How Stupid Will We Get?
We watch the rest of the Abrahamic world go authoritarian but are blind to our belonging to this world
Our leaders, and the educated, watched in horror as ignorant people and an odd assortment of middle and upper class Islamic people conspired against the western power structure. They wanted to destroy it for educating its citizens in the classic ideas of ancient Greece, the philosophy of a special class of person who is distinguished by equality and education, in order to be self-governing. The only education needed is in the Koran. We have the same people among us as the Jewish and Islamic population centers, people who are so invested in the top down authoritarian structure they will die with it if they can’t keep it propped up.
The enemy of this top down structure is a bottom up structure, which we received from the ancient Greeks, where the gods were not real, in that they had no location, they were manifestations of the emotional states and situations people get into. Eros wasn’t outside the person, but inside, as was Aphrodite. Zeus was father energy and Hera, the hearth and home. The gods were nature’s god.
This is why there was required education in these ideas of what is essentially a bottom up governing power. There is no actual top because the representative of any number of people is still just one of them, under the law. One of my favorite examples of this bottom up power was the story of a Maori politician who was buying himself expensive underwear. He was laughed right back to the chapter house and somebody else took the job. The best way to protect against corrupt leaders is to institute a policy that nobody can be elevated to leadership positions because they seek it. They should be elevated by their fellows as the best among them. I don’t think that’s how our recent Supreme Court Justices were elevated. They are from one side of the divide, the top down authoritarian side, there to undo the works of the founding fathers.
A liberal education requires being faithful to the foundational idea from the Greeks that all the citizens are equal, and they govern themselves through the power of oration of the philosophy which best guides the society toward the intention of this concept of an individual becoming what he or she imagines, with the only caveat being the golden rule. This is the rule of basic respect. The image is of one eye looking at the other guy and one looking back at yourself from his point of view. Re spect. This allows for a feedback loop which is responsive to any changes in the energy field. In other words, the field is responsive to any shifting in the polarity. If you are one with the responses you cooperate and your god is nature. Power is coming from this intelligent response and knowledge of the entire field. This is power through understanding, and is based in quality, or, the good.
Standing opposed to this education is a field in which one polarity is always in competition with the other polarity to dominate. This is a power god with a simple model in society of a strongman, a king, a gang leader, a corporation, a political party, if all the power is at the top and delegated downward to people who follow orders because, if they lose the power given from above, they’ll be helpless, turned away from the fire, cut off from their in-laws, the power at the bottom evaporates. All wealth flows to the top with the power. This top down structure of authority resides above you and questioning it will get you killed, so when that applause sign comes on you will cheer, just you wait and see. You’ll cheer like a cock crowing.
These are two strands which run through our culture, and you easily see them clash, as when we have to teach alternatives to democracy and science and classical philosophy, when the virtues born of oration and nature’s god are false faces for idiots, and for a ship of fools who don’t know a false face from a horse’s ass. And it is so easy. If you want to steal elections accuse the other side of doing it continuously all the way to the elections, and then steal it. It is a simple system Roy Cohn taught Donald Trump. You are a bulldozer so just roll over anything in your way. Never stop, never apologize, never doubt yourself, and punish anyone who disagrees so severely they never do that again. This is the model used by Saddam Hussein or Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin. It doesn’t matter where you find it. It has the same rules.
What comes next is cruelty for its own sake. Once an empowered mob is at the disposal of a strongman, anyone can be governed by cruelty, because fear has no bottom. Anyone who does not please the strongman is at the mercy of this mob. Democracy and knowledge inherited from the Greeks was the underpinning of western society, the originating idea of the United States government, it flowered through the cold war, and then we forgot the most basic strategy of an enemy which must go passive in the face of superior force. They will use poison, and they will use judo, with which a large and powerful opponent is defeated by using his own momentum against him. The propaganda artist’s lieutenants follow the playbook, and it is working. It is evil genius, but genius, nonetheless. We are watching its flowering after it got a good foothold inside our government.
We are in a place right now where people are so stupid they will listen to propaganda from professionals and believe it over their own government, because part of the propaganda which has already succeeded is that the government is the enemy. This did not originate with Putin of course, he is just building on what the American right used Reagan to front for, the weakening of the power of the government by cutting off tax revenues, so as to gradually bring it under the control of the corporations. This has been successful. The Supreme Court is on their side now.
What was intended to be a financial windfall for them went out of control, and now people really do think the government is their enemy, as if it is anything other than people like them working jobs which keep the mail and social security checks coming in, or rockets on the correct trajectory. As if it is not their sons and daughters flying the helicopters and developing the vaccines. This is tragic because we need good conservatives to stand against stupid regulations and bureaucrats who think their job is to oppose work getting done. We do not need stupid people in high places, just because they will do anything they’re told and could never get a better job than this should they be in disfavor from above.
The momentum of this war against the democratic government by the corporate, top down, government, has been extended now by propaganda intensifying the divide between the Abrahamic religions and the humanists, who are based in the foundational poems and knowledge from ancient Greece, which were facilitated by psychedelics. Again, this is judo, taking the momentum of an existing divide, which was not causing much trouble beyond making fun of other people for being different, and introducing paranoia and fear into it to fan the flames of conspiracy. Instead of just driving a Volvo and drinking espresso, liberals molest children and eat babies tarta.
The most advanced degrees in stupid right now are that people are reading conspiracy theories about the vaccine instead of reading the obituaries. Died after a short illness is code for family is anti-vax. The foundation of stupidity is believing anything which does not come to you from a reliable source. Journalists have rules that insure they at least have confidence that the story is true, even if they get catfished once in awhile, like Judy Miller was. Being catfished by the Bush administration is what the poor woman is famous for. The intention is to give a fair and balanced account of what is going on. This is why Fox uses that phrase, it is judo, turning the force of the ethical against itself, so as to blur the distinction between reporting and propaganda.
When I think of people around this country being caught up in the stupidity of Fox commentary and right wing radio and the right wing celebrities, famous for being stupid and proud of it, I recall a friend who showed up at our apartment in San Francisco shortly after we moved there. He was doing coke and was with a girl who might have been jail bait, I had no way to know without asking for an I.D. Whatever it was he was paranoid, and started saying things which insinuated he was on to our plots against him. I knew the drill, you think something but you can’t prove it so you begin to insinuate you know so they will admit to the conspiracy, at the center of which, is you. His expression started to get threatening, so I got fed up and yelled at him. “It’s in your head, man! There is nothing, nothing fucking going on!” Whereupon he suddenly collapsed into a puddle of regret and said,
“Wow. Thank you, man. I’m so glad you said that.”
There is nothing going on except people making a lot of money in the same way the Enquirer used to make it, putting magazines in the supermarket checkout lane with headlines such as, “Elvis had my baby,” or, “Princess Diana and Elton John caught in lesbian embrace.” If you can hook somebody with the headline, no matter how far beyond belief and good taste it is, you make money on the click. The only thing is, most people didn’t used to actually believe this shit, they were entertained by it.
At least, I don’t think they believed it. Regardless, the question always being asked is, how gullible are you? It’s like any con game, you string the mark along from click to click and get them to bring in new marks. Success in America, as my friend Jim said, is finding somebody dumber than you and getting their money.
If all of a sudden nobody could listen to this Russian propaganda that is married to the right wing media, they would realize nothing is going on besides a lot of nets scooping up the day’s catch of marks. Anger and hatred are energy which can be used, and so it is traded as a commodity on the open market if there is no governing virtue of some noble common purpose. That’s why it was illegal for a non citizen to own American media until Murdoch the billionaire arrived from Australia and bought his way in. The theory was that somebody with no interest in the United States, other than as a source of wealth to be extracted by the easiest and most efficient means, was not a trusted steward of the public interest. That was correct. Now he has the Wall Street Journal. Trading qualitative goods for quantitative goods never works out well.
What people think is going on where nothing is going on is like the mind of my friend, getting itself worked up on stories which are perfectly logical in their construction, but without any connection to other people. They are connected to what is being imagined about other people, and we all know that we can drag somebody off into the cave of the mind and do anything we want with them. The only alternative to this is to stop listening to what people say about other people, negative or positive. The time to dismiss them as anyone of importance is when you realize they like to talk about other people.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people. (Eleanor Roosevelt)
