I engineered a situation the other day on a forum for stutterers that could have had no other possible result than getting me banned from the forum. I did this plainly, by maintaining my integrity, my position, my convictions and my poise no matter what was thrown at me.
I don’t stutter. Although I did for most of my life. Very, very badly.
Nobody on the forum had ever met anyone who stuttered and then became cured. Even though I told my story, over and over, every which way, from incoherent to cured.
There existed this blind spot, among the self-styled victims. These poor stutterers whose affliction had ruined their lives. They simply could not hear any words that claimed there was a way out.
Nobody else, with perhaps one ineffective exception, who himself still stuttered, had anything whatsoever to contribute. All the members did, year in, year out, was whinge and whine and hope for someone to become a successful enough activist, to force government to decree that anyone who could speak fluently would be forced to never notice anyone who could not.
Not content with that, government would be made to decree that jobs involving high fluency levels, should henceforth be made available to stutterers, and that they should be chosen over and above the fluent.
Airline pilots. Emergency responders. Politicians. Police. Teachers. News announcers.
Being somewhat conservative in outlook, this seemed a little ludicrous to me and I couldn’t help but point out the obvious flaws in such a scheme.
Did I imagine anyone would get it? If I did, then I was always going to be disappointed. So I was.
Stuttering forums are not about finding a stuttering cure. They are, in fact, social clubs for victims, to get together and celebrate their victimhood. There is no interest, whatsoever, in becoming an ex-victim. The victimhood is the identity, and the identity is sacred.
So while I laboriously wrote reams of self-help, which actually works, and actually eliminates stuttering, all I was met with was more and more abuse. Having a cure presented to them actually enraged them. It became a bona fide hate-fest.
The funny thing was: not one of the stutterers was able to identify the fact that they were being abusive towards me. Yet any time I pointed this out to them, the very act of my pointing it out, was seen as abuse of the most reprehensible sort. And so it went, from bad, to worse, to worse still, to really, really bad, to really, really, uber, mega, ultra bad…
I wondered and wondered at all of this. With the best of intentions, and ammunition to back it up, my every effort inevitably suffered a meteoric plunge into fiery death. No exceptions.
Self-styled victims inhabit a parallel reality. They simply do not exist in the one I exist in. I may type words and receive a response, but no communication, whatsoever, is taking place. What I know to be true is seen as lies, and nothing I could ever say, would change this.
And of course, these stutterers are like leftists, everywhere: they make a career out of evoking sympathy in others. Poor things. Innocent victims. Needy and helpless. There, there…
When really, a millimeter beneath the surface appearance, lurks a vicious, ravening monster that knows no mercy, no love, no forgiveness, no quarter, and absolutely no capacity for fun.
It’s an alternate reality that such people inhabit. And there are countless millions of them. Forever cut off from any possibility of reason, compromise, or communication. They might as well be zombies from Mars, for all the humanity they possess.
This must be what happens when one sells one’s soul, in exchange for the unlimited credit-card of victimhood. Once you’ve sold it, there is no way on earth, to ever get it back.
Jesus probably knew this. In his Jesus-way. He probably realized a lot of things, and being Jesus, took on the thankless task of trying to free people from their soulless existence. As if he could.
I am lucky, I suppose, that I drew the line at stutterers. I think I know what fate awaits anyone who tries this on an industrial scale.
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Well that’s the purpose of internet forums, isn’t it, to be gathering places for whatever oppressed minorities who can’t find a large enough “public” forum from which to gripe from?
Quite. The internet has become a repository of those who once stayed home with the shades drawn while watching such cinematic delights as “One Life to Live” and “General Hospital.” From a cursory examination of the thought-process of many of these internet posters, especially on the message boards, it seems that an unusually large number of them have diagnosed mental illnesses or physical disability. This I find helps to explain how what people are talking about on the internet and what people are talking about in the functional parts of the real world are separated by such a vast chasm of understanding.
“Well that’s the purpose of internet forums, isn’t it, to be gathering places”
No more purposes except just gathering and showing off?
They’re called “niches” and you can sell to them for big profit!
I’ve been laughing at the miserable truth of this comment all day. Well done.
Only if you can stomach the taste of your own bullshit, and not accidentally vomit mid-speech.
Additionally, as i have showed this site only amounts to a mere variation of this ‘victimhood’ every time it chooses to blame ‘leftists’ instead of developing and articulating solutions/alternatives.
You guys know more than me :)
I hadn’t seen it through those eyes.
I’m always completely mystified by such things.
Have you ever been to a “support group”? Ghastly things, really. They will sit you down with a group of people suffering the same affliction and talk it to death. Never a word of overcoming. They extend sympathy until it becomes a poison. The goal seems to be to contain the innocent participants in a “hive mind” which replaces their own minds with that of the group leader. I will never go to one again. It’s better to talk directly to your affliction than to people who have made a religion of it.
I have, once. For stuttering, again, when I was still very afflicted by it.
It didn’t help at all, but it was a social event for afflicted people.
Things were fine, as long as one went along with the program.
Which I did, not knowing what I do now.
My wife once attended a support group for women whose daughters were drug addicts. There seems to be a support group for everything. She loathed it, saw the snivelling self-indulgence for what it was, and her daughter finally died of an overdose, anyway.
Not a lot of practical use, really.
Or any other use.
The wisdom is this: there’s nothing you can do for, or about, anybody else. If you can do anything about you, you’re ahead of the game.
Funny, that is often my exact experience here, and at anus.com (another ‘paleoconservative’ blog not a porn site since some of you are so easily confused) I was forcefully ejected for continuously asserting the truth, and the comments which the poster and audience couldn’t refute were deleted. Always a good sign an ideology has devolved into mere psychotic devotion when cognitive dissonance is acted out on the physical, or rather electronic level. But back to the topic…
Some excerpts would have given us a much clearer image, so that we are not left wondering whether you merely misinterpreted their response as ‘abuse’ from a subjective viewpoint. Also we have no way of knowing how many in the forum are actually stutterers, most ‘girls’ in chatrooms are fat, 40 year old men, or whether their ‘victim’ role-playing carries over into the rest of their lives, for all you know the ‘neurotic behaviour’ you describe is mere venting which permits them to function the rest of the time. I suspect most of this would have been cleared up by an actual excerpt or two, assuming this actually happened.
Jesus was the original (or most successful) salesman of victimhood, his legacy is one of hopeless masochism swallowed whole by the masses, unless his ‘real’ message has been truly subverted/perverted by the church.
Every time this site chooses blaming ‘leftists’, instead of offering valid solutions, it also pimps itself out to the victim/blame game, but with an added level of hypocrisy to boot.
“What THEY are doing is harmful, thus WE are victims!” Same shit, different smell. Period.
“I was forcefully ejected for continuously asserting the truth”
It sounds to me like you were a victim there.
“What THEY are doing is harmful, thus WE are victims!”
What a stretch you make there. By your estimate, anyone who finds blame with anyone else is a victim and thus we should dismiss their claims. Does this apply to you as well?
don’t feed it please, it won’t be reasoned with, it knows nothing of our minds. it is an evil thing, just remember when you read its words that there really still are believers in the lies.
Do you even realise what you are doing Ryan? Painfully obvious self-projection again, I am one of the few on this site actually ASKing to be reasoned with. But since you, ‘crow’ and a handful of others simply REFUSE to provide further articulation and resort to name calling (the word ‘liberal’ is a box you use to contain information/ideas so you don’t have to process them), one cannot HELP but assume your ideology is nothing more then pure psychotic devotion to an idea that once seemed to make sense.
You are not fooling anyone, I doubt you can even still manage to fool yourself by this stage.
“By your estimate, anyone who finds blame with anyone else is a victim and thus we should dismiss their claims.”
No, we are real and our actions effect each other, but when you focus solely on blaming ‘leftists’ as opposed to expanding/refining your own ideology/’way’ and/or articulating how it would best be applied to reality, it begins to look as though you NEED the hordes of weak, stupid people who do nothing purely to give yourself a sense of worth/accomplishment. The more you blame others, the more you begin to define yourself through them.
“Does this apply to you as well?”
Yes, which means i can only stay here so long in the hopes that something more productive and interesting will emerge. So far, every time I’ve asked for further clarification (on among other things, what warrants the perception of ‘liberalism’ as false/artificial equality in a mechanical sense, or how this ideology would be applied to reality), i have been met with non-answers and called a ‘leftist”. When i ask exactly what makes me a ‘leftist’ beyond presenting ideas/information contrary to a rightist ideology (I forget the name of that logical fallacy, but i bet you know it), again i am met with non-answers and called a ‘liberal’ to avoid answering the question(s), (apparently I am also a rightist when i argue with leftists, a capitalist when arguing with communists etc, there are also rigid/splintered schools of thought in economics which has resulted in me being accused of supporting theories i wasn’t even aware of, and didn’t agree with anyways).
Although seeing proclamations which i consider wrong expressed with an air of self-certainty always provokes me to respond, i guess i can’t justify continuing to ask for further discussion/articulation when it is becoming apparent that for most this only amounts to psychotic devotion. To quote Blake again: “We impose on one another, and it is but lost time to converse with you, who’s words are only analytics”. There is no ‘life’ in the words of this site anymore as far as i can see, the ideas have grown sterile due to lack of evolution.
Amerika: leftists are a problem.
JooPe: saying leftists are a problem is in effect saying that leftists are the only problem, therefore it’s as much of a problem as leftism, which also identifies problems. There can be no other problem than the problem of identifying problems. By the way, I’m equal and don’t call me a leftist.
You are repeating yourself on someone else’s dime.
same thing with the deaf. there’s a “culture” of being deaf, and if you can be cured of being deaf and exit the victim community, you’re derided, almost as if you’re a sellout for wanting to hear. just terrible.
That’s it! Exactly. Communication has taken place!
Nice one, Frank.
good point frank, (also your name means spear in ancient german),what do you all think of AA? i think it is quite scary, they destroy the individual (the drunk) and replace it with a maxim spouting determined individual, who would make a great storm trooper. but what is the point of being determined if there is no goal to strive for? thats why there are drunks.
i suppose though that it is not the same as the “victimhood” of the testicular cancer seminars, etc.
When I was a sailor, I met, and became friends with, a lot of alcoholics (I guess many sailors are big drinkers).
I accompanied some of them to AA meetings, just out of curiosity.
At these meetings, each member stands up, in turn, and says:
“My name is Vexorg (or whatever it is), and I am an alcoholic.”
I found this very weird. If you perpetually reinforce the idea that you are an alcoholic, how are you ever not going to be one?
I used to hope somebody would say:
“My name is Vexorg, and I am no longer an alcoholic“.
But nobody ever did.
Forums themselves wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t always moderated by whiny emo types drunk off their collective asses on their own power.
This is why I much prefer social networking outlets like Facebook. No angst ridden 15 yr. olds there telling you what you can or can not post.
“Forums themselves wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t always moderated by whiny emo types drunk off their collective asses on their own power. ”
Almost by definition, that is the only type of person who will take the job. For comparison, look toward any “crowd-sourced” site like Wikipedia.com or one of those awful Mechanical Turk answers sites. The crowd not only picks the wrong answer just about every time, but they punish anyone who raises a wavering hand and demonstrates the bankruptcy of the process.
I see the atheist is back, for more automated masochistic suffering. The thing whose great intellect serves only to ensure its ongoing discontent in a world it loathes.
Disconnect from the source and this is the result. A crazed mind, churning away endlessly, wrecking everything around it. Isolated, parasitic, utterly alone in a realm of manufactured torment.
I wonder what motivates such as these. I really do. Even though it is clear that such phenomena are beyond all understanding.
Beware using the mind for all and everything.
It becomes a feedback-loop, devouring itself as it excretes itself, over and over…
yes, its personalities like the “nihilist”, that reassure me that liberalism is on its last legs. the west has run out of things to “equalize”, so as the ideology begins to devour itself (a-la OWS’s pseudo-nationalist ideas Vs. the liberal “globalist” establishment) and the west continues to decline, it is only logical (raise eyebrow spockishly) that (supposing if there is a coherent school of thought) the proles will begin to move right, thereby moving the civilization “right”, thereby allowing the leadershio to do away with such “nihilists” (narcissists).
I had the thought, just yesterday, that this whole leftist activity of ‘being nice’, must surely be beginning to grate upon the leftists, especially since ‘nice’ is about the last thing they actually are.
If the right were to offer freedom from the burden of always displaying this false ‘niceness’, it might well appeal to the true nature of leftists.
I mean: since when was ‘niceness’ the defining quality of men?
It amazes me, constantly, how anybody ever bought into it.
Notice how it does the leftist thing that none of them can ever resist:
It inserts itself in a situation where it clearly does not belong, and demands, as a right, that the situation changes, to accommodate it.
The world, and everything in it, exists solely for its entertainment and self-aggrandisement. It damages whatever it comes into contact with, as it thrashes about, trying to force-fit everything to itself, instead of it to everything else.
And remains utterly unable to consider what the whole world tells it.
This is why I call leftists ‘leftists’.
Their sanity has left them, if, indeed, they ever had it.
And why I call rightists ‘rightists’, on the rare occasions that I do: because they are able, whatever their flaws may be, to see that the world does not exist merely to accommodate them.
Notice how it does the rightist thing that none of them can ever resist: Endless self-projection and using misappropriated labels to avoid a discussion it doesn’t want to have.
If asking for further clarification/articulation of your ideology (intellectual integrity), as well as how one is ‘liberal’ beyond your merely ‘saying so’ means I am destroying something, then it fucking deserves to be destroyed, for it is inherently harmful to reality.
You fool no one.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but to me defining Liberalism is quite simple and easy. They are, to a man, Utopians. The child like belief that the world can be made perfect, according to their dysfunctional belief systems–even if it means killing a billion or two in the process. In short, they are all narcissistic individuals who want everyone else to take care of their needs.
So, they are incapable of leaving “well enough alone”–they must always try to make it better. They totally negate the reality that western civilization took 3500 years to evolve and that they, beginning roughly one hundred years ago, decided that since they didn’t fit in, they would turn it on it’s head so they could fit in. As a result, society has struggled along on life support–the support engendered by those who are not so much “conservatives” as they are traditionalists. But now we are tired and grown to a few–we are not enough to sustain society anymore and it is dying–it is on life support. The “children” of the forties, who became the radicals of the sixties were more than the system could bear. They beget children of their own who are even worse, due to having grown up in a household full of narcissistic adults smoking pot and using other drugs to escape the reality of every day life.
great point robert!
I don’t believe the world can be made ‘perfect’, ‘weltschmerz’ is not a foreign concept to me.
What you are describing is not a concrete political philosophy but generalised behaviour. However constantly trying to change things is what people do, from their perspective they are trying to improve things which is no different than yours (i hope). Also the radicalism of the 60′s was inevitable given information dispersal inevitably resulting in a higher awareness of how governments act and deceive their populace, thus I would consider it fair to say it wasn’t entirely unwarranted. When it was revealed that the U.S. government was deliberately concealing war crimes, what was the ‘appropriate’ response then? To hear/see/speak no evil?
Also i feel compelled to point out that it is those who self-identify as ‘conservative’ who do the most damage in domestic, international and most importantly ecological affairs. Reality is, we have developed numerous technological advances which are better for us and the environment but refuse to employ them (because it would be less profitable to do so in the short-term), that simply does not happen without a very strong (un)conscious desire to destroy humanity and the planet. If it is true that ‘they’ are destroying ‘society’, then perhaps it needs to be destroyed?
Thank-you, Ryan. I also think that, if not for modern technology, an awful lot of these people would have died young of their own stupidity.
In the old days, people had enough sense to know that when someone died of their own stupidity, society was best served by their loss. Which is to say, they were used as an object lesson for teaching children right from wrong–no one would have even thought of passing a law to protect someone from their own stupidity. A large number were also used up as cannon fodder which was another way society benefited–their genes were not passed on. There was also the idea that some people “just needed killing”. These were the dregs of society that were forever making other people’s lives miserable. Everyone knew who they were and everyone rejoiced when they died. There was never any attempt to save them from themselves or make an excuse for their behavior. It was simply understood that there were bad seeds in the world–and people understood that to mean they were of “bad stock”, which was another way of saying they were genetically deficient.
here, for free, is one of my favorite essays on the absurdity of liberal egalitarianism. It’s by Kurt Vonnegut, of all people.
http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html
While humorous, it is, of course, where Liberalism is headed.
That is some f*****’ story!
Well spotted.
Who are you calling an atheist?
I may be a crazed, isolated, tortured soul, but then most artists are, at least the good ones are. 90-95%+ of all foods trigger my gag reflex, and the air vividly tastes and smells like shit/piss/pollution to me, since as long as i can remember my experience has been one of CONSTANT and INTENSE physical repugnance, I have had to work hard not to be overcome by it alone. It is my lot to be saddled with all the anguish and suffering of a heightened perception and sensitivity, and be afflicted by a darker perception of reality than most, the upside is I know why i have it and i know i have been gifted a much deeper/intense range of experience then most will ever grasp. You think I consider myself a victim, reality is I’m a survivor, more than.
Honestly Crow, either man the fuck up and answer my questions, or just shut the fuck up. Your words are empty, and all you ever do is self-project yourself as the malevolent force you have defined as ‘liberalism’. You don’t get to accuse others of being ‘unreasonable’ or using ‘circular logic’ when your sole defense against every point raised is “i say you’re liberal, thus your point is invalid”.
So again i ask, what makes me ‘liberal’, beyond my refuting your ideology? Simply calling an apple an orange does not make it so, oh wiat this is politics where repeating something ad infinitum DOES make it reality, right?
Care to share your tortured introvert art? My interest was piqued.
http://joope.deviantart.com
This is all quite outdated but all i have on the net, I only recently began producing art of a ‘professional’ grade and am still searching for a way to make cheap, good quality, internationally available prints.
Well done, JooPe. I really like it.
You and crow should lay off of each other though…you two are probably far more similar to each other than 99.9% of society, and that stuff just isn’t accomplishing anything.
My goodness. The “art” tells its own story.
A blood-spattered windows desktop…
We inherit life in an inherently hostile reality, the key to happiness is finding beauty in darkness.
>>>>The victimhood is the identity, and the identity is sacred.
It can then become a claim against the well-earned resources of others. A sad situation.
Kind of like MRA and MGTOW forums.
Notice how it can not help but rant and rave.
It shows up, calls everybody names, treats them like idiots and morons, then demands to be hailed as a saviour for doing so.
It hates being called what it is, because in its deluded way, it sees itself as ‘free-thinking’ and ‘independent’. Leftist is a term that does not suit it, and so it rebels, as it does against everything it doesn’t like, and demands the thing that offends it should be made to disappear.
People here come here because they have an interest in the discourse that takes place here. Not to convert everybody to some tinpot fortune-cookie ideology that is even now in the process of demolishing the western world.
But see the length of its carefully-crafted rants: the whole site is all about it, and its views, and its problems.
It has problems, too. To which it freely, and gratuitously admits. Because now that we know this, we are manipulatively directed to sympathize with this victim.
We don’t support victimhood here.
There are millions of sites that do.
We’ll certainly miss it when it goes, but it shouldn’t let that stop it; after all, it owes us nothing, and the world is its oyster.
What part of “I am not a victim” do you fail to understand? Sure, my ‘condition’ means i suffer more than most (or at least would in comparable circumstances), the way i see it is because i have the STRENGTH to take it, and believe me the bad certainly amplifies the good.
I came here to challenge myself and for interesting discourse, but when you resort to using labels like ‘liberal’ to just ignore ideas/information instead of processing them, exactly how much ‘discourse’ do you think is possible? It is like the insanity argument, the more you call me ‘liberal’ and the more i refute it, the more i am bound to be perceived as such, and of course failure to refute it would be taken as ‘silent approval’ as well, a perfect catch 22. Nevermind the fact you simply ignore any requests for articulation as to exactly how i ‘express’ liberal ideology, no the assertion is made and ‘proved’ through the assertion itself. Ignorance IS strength, but oh so repugnant.
But maybe you are right, given all that perhaps my presence here is ‘damaging’, but more likely it is damaging to me/my time. Good luck replacing character with ‘culture’.
“It” came here with an interest in discourse and to challenge itself, until said discourse progressed to a stage where “it” began presenting ideas/information contrary to the accepted worldview/ideology. This resulted in “it” being labeled a ‘leftist’, the circular logic being anything a ‘leftist’ says is wrong and “it” is a ‘leftist” because some ‘rightists’ say so. Obviously, this made further constructive discourse impossible.
What part of “I am NOT a victim” do you NOT understand? Oh wait, the part that would force you to abandon your categorization of me and the information/ideas I present, and thus end your cognitive dissonance.
It is the insanity argument, the more i refute your claims that i am ‘liberal’, the more i am bound to be perceived as such, nevermind the fact I openly denounce all ideology and no evidence has been made to support the claim beyond ‘because i say so’, the assertion is made and ‘proved’ through itself and endless repetition. The perfect catch 22.
Ignorance IS strength, but oh so repugnant.
I like this blog post’s meaning, but the situation from which it stemmed, I found to be different from what is described here. A quick google search let me find the mentioned stutter forum posts. so decide for yourself. And I hope this post of mine is not censored; that would definitely be discrediting. Remember- “to hell with me if there is any truth which can destroy me”. And crow, I’m not attacking you, but merely making sure everyone can see the ‘whole story’ and form their own perspective. I’m seeing inconsistencies here that trouble me.
http://www.stutteringcommunity.com/showthread.php?t=513
I am glad you agree, because we’ve sent an activist to your forum to debate the veracity of Crow’s statements.
If he is censored, we will know who is discredited.
http://www.stutteringcommunity.com/showpost.php?p=8484&postcount=71
Thank you. I read all that stuff again, and it’s been heavily edited by the stuttering admins, who are, as they proved, liars and cheats. That’s what stuttering does to you. The speech aberration is the least of it.
They need to look good, so reality is warped in order to achieve the illusion they desire.
I imagine that the troll and his accomplice are – in fact – stutterers from that forum.
And if they are not, they might prefer the company over there, to the company here.
Screencap is your friend, now we have no way of verifying your account(s), I guess it is also possible they realised the ‘error’ of their ways and that is why they deleted the comments, or the comments were in fact left by trolls and deleted by admins. And no, I am not from a stuttering forum, nor have i ever stuttered, at least not unassisted by alcohol.
Want to make sure I am understanding correctly: The admins of the stuttering forum edited crow’s posts and/or the Completely Fluent thread? by the way, I am completely unaffiliated with the stuttering forum and don’t want to cause confusion. I simply googled “stuttering forum” and clicked around until I found posts that fit the description. Too much time on my hands, yes, but I’m not trying to troll anyone.
The stuttering forum moderator, GrantM, closed the thread with the above message.
The stuttering forum has discredited itself.
What are you zeibel? The Spanish Inquisition?
Read what it says. That is what it says. You want someone else to tell you what to think of it? You certainly behave as if you are from that forum, by the way you whip up drama, then when it starts to die down, try to whip it up again.
We are adults here – generally – and haven’t been interested in being told what to think, since we left home.
Personally, I don’t give a toss whether you understand, or not.
Thanks for the link.
The victimhood mentality runs thick in my family. My mother is an alcoholic, my sister has an eating disorder, my father is a workaholic, and I have self loathing tendencies/martyr complex. The great triumph of my life has been to man up and exorcise that weakness from within me. It all boils down to accepting responsibility for one’s actions and seeing reality for what it is. There’s a paradox – we can’t be fatalistic but we must accept what comes our way. We must accept who we are but strive for actualization. There are times that we are truly victims, but there’s no use whining about it except to stroke our own egos. We reap what we sough. Only through thoughtful reflection and disciplined action can we change ourselves. But we need a center to revolve around – I call it God. Without that cultural glue, civilization is just a thin veneer of manners, covering a savage soul.
We know you better now, Lux. Great post.
It takes a lot to turn it all around and make things work for you.
If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.
The Christian Church, itself, is to blame, in large part, for the demise of it’s God and the adherents of that God. By misrepresenting what really needs no representing, at all.
It would work, and keep working, if they did it in an accurate and reasonable way. Alas, they do not, have not, and likely will not.
All anybody really needs to know about God is that God is.
All the rest follows, by itself.
Well said crow, most true, indeed.
What has happened? A long, steady decay across all levels of our civilization. A series of bad decisions, wrongheaded thinking, and poor judgment. Now it’s time to pay for all of our malinvestment. In the Christian church, in the economy, in our art, in our politics, and in our environment we are at the end of a grand cycle. We have exchanged the wisdom of our fathers for the whimsy of our own pleasures. Our center cannot hold, because we have abandoned our center, and are spiraling into oblivion. After this death, some kind of rebirth. This is an historical pattern that has been seen over and over again. But we have crossed the event horizon. The momentum cannot be stopped, we can only control how long we remain in crisis and how bad it will get.
At the very least, there is a passing chance for a discussion right now about what we’re going to do when we come out of the other side. At the most, a discussion about how we can do some damage control. The car is careening of the cliff, now’s not the time to press the breaks, it’s time to jump out of the car. Correctly identifying the problem(s) is crucial, but blame is only the first fumbling attempt of that process. Most of the time people are satisfied with blame, because that way they can pass the buck on the real work, which is growth. Occupy Wall Street may be misguided in certain respects, but its core function is to open up a dialogue. Let’s allow that to happen.
My experience has been that people will listen if you make it clear that results are what you are after, and not just hearing the lovely melody of your own dogma. While I recognize that most people are idiots, and seem incapable of change, I also feel strongly that many are waking up to the truth. We don’t live in a vacuum, and it is no coincidence that all of a sudden my friends and I happen to begin reading macroeconomics and political theory. Our collective subconscious is beginning to recognize what is happening. Awakening is a dizzy, confusing process. It is up to those already conscious to act as intellectual midwives. Whatever our differences, which are many and real, I believe there is a large group out there that have in common a desire — to return to our roots, and find meaning in our lives.
What is the wisdom of the ancients? That we must be born again. We need to have an organic system that takes the inevitables into account. The inevitables? Corruption and decay. We must not recoil from death’s renewal. The snake must shed his skin. It is written into the biology of the animal. A clever design, because writing it into a constitution is clearly not helpful. “Death” and failure must occur as a matter of course. Good businesses, leaders, and ideas must rise to the top, bad ones must tumble into the ash bin of history. This is of course what you guys here at Amerika call meritocracy.
How do we achieve meritocracy? Through competition. The improving mechanism through which optimal design emerges. We must pass through the purifying fire of reality. It’s the basic scientific principle and is eminently practical — trial and error. Humans have been experimenting with forms and ideas since our beginning, and the record of that experiment is history. Much can be learned from it; the horrors and the terrific triumphs.
Historically, culture only extends as far the national level. Until E.T. shows up, I don’t see this changing. Any talk of a global culture becomes too much of an abstraction, and especially dangerous if we’re talking about world government bodies like the U.N. People can act out of mutual self interest — if there is something tying them together. Capitalism, and free markets, work — if there is culture. In the absence of culture, and with the aid of the nanny state, we have crony capitalism, consumer culture, and the worst common denominator.
But shouldn’t cultures compete, and political systems too? This seems rational to me — even the improving mechanism must be improved. We should approach this with the right methodology.
My rough conceptualization — 1) protect the borders, prevent further invasion 2) promote American decentralization via a loose confederation of localized competing enclaves, organized cultural units. People can vote with their feet and vote with their dollar. A business can’t operate without customers, neither can a city operate without a citizenry. Maybe some people move towards Monarch, Missouri; others to Consumerville, California; Libertarian, Louisiana; or Welfare, Washington. What works will create prosperity, what doesn’t will crumble. We need more lines in the sand, not less. More experimentation, more failure, more success. A faster feedback loop. There cannot be bailouts. Debt must liquidate. In short, the rain must fall on the just and the unjust alike. Modern civilization must integrate in some fashion with our primitive past. Our ancestors were smaller and leaner, and so were its tribes. Smaller communities have the strongest bonds. I believe this fracturing effect will happen anyway, we may as well go with the flow and use it to our advantage. People organize themselves organically, by ethnicity, culture, and other factors, gravitating towards the likeminded. We ought to let this occur.
By the way, thank you guys for the kind words. I don’t often venture into advocacy or proscription, but these ideas have been floating around in my head recently and I thought I’d throw them out there.
It’s a good thing you did.
Your ideas are a breath of spring, and a dose of real, in fantasy daydream gone bad.
As you say, we can often feel alone with our vision of reality. It is good to know we are not.
Ah, the red pill of the real. Very bitter, doesn’t go down the gullet well, but it’s the medicine of our soul. People ought to realize the value of a cold shower.
This is insightful. I would like to point out that reverence for the whole is necessary. If you call it god, nature or science does not matter. The reverence does. I think however those who believe in a divine force have the most whole lives and the most poetic ones.
It seems to m that the enlightened Christian sages and ancient Greco-Roman pagans appear to have espoused a similar philosophy, at least as seen in the Iliad and Odyssey. For some, a trip down Plato lane may be necessary, at which point this and this can be meaningful.
“It is my lot to be saddled” vs “You think I consider myself a victim, reality is I’m a survivor”
eg. I AM HINDERED AND MUST TELL YOU ABOUT IT, THEREFORE I AM A SURVIVOR
eg. I suffer more than you, therefor i am stronger than you.
Actually if anything it’s more like “I suffer more than you, therefor i am STRONGER than you.”
I very rarely comment – I leave that to my husband who is far superior to me in that area. However I feel compelled to let all of you know how especially stimulating Amerika has become for me. I am learning a lot from everybody, on subjects I really never gave much consideration previously. I even take a break from my beloved garden to read the latest posts!
THANK YOU ALL.
Mrs Crow!!!! :) It’s an honor to meet you!
Thanks Ted. She went all soppy when she read that :)
[...] http://www.amerika.org/social-reality/victim-identit:/ And of course, these stutterers are like leftists, everywhere: they make a career out of evoking sympathy in others. Poor things. Innocent victims. Needy and helpless. There, there… When really, a millimeter beneath the surface appearance, lurks a vicious, ravening monster that knows no mercy, no love, no forgiveness, no quarter, and absolutely no capacity for fun. [...]