People have slowly started to notice a new fad gaining traction among our ruling class. Check your social media feeds or the entertainment news, and odds are you’ll see a piece extolling the virtues of eating bugs.
As if it had to be said again, you should never take our rulers’ stated motives at face value. They don’t think eating bugs will save the planet, nor do they think bug burgers are delicious. We know this because our betters won’t be dining on meal worms. When the daily bug ration is mandated, they’ll make unprincipled exceptions for themselves.
It’s good to see people catching on to the real purpose behind pushing bugs as haute cuisine. They’ve seen enough humiliation rituals to know the next one when it pops up.
If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, the most commonly cited example of a humiliation ritual was Eastern Bloc shopkeepers being pressured to place “Workers of the world unite” signs in their front windows. If you didn’t display the sign and the local party functionary stopped by, there’d be trouble.
Now, this practice continued well into the 20th century, when it had become obvious to anyone with a brain that there would be no global Communist uprising. We know the guys in charge knew it. That wasn’t the point. They didn’t think the revolution would come if only enough shopkeepers displayed little red stars.
They knew from history that forcing people to publicly state manifest untruths demoralized them.
That’s how humiliation rituals work. If you can sap the people’s fortitude until they’ll willingly recite patent falsehoods, they won’t have the fortitude to challenge the elite.
A good example of the Left’s current favorite humiliation ritual came across my Twitter timeline yesterday. It’s astounding that there are any Conservatives who still think the Left’s noises about gay rights are on the level. Yet there they are, publicly endorsing butt stuff while wondering why it still hasn’t won them any brownie points with the Death Cult.
The reason for these housebroken Conservatives’ confusion is, as usual, their penchant for linear thinking. They can’t imagine anyone having ulterior motives, or if they can, they imagine some deliberate mass conspiracy; the SJWs getting daily marching orders from the Central Committee.
In reality, the Death Cult works more like a school of fish. They’re always sending subtle signals to each other to produce what looks like consciously coordinated movement.
That’s why Conservatives trying to be more pro-LGBT/anti-racist/feminist than the Left never works. They forget they’re dealing with a heretical religion, not a bunch of individuals who subscribe to an ideology.
To the Death Cult, a Conservative proclaiming his commitment to gay rights is LARPing with his fly open. He’s burning his pinch of incense and professing Caesar’s divinity while visibly crossing his fingers. The cult knows he’s not one of them, so his attempts to placate them come off as sacrilege.
That’s also why Conservatives lost the culture war. The point of a humiliation ritual is to make the enemy parrot your side’s moral code. For decades, Conservatives have dutifully performed every humiliation ritual the Death Cult liturgists have devised.
This isn’t a battle of divergent policies. It’s a war of conflicting morals. In asymmetrical warfare, whoever captures the moral level wins. Accepting the Death Cult’s moral framework is suicide, as Conservatives have proven. Beating this enemy will mean rejecting their morality wholesale.
“Space pirates OD on the spice from Dune and wake up on Cthulhu’s couch.”
Is it safe to say that everything in this twisted world is geared towards humiliation? Pornography, where the participants and viewer both debase themselves. People with Masters degrees having to life with their parents while working a minimum wage job. Would-be retirees never being able to retire and also having to do minimum wage work. H1B visas taking tech jobs where professionals have to train their own replacements from a foreign country. I could go on and on.
Living with your parents is something people need to get over. Moving out at 18 is an ahistorical anomaly that only existed for a brief period of time in the west and it's a big part of how our society got so atomized.
We need to start thinking inter-generationally.
During the age of aristocracy, Europeans came up with the idea of noblesse oblige. The deal was that the lower orders respected the nobles' authority, but in return their rulers looked out for their interests.
We now live under an inversion of that system–noblesse malice, if you will. The upper classes have become so insulated from the people they govern that they no longer understand our needs, much less care about them. That's why these bureaucrats all sound like space aliens when they take to the podium. Even Trump keeps bizarrely boasting about moving foreign embassies and legalizing sodomy where the AIDS pandemic started.
All that is to say, our rulers have decided it is more expedient to dissolve the people and elect another. They want us tamed and cowed so the project runs smoothly.
The Boomers really perfected the moving far away and atomizing families game. It's a trend that really needs to die if the isolation issue is ever to be repaired.
I remember when I wanted to move out of the house and get my own place. I was 18 and paying my own way through a 2 year college. My father and mother were lower middle class. We needed no assistance to eat or pay bills. But without scholarships or loans, which I refused, college was out of the question. I was planning on transferring to a 4 year college later. Before that I had been planning on enlisting in the USMC but was medically disqualified for having asthma an an inhaler after the age of 10. I had always had an independent streak.
So, I was going to move out and I found a small apartment I could afford.
My father was incensed. Angriest I had ever seen him. Angrier than when I failed 10th Grade Math. Angrier than when I tried to join the USMC (He was Navy in Vietnam- worked on PBRs and was anti-military after the war).
To my father, it was like a slap in the face because it implied he wasn't doing a decent job of providing for my needs (and college wasn't one of them- my well-being was primary) and I wasn't being a good example of a big brother, ready to take up the reins. My dad was from a traditional Irish Catholic family and in his family, like most I knew, you didn't move out until you got married, and sometimes not even then. Families supported each other.
It was my father's job to support me until I met the woman I would have a family with. It was my job to be a good sibling, be a good example and meet that woman. Not move out and be on my own (and have women over all I liked). And if something happened to my dad (which eventually did happen), it was my job as oldest male to pick up the slack.
The pop culture war on traditional family values is deeply insidious and very, very real. Men are always violent controlling jerks or weak, stupid comic relief. Religious people are always fanatics and judgmental and cruel. Attractive men, when they are shown to be attractive, always get a place and no longer live with mom and dad. Those 'men' who live with parents are nothing but losers.
Chris and JD are dead-on right about this. Its nothing but Divide and Conquer on the Family/Micro level rather than the Political/Military/Macro level.
One way to deal with the atomization is to develop a family game plan to deliberately avoid participating in the labor mobility rate between states (and between countries if the Free Marketers get their twisted wish). Families need to find a community worth fighting for, and then help their kids choose careers based on the needs of the local community. We also need to invest into local businesses and accept higher costs rather than use services like Amazon or other multinational and national chains.
If we keep doing the college roulette gamble, we’ll keep getting the atomization we get from such a system.
I have no respect for those who call themselves "Conservatives" anymore because they don't conserve anything. Calling yourself a "conservative" is another humiliation ritual.
Good point. They're like Vietnam era generals insisting they must destroy a village in order to save it.
You can't conserve things that are gone.
"There are 5 lights!"
A single smartphone screen backlight suffices for most.
Relevant story:
Doctor ‘Dismissed’ After Saying He Wouldn’t Call ‘Any 6ft Bearded Man Madam’
Dr Mackereth, an experienced emergency department medic, told the tribunal that shortly after his appointment in May 2018, he was asked by his line manager, James Owen: “If you have a man six foot tall with a beard who says he wants to be addressed as ‘she’ and ‘Mrs’, would you do that?”
The trained theologian and “unashamed” evangelical Christian gave his answer that he would not because it was against his religion. The medic alleged that Owen told him he was “overwhelmingly likely” to lose his job unless he changed his convictions, and in June 2018, the doctor alleged that he was dismissed.
The DWP say that Dr Mackereth left the role after receiving a letter where he was instructed to follow the “process as discussed in your training”, to which the doctor replied: “I am a Christian and in good conscience cannot do what the DWP is requiring of me.” The father of four maintains that he was dismissed and is a victim of harassment and discrimination.
The Christian told the tribunal on Wednesday that he was dismissed “not because of any realistic concerns over the rights and sensitivities of transgender individuals, but because of my refusal to make an abstract ideological pledge”.
Ivhate thst response though. "Because I am a Christian." How about "Because I don't lie to my patients?"
It opens up so many stupid doors for attack. Christians aren't the science deniers here.
I assumed he meant he's not going to lie because Christians aren't supposed to lie.
Dr. Mackereth did exactly the right thing.
He's a trained theologian. No doubt he recognizes the spiritual nature of this war.
Reasoning with fanatics is a mistake. You don't debate policy with them. You don't take part in their shame rituals. You go straight to religion, and you make the rubble bounce.
But that's a liem It isn't a religious issue in the slightest. It has nothing to do with religion.
Unless he really did mean that his religion commands him not to lie, in which case I stand duly corrected.
"It has nothing to do with religion."
That's like saying jihad has nothing to do with religion. We are not fighting an ideology.
His follow up though needs to be to make the rubble bounce. He should find a Christian lawyer and sue the DWP if there is a case for wrongful termination, workplace discrimination, etc.
Bellomy,
As a Christian, lying is indeed against his religion. The witness of the Scripture on the evils of dishonesty is very clear. Jesus said, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life" as well as "You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free" and "I come not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it." The Old Testament is equally clear on this subject. "Thou shalt bear false witness against thy neighbor" is one of the Ten Commandments. Proverbs has many verses about the virtues of honesty and the vice of deceit. "Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord, But those who deal truthfully are His delight," is just one of them.
But saying "Nope I won't call a woman a man or vice versa" has nothing to do with your Christianity. It just doesn't. I'm not saying anything else but that. What does jihad have to do with it?
A Reader,
Right, I agree. If that's what he meant I have no objection.
Brian
Thomas Darlympe wrote an article at newenhlishreview.org.
His conclusion:if you make people lie and the more brazen the more complicit they become. Thus unable to resist.
xavier
This is the quote I always remember from Dalrymple, expressing the same idea.
"Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to."
From Jamie Glazov's interview of Theodore Dalrymple on his book "Our Culture, What's Left Of It"
City dwellers would only have to eat bugs for protein if regulations outlawed self sufficient balcony aquaponics or rabbit farms.
So there must be another facet to the push outside of nutritional pressures. Humiliation certainly fits.
These are the same people who prophesied that the world was doomed unless we rolled industry back to the stone age. How anyone them seriously about eating bugs to save the world is mind boggling.
This is another article that you have written Brian that will need to be reposted now and then. Reminds me of a Dalrymple article where he mentioned how Soviet propaganda works primary by demoralization through blatant lies that are forced on everyone to prattle. Father of Lies indeed. If he can get you to say one, what’s the harm in saying two? Three? And on it goes.
I"ll keep that in mind.
Duradel and Brian:
Here's the money quote from the 2005 interview with frontpagemag.com
Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
xavier
"Science denier" is a really clumsy way of saying "heretic."
Why should those who know the Truth and worship the Risen Lord care about being called 'science deniers' by those who worship the works of mortal hands? Science, as a false god, is as dead as Superman, or Iron Man, or Professor X, or Zeus, or Wotan. It is as dead and as deadly as the fun-house-mirror goddess of the Wiccans, the eleventy-billion idols of South Asia, and that rock in the desert the Mahometans pray toward.
William M. Briggs calls science worship scidolatry. Has a nice ring to it.
Indeed. Appropriate responses to their pagan incantations ("racist!" "misogynist!") include laughter and dismissal.
That these clowns have any power at all says more about the sad state of the so-called right than anything.
"Appropriate responses to their pagan incantations ('racist!' 'misogynist!') include laughter and dismissal."
Also, "witch" and "pedophile".
And stoning
Being more anti-racist than the Left, if we're using any dictionary definition for the term "racism", is both desirable and extremely easy. But certainly it won't make leftists like you any better.
This is the best description I've ever heard of how the Left looks like it's marching in lockstep though no human being is shouting orders. School of fish. I'm absolutely using that analogy.
At this point, the good opinion of the Left isn't worth having. On the contrary, if the Left likes you, that's a cause for real concern and possibly a frank examination of conscience.
It is a terrible thing to say, but they are our enemies. For the longest time, I thought "Love Thine Enemy" meant not having any, or not thinking of anyone as the enemy. I've grown up since then and come to understand that one may recognize enmity without reciprocating it. A one-sided war counts as a war once the side that is fighting inflicts casualities, even if the other side hasn't noticed or is actively pretending that there isn't a war.
Superversive is being cranky on my Kindle again. Stopping by to say thanks for a terrific post.
Spot on.
Give the glory to God.
You will enjoy this article by Nassim Taleb. It's kinda related: https://medium.com/incerto/pedophrasty-bigoteering-and-other-modern-scams-c84bd70a29e8