Amerika

If you believe Darwin, the human brain developed by recording successful responses to previous crises through genetic survival. If you do not, you might believe that over the past centuries we have lost memory of anything unfamiliar to our current historical era. In both cases, the human brain is out of its depth in the status quo.

Perhaps we evolved in small tribal bands, wandering across wide ranges of terrain, basically interested in staying apart from others except for yearly breeding rituals. On top of that, living in cities and towns may have filtered out those who did not see the world through a relatively similar lens.

This lens has us believe in good and bad guys, where the good guys are motivated by being nice and the bad guys want to do evil. This is entirely fiction, of course, because history shows us competition in which one side is later back-written into being the evil and the other is airbrushed into being good.

In our quest for good and evil, we tend to believe that the good guys and the bad guys should never be working hand-in-hand, when in actuality, those fighting for the same thing often form alliances and divide the cake rather than struggling over it.

Consider the case of the feminist who worked for the CIA:

What is often missed, or mischaracterized, however, is the work she did as a CIA agent: Steinem was a spook.

CIA agents are tight-lipped, but Steinem spoke openly about her relationship to “The Agency” in the 1950s and ’60s after a magazine revealed her employment by a CIA front organization, the Independent Research Service.

While popularly pilloried because of her paymaster, Steinem defended the CIA relationship, saying: “In my experience The Agency was completely different from its image; it was liberal, nonviolent and honorable.”

Why would government be liberal? Ask instead: why would it not be, since liberalization of social norms makes a bigger role for government, and makes it easier for it to do its work undetected?

Feminists and government both agree that organic society must be abolished and replaced with a bureaucracy that enforces civil rights for all. In addition, the CIA can use this dogma to subvert any still-healthy society anywhere worldwide.

In short, both agree that the power of the individual human must come before any sense of natural order or organic process of life. The ego must be in control; starting in The Enlightenment,™ this has been the dominant human attitude.

More experienced hands might simply refer to it as hubris or denial of natural/logical/divine order through a desire to replace it with human individualism and the social world that rationalizes and justifies it.

For most people, the Garden of Eden mythos provides the best introduction to hubris:

Eve’s action to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge is similarly an act of hubris. In this case, the serpent (Satan in disguise) convinces Eve that she deserves to have the same knowledge as God, the she deserves to eat the forbidden fruit. Eating the fruit is an act of defiance against the dictates of God—it is an act of hubris—and Adam and Eve are, as a result, cast out of the Garden of Eden.

Since the Bible was mostly borrowed from the Greeks, with a heavy Buddhist influence on the New Testament, it is not entirely surprising that it preaches selflessness, Zen realism, and fear of herd social opinion a.k.a. democracy.

The Garden of Eden shows us the world in a small symbolic walled garden. The omnipotent and omniscient deity tells the new humans that they can do anything but one thing, and naturally they want to do that one thing.

In comes the pharisaic and sophistic serpent who recognizes the weakness of these people and offers them an excuse. They are not simply egotists in search of power, rationalizing this to each other through social impulses, but learners exploring for the sake of science, so they need the wisdom of God from the forbidden tree.

Did this serpent, sometimes thought to be Satan, mislead them? Like all good con men, he simply nudged them into deceiving themselves by offering potential ideas of what might be true. These turned out not to be true, but he made no promises.

In the same way, feminism offers egotism through validation of individual desire without having to point to a positive effect it achieves in reality (a process known as realism). The CIA goes along for the ride because it, too, walks with the Serpent.

Tags: CIA, feminism, hubris