Then And Now, Incompetents Or Scammers, Slowly Then Quickly

I’ve gathered excerpts from a number of blog posts/articles that in my view offer fairly penetrating socio-political commentary on the nature of our contemporary social state. “Then and now” of course refers to yesterday’s post re Scott Adams’ views on people increasingly running into a wall—meaning, they can no longer explain away the lies and malice that the Left is inflicting on them on a daily basis in their everyday lives. These articles are very much along that line. We see more examples every day. In this first selection Tom Luongo proceeds pretty directly from where Adams is at—people feel they’ve been told to suspend disbelief for too long. But the Left can’t help themself—scammers will scam:

Luongo: Biden's Incompetent Presidency – A Feature, Not A Bug

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Scammers lie. They misdirect. They gain your confidence and then keep you in a bubble of lies and promises they don’t intend to keep. They prey on your good nature and your assumptions of how things work to keep you in their orbit.

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But the thing about lies is that they are always inconsistent. There is always a tell. But, you can’t see the tell if you don’t want to. And by the time you do, it’s far too late.

Biden’s folks and the media (and, yes, Davos) can’t tell you the truth about the COVID-9/11 clot shots because the COVID-9/11 pandemic was never about public health.

They can’t tell you the truth about the infrastructure bill they just passed because it was never about rebuilding failing infrastructure.

Similarly, they can’t tell you the truth about the Build Back Better bill because it isn’t about Building anything.

The media refused to cover the Kyle Rittenhouse trial or even the events in question with any honesty because the trial was never about Kyle’s guilt or innocence (and the jury ruled properly). It was an opportunity to grandstand on race relations when none of the men Kyle regrettably had to shoot were black.

And this is the first mistake people make when assessing current events. They believe these people are working with an honest desire to make things better. They refuse to believe malice because incompetence is easier to swallow.

It’s why it’s so easy for them to dismiss the truth as conspiracy.

To believe COVID-9/11 necessitated destroying the social fabric of society.

To make us all poorer with hypocritical energy policy because of Climate Change by destroying the oil industry that literally puts food on everyone’s table.

To eat the same rich people their policies created in the first place.

To divide us into arbitrary groups based on our willingness to get an experimental gene therapy whose only observable real-world effect is to create a whole new strata of autoimmune disorders and possibly short circuit the normal immune response to a coronavirus.

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Because the worst thing about scammers is that they make you liars, too. We lie to ourselves that it isn’t their fault, it’s ours. We lie to our family and friends that things can’t be what they are.

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Because with Biden’s team the evidence points to something far different, something far more sinister.

These people are vandals. They are intent on destroying society itself and make us complicit in the lie that there is nothing good or decent left about America or, for that matter, everything that they tell us today (as opposed to yesterday) is unacceptable.

That is the hardest red pill to swallow in the end for too many at this point. The incompetence of the Biden Administration is itself a lie. These people have an agenda and a goal and they have moved with assiduous speed and deftness to implement that agenda.

They are not incompetent, but rather hyper-competent… at being vandals.

This is why COVID-9/11 will never end. This is why when we say no to the clot shot they double down and demand we give it to our kids. This is why when information gets out that proves they are lying they lie even more and suppress the information.

Truth is treason in the empire of lies. The scammer will make the lie bigger and bigger to keep you on the hook. They will never admit they are lying.

This is why I keep saying become #Ungovernable.

Next up Theodore Dalrymple, who takes the broad view. I’m not including the beginning, but do follow the link to read it:

First Slowly, Then Quickly

After his introduction, which deals with the abuse of language, Dalrymple moves on to five related cultural trends that he identifies in the context of the trans cult—but which, to my mind, have broader application.

There are several wider cultural trends discernible in the current agitation over transsexualism, or whatever name one wishes to give it. …

The first cultural trend is an increasing reluctance to accept any limitation whatsoever to the satisfaction of one’s desires that are placed by circumstances beyond one’s control, that is to say an exaggerated or exacerbated Prometheanism: You can be anything you want, without limitation, and therefore you do not have to accept anything you were born with as ineluctable. ...

The second trend is to magical thinking, despite the supposed rationality of our age and its vaunted defeat of superstition. We believe that we can change reality by means of mere verbal incantations. If we alter our language enough, reality itself will change. …

This is key to understanding the Neognostic nature of our Progressive rulers. It flows from the first trend—the paramountcy of Will over rational deliberation. Progressive Wokeism uses the forms of rationality (e.g., CRT and other forms of “critical” theorizing) for distinctly non-rational ends.

The third trend is the worship of power. The object of deliberate language change is not to improve the state of the world, or even anyone’s state of mind, but the exertion and consolidation of power for its own sake. …

Language is power. If you can change the words people use you can, according to the progs, change the way they think. Which, of course, is what’s behind much of government funded “education”.

The fourth trend is centralization of the marginal; that is to say, a marginal phenomenon such as transsexualism comes to occupy the center of intellectual attention. To employ a different metaphor, the tail wags the dog.

One could say that enforcing this centralization of the marginal on normals is a demonstration of prog power on the societal level. This used to be called “signifying.” Making normal people jump through prog defined hoops. Making them affirm the lie they know to be untrue.

The fifth trend is to the increasing spinelessness or cowardice of much of the intelligentsia, who in this case have proved themselves astonishingly easy to intimidate, a pack of intellectual Neville Chamberlains (but Chamberlain had more excuse, for he had lived through the horror of the First World War, which he did not want to repeat). Nothing has proved too absurd for this intelligentsia to swallow; indeed, the swallowing of absurdity is easier for the intelligentsia than others, for rationalization is their métier. There is no point in being an intellectual if you think only what everyone else thinks.

Here, I think, Dalrymple is eliding a more complex reality. The spineless intelligentsia he’s referring to are not the true progs but the older line liberals who are afraid of being left behind. They may not be true believers but, in their spinelessness and lack of moral bearings or principles they mouth whatever is current.

The most important question is, What next?—for there will be a next, because transgressive reform is what gives meaning to life in the absence of any other meaning.

There will always be one more reality, one more manifestation of normal human nature, to overcome and suppress. This reality is what gives prog wokeness its restless aggression.

Now, I wan to draw attention to a seminal essay by Eric Voegelin:

On Hegel: A Study In Sorcery.

In this seminal essay, published in 1971, Voegelin identifies Hegel as, essentially, a scammer. Masquerading as a philosopher, Hegel was in reality a Hermetic sorcerer whose seemingly hyper rational language was in fact a tissue of magical incantations that aimed at the monstrous end of placing himself in control of the process of history. The relevance of Hegel for us is that he was the ideological inspiration for our original Progressives: Dewey, Wilson, and the rest. 

In the much quoted first paragraph of Voegelin’s essay we find a description of the psychological universe that gives rise to the Wokeness that Dalrymple describes:

When the gods are expelled from the cosmos, the world they have left becomes boring. In the seventeenth century, the ennui explored by Pascal was still the mood of a man who had lost his faith and must protect himself from the blackness of anxiety by divertissements; after the French Revolution, the ennui was recognized by Hegel as the syndrome of an age in history. It had taken a century-and-a-half for the lostness in a world without God to develop from a personal malaise of existence to a social disease.

In a boring God-less world the task becomes to make it interesting through intellectual gamesmanship. “Transgressive reform”. Not reform in the sense of improving at the margins on a necessarily imperfect human condition, but radical transgression against all bounds of human nature.

To tie Voegelin, the political philosopher, even more closely to the analysis of the psychologist Dalrymple, here is a lengthy excerpt from an article that appeared in August in Modern Age. The author uses Voegelin’s essay to analyze the phenomenon of Wokeism:

“WOKE” IS THE NEW SORCERY

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Voegelin aimed his analysis chiefly at nineteenth-century thinkers such as Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, and Auguste Comte. He notes that Hegel quite clearly saw himself as a sorcerer, as he referred to his Zauberworte (magic words) and his Zauberkraft (magic force) that would transform reality. But Voegelin’s analysis applies equally well to more modern sorcerers, including those who conjure up a new political order through the magic language of “wokeness.”

Voegelin posited that sorcery was an attempt to create a “second reality.” Brought into being by a spell of words, this second reality is supposed to be more real than the primary reality that we encounter every day. How in the world could a “sorcerer” create such a “second reality” or make living in it seem preferable to living in primary reality?

The first thing a sorcerer must do is seduce his acolytes into the new reality by offering some genuine insights about the nature of the old reality. So, for instance, Hegel, a brilliant scholar of the history of philosophy, could offer his readers novel perspectives on the development of the subject. Marx, who was a keen observer of the social scene around him, could provide genuine insights into mid-nineteenth-century European social relations.

To take a more recent example, L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, had studied Buddhism, psychoanalysis, and cybernetics, and thus could offer potential acolytes an interesting perspective on their psychological difficulties with what he called “Dianetics.” And Ayn Rand, another modern sorcerer, drew upon the sound philosophy of Aristotle and had personal experience with collectivist tyranny in the USSR, and so she could offer real insights into collectivist madness.

In “On Hegel—A Study in Sorcery,” Voegelin summarizes this feature of the sorcerer’s work as “replacing the first reality of experience by the second reality of imaginative construction, and endowing the imaginary reality with the appearance of truth by letting it absorb pieces of first reality.” Voegelin notes that this sort of sorcery is widespread: it is “the great confidence game played by modern man . . . under such titles as advertisement, propaganda, communication, and comprehensively, as ideological politics.”

Ideologies gain their plausibility because they point to something that really is a problem, such as racism or “capitalist exploitation.” But they typically try to treat this one problem as if it were the source of all problems.

The truths offered by a sorcerer, moreover, only serve as lures, inviting acolytes into the sorcerer’s second reality. Once “hooked” by these lures, the apprentice is then educated into a whole new way of viewing the world. This new vision is made attractive by the assertion on the part of the sorcerer that those who have embraced it are now superior to the run-of-the-mill human beings who have not done so. For example, followers of Hegel are told that they are at the forefront of the historical development of geist, or the “world spirit.” Voegelin observes: “Hegel’s obsession was power. If he wanted to be the sorcerer who could evoke the shape of history, he had to penetrate the political events of the time with thought until the events and thought would coincide.”

Similarly, the most diehard Marxists are assured that they are “the vanguard of the proletariat.” But these are promises about the future; the sorcerer’s apprentice also gets a more immediate payoff: the conviction that he is now privy to previously hidden knowledge about how the world “really” is structured. The newly minted Marxist can “see” that class struggle is what really drives human affairs. And the imbiber of critical race theory today is enlightened to the “fact” that “white supremacy” is the key to understanding all things American. For someone floundering in the troubled waters of a society in flux, this assurance of special insight into reality is a tremendous boost to one’s self-image.

Lest this analysis of sorcery seem like merely a right-wing tactic to smear leftists—although Ayn Rand, for one, was hardly on the left!—I will cite another recent example of sorcery: what is often called “neoconservatism.” The secondary reality that neoconservatives of the George W. Bush era attempted to create is one in which all actions by the United States are, by definition, virtuous, and all people, all around the world, have as their deepest aspiration to become American. Writing in the New York Times Magazine, Ron Suskind reported on a conversation with a Bush administration official as follows:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. . . . That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

It is stunning how explicit this official was about ignoring the primary reality of experience and creating “our own reality.” If one were to write a fictional character intended to exemplify Voegelin’s concept of sorcery, and put those words into his mouth, a critic would call it too ham-handed, a caricature of an ideologue.

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To my mind this magic-incantational mindset is expressed will, albeit in conventional American political terms, by Fred Siegel in a 2018 interview (h/t commenter kaishaku):

Siegel: Liberalism has taken on a religious aspect. It’s a belief system, and not a system that represents political interests. Liberalism is seen as a source of grace, in religious terms. It is hard to talk to people, when you are effectively suggesting they are not among the blessed (or, to use Thomas Sowell’s phrase, the ‘anointed’), that they are in fact mistaken.