebody employed them in USA to do what they did.
http://www.culturewars.com/2012/Michel.htm
The people with real power have been enthusiasts of psychological control of population through mass-media since at least 1914 – but even earlier, eg the Spanish War.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Lippmann
“Early on Lippmann said the herd of citizens must be governed by “a specialized class whose interests reach beyond the locality.” This class is composed of experts, specialists and bureaucrats. The experts, who often are referred to as “elites,” were to be a machinery of knowledge that circumvents the primary defect of democracy, the impossible ideal of the “omnicompetent citizen”.
Wells – The Open Conspiracy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Conspiracy
http://www.panarchy.org/wells/conspiracy.1933.html
http://www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0201081.txt
Therefore, the people with real power in USA believe in the democracy in the sense that they think they can manipulate people to vote for what they consider good:
http://www.isegoria.net/2012/09/what-happened-to-the-culture-war/
http://nymag.com/print/?/news/features/chait-liberal-movies-tv-2012-8/
The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy Is on Your Screen By Jonathan Chait
It is quite probably that the rulers of America have devolved since the First World War and that their own propaganda has stupefied them – this certainly happens. Usually, however, there is some faction of the rulers which has prepared a plan to benefit from the coming disaster.
Of course, the visible elites are mostly without any idea. But the power of elites is growing ceaselessly, and this proves that the real rulers have at least enough contact with reality to increase their power in the short term.
We have the internal documents of the climate priesthood, and a few of the internal documents of those that pissed away all financial system’s money.
What I see is double think all the way down – they know the truth, but will not admit it even to themselves.
Now probably Briffa knew the truth, and did admit it to himself, but that characteristic, excessive ability to see truth, is what makes him a lowly menial in the climate conspiracy. To get to the top in a priesthood, one must demonstrate the ability to fully and sincerely believe six impossible things before breakfast.
Those people are entirely replaceable – they do what they are to do, or they are fired and somebody does it instead. Of course they have to believe every idiocy – that is what they are paid for.
Such people are on very short leash – and the higher the position, the shorter the leash.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers
That is necessary – a prole can be a white nationalist or a semi-Nazi, and the system is strengthened, since the main justification of the system is that it – and only it -defends us from the ultimate evil, Nazis. A treason at the top could overturn the whole system.
http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/news-features/urban-future-blog
http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/1973/the-dark-enlightenment-part-4
“In this regard, rather than Satan, it might be more helpful to compare Hitler to the Antichrist, which is to say: to a mirror Messiah, of reversed moral polarity. There was even an empty tomb. Hitlerism, neutrally conceived, therefore, is less a pro-Nazi ideology than a universal faith, speciated within the Abrahamic super-family, and united in acknowledging the coming of pure evil on earth. Whilst not exactly worshipped (outside the extraordinarily disreputable circles already ventured into), Hitler is sacramentally abhorred, in a way that touches upon theological ‘first things’. If to embrace Hitler as God is a sign of highly lamentable politico-spiritual confusion (at best), to recognize his historical singularity and sacred meaning is near-mandatory, since he is affirmed by all men of sound faith as the exact complement of the incarnate God (the revealed anti-Messiah, or Adversary), and this identification has the force of ‘self-evident truth’. (Did anybody ever need to ask why the reductio ad Hitlerum works?)
Conveniently, like the secularized neo-puritanism that it swallows, (aversive) Hitlerism can be safely taught in American schools, at a remarkably high level of religious intensity. Insofar as progressive or programmatic history continues, this suggests that the Church of Sacred Hitlerite Abomination will eventually supplant its Abrahamic predecessors, to become the world’s triumphant ecumenical faith. How could it not? After all, unlike vanilla deism, this is a faith that fully reconciles religious enthusiasm with enlightened opinion, equally adapted, with consummate amphibious capability, to the convulsive ecstasies of popular ritual and the letter pages of the New York Times. “Absolute evil once walked amongst us, and lives still …†How is this not, already, the principal religious message of our time? All that remains unfinished is the mythological consolidation, and that has long been underway.”
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.500-revealed–the-capitalist-network-that-runs-the-world.html
However, those people are hired. The firms that hire them are controlled by a network of other firms, etc –
“An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.”
“But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power.”
“The work, to be published in PLoS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What’s more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world’s large blue chip and manufacturing firms – the “real” economy – representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.
When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a “super-entity” of 147 even more tightly knit companies – all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity – that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. “In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network,” says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.”
Of course, any member of the inner group must still behave publicly in the approved manner – any heresy would endanger the whole group and would have to be immediately punished.
For that reason, the approved messages run on auto-pilot.
Certain messages are natural consequences of the fundamental principles – feminism and anti-racism are good examples. Racism will be always less pious than anti-racism, and therefore would be an exception, a surrender of piety to reality – and for that reason any faction can use it to gain power over the competition – and it happened.
More interesting are messages which are essentially arbitrary- eg global warming. There is nothing in the fundamental tenets of progressive piety that requires the climate to be warming.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7823477/Was-Margaret-Thatcher-the-first-climate-sceptic.html
http://www.john-daly.com/history.htm
Global Warming was first promoted by Margaret Thatcher. It tied in with her war against the coal-miners unions. As England found large deposits of oil in the North Sea, it was possible to replace coal with oil and gas. As oil and gas do not need large number of miners, it made it possible to destroy the coal-miner unions, which were the most important labor union in Britain, and overcome the labor movement.
The basic idea was proposed in 1907 in a novel by Ernest Bramah.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_of_the_League
However, the idea found world-wide support and is promoted to this day. Interestingly, from the economical point of view, limiting the amount of energy limits the number of workers in production.
At a given technical level, to produce an unit of finished good, there is needed a certain number of energy, and of workers. If the production is limited by the amount of energy, the additional workers are not necessary.
This causes structural unemployment. The supernumerary workers can be employed in services (another popular message) – but since the services are only optional, the service workers have no strike power. The strike at the MacDonald would not overthrow the government. In that way, the labour movement was practically overcome, and the power of the elite immensely increased. (The government employee unions are another matter, and are only now starting to be dealt with).
The same applies to the anti-nuclear hysteria and to useless windmills – which work to increase the price of energy and limit the amount of available energy.
All modern innovations work that way – they always increase the power of the elite. This is rather obviously not an accident.
True, but these people, by and large, are responsible for Basel and Basel II, and Basel II led to politicized lending which pissed away large amounts of money, and, in the US, that money was for the greater part pissed away on mestizos, in large part illiterate unemployed no-hablo-English mestizos, who were the recipients of ridiculously large loans, typically close to a million dollars per loan.
So they did believe, all the way to the top. And the higher up they were, they more they believed.
The left singularity necessarily gets ever more repressive, until the system shatters. If we don’t get totalitarian levels of repression, it will be because of revolutionary change, for example the army remembering its oath to defend the constitution.
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