Amerika

For all of our “enlightenment,” scientific learning and vast statistical knowledge, we also suffer intense paranoia in this modern time. Paranoia occurs when you fear a threat but don’t know where it will come from.

Our news media, politicians and even friends in conversation treat all misfortunes as if they sprouted out of the ground. “Crime rises in the inner city,” they say, missing a fundamental part of the equation: why.

All issues are this way, with one crucial exception. If we can blame someone who is in a position of authority, our paranoia goes away. I call this The Revolutionary Narrative because we have a story of our society’s founding like any other society. Since all of our modern industrialized first world nations survived revolutions, we have re-written history to explain those revolutions as good things.

For example, here (roughly) is the American Revolutionary Narrative: We evolved from monkeys who lived painful, dirty, degrading and short lives. Early human life was almost as bad, and whoever had the weapons ruled over the rest of us. When we found Science and started having Revolutions so that individuals like you and me were seen as equal, we overthrew the corrupt kings and fought off the evil fascists. Now we live in a society of increasing enlightenment, peace, justice and good intentions.

But if we don’t have someone in a position of power — a corporation, king/autocrat/fascist, organized religion, or large corporation — to blame, who do we blame? We don’t know, so we “socialize” blame and we each take on the guilt without thinking twice about it. Our oceans are polluted? We, humanity as a whole, are bad. Each of us. Feel the guilt or you’re a jerk.

Our modern paranoia is that we are constantly looking for someone to blame yet, because our dysfunction is within, our problems march onward with increasing strength. No wonder we’re paranoid: we’re slicing at heads of a Hydra, but we’re even slicing the wrong Hydra. That our obsessive quest for someone to blame might be the largest part of our own problem has not occurred to us, so we swing wildly in the darkness and when we connect with something — anything — we declare victory and go home.

Do you remember The War to End All Wars? That was World War I, back in 1914-1918. How about the French Revolution, where the aristocrats were killed so that maniacs like Napoleon could trash most of Europe (including France) in a short-sighted ideological quest? Or how progressives in the USA swore that everything would be great when we replaced George Bush with Barack Obama. Or the same fawning when Clinton was elected, the EU was formed, Hitler was beaten, the Wall fell, etc. The pattern repeats: we construct an enemy out of our projections, destroy that enemy, and then wonder why our problems continue. It’s amost like they are within us. But that’s not a satisfying answer, so it’s on to find a new enemy.

The Revolutionary Narrative strengthens itself when it is wrong. If we depose a dictator and yet our great progressive society still has problems, we are supposed to find another dictator to depose. If corruption is rife in our society, we must find a corporation to blame; if not the corporations, maybe organized religion, since we don’t have kings anymore. If we can’t find one, suggest one might exist and we just haven’t found it yet. In the same way we find gender-oppressors in every toy, racists in every standardized test, and Hitlers in every third-world strongman.

We don’t stop to think that we might have it backward: that third world strongmen exist because their countries are unstable and require a strong autocrat to rule them, that there might be pre-existing differences between people (a/k/a “we are not all equal in ability, only equal in that our votes count the same”) which explain some different results, or that boys might like to play with fire trucks while girls prefer female dolls. Maybe these are right, or maybe they’re wrong — that’s not important in this moment. What is important is this: we have prohibited our minds from even considering any possibility outside The Revolutionary Narrative.

Yet because The Revolutionary Narrative “sounds good” to most of us — We The People rise up and depose the bad guys, set up an empire where everyone (be sure to widen your eyes when you say that word; most people do) feels important and no one is excluded for things they can’t control — we can’t quit our addiction to it. So we keep pounding square pegs into round holes, and when that fails, we get paranoid and then, the only solution is more Revolutionary Narrative. Straight into the main vein.

If we overcame our paranoia, we’d see that we have it backwards. Our problem is not oppressors; oppressors appear because of our problem, which is the laziness, incompetence, dishonesty, evasiveness and deceptiveness of most people on earth. In fact, as my retired father said recently, “Now that I’m retired, I can see that 90% of the people on earth do nothing but create messes for the rest, and we just keep cleaning it up.” (This is from a man who is a life-long social liberal with conservative tendencies in economics only.)

How are We The People screwing up?

“Our problem basically is that we have a very distorted economy, in the sense that there has been a significant recovery in our limited area of the economy amongst high-income individuals…

“Large banks, who are doing much better and large corporations, whom you point out and everyone is pointing out, are in excellent shape. The rest of the economy, small business, small banks, and a very significant amount of the labour force, which is in tragic unemployment, long-term unemployment – that is pulling the economy apart. The average of those two is what we are looking at – that they are fundamentally two separate types of economies.”

Mr Greenspan is right, of course, and not just about the US. Over the past three decades, the world economy has been reshaped by two mega-trends.

One is a surge in the size and connectedness of international markets.

…

This winner-take-all phenomenon has been particularly stark in the US, where, between 2002 and 2007, 65% of all income growth went to the top 1% of the population.

…

Many of today’s plutocrats are the beneficiaries of globalisation. And even those who made their money at home have figured out that to make more they need to embrace the global economy.

As a result, they are becoming a trans-global community of peers who have more in common with one another than with their countrymen back home. – BBC

We The People were sure that Globalization was liberation. Our national borders limited us; we were not free. Surely erasing these borders (tools of oppressors and fascists) would save us. Even more, we were limited by the old way. We wanted more connectivity, more of an idea-based economy, more feelings and more entertainment! And to spread the wealth around. And what happened?

“The end of history” caused Chinese communists and Indian socialists to join the winning side and to open their economies to First World capital. For the first time, American corporations had access to massive supplies of unemployed low-wage labor. The huge excess supply of labor in India and China meant that workers could be hired at wages far below their productivity, and the difference would flow in profits to executives, shareholders, and Wall Street.

The offshoring of American manufacturing separated Americans’ incomes from the production of the goods and services that they consumed. The advent of the high speed Internet made it possible to offshore professional service jobs, such as software engineering, which drove down the returns to a college education and the employment prospects of graduates. In an offshored economy, the profits of corporations are not a measure of the economic welfare of the population.

As American incomes stagnated—except for the rich, there has been no real increase in 20 years—the economy was kept going by the growth of consumer debt to take the place of the missing growth in take-home pay. – American Conservative

When the Baby Boomers finally got control in the 1990s, their agenda was one of multiculturalism: improve race relations at home through an entitlement agenda, and pacify ourselves abroad through a policy of appeasement and globalization. We would spread our democracy/consumerism/liberalism hybrid to the rest of the world, make them like us, and then a new Utopia would reign.

Instead, we committed suicide by gutting our economy, destroying any sense of shared values, culture or even common purpose to our citizens, and finally polarizing the right and left so much that now compromise or even working together is impossible. Globalization in turn produced an elite of super-rich, most of whom profit from taking third-world raw materials and making them into first-world luxury products or entertainment, and they now rule us, but with less of an informed and steady hand than the older money.

We lose on every front. But who to blame? No fascist did this to us, unless you mean the fascism of our individual desires. No oppressor made us what we are; we did it to ourselves. We oppressed ourselves? That’s too heavy, man. Blame the corporations. But they merely make the products we want and when we can’t stop ourselves from buying them in droves, make a tidy profit. If tomorrow it was proved that iPads and BMWs cause world destruction, could humanity stop itself from buying them? Of course not.

Thousands of people across the country took to the streets to protest against student fee increases, public-sector job cuts and the proposed sell-off of the Royal Mail.

The TUC, UCU and NUS mobilised workers and students in Manchester, while various student groups took the fight against cuts to the capital.

Speakers in Manchester highlighted Britain’s one million under-25s who are unemployed and called for mass mobilisations for the TUC’s national demonstration in London on March 26.

Over 6,000 people rallied in Manchester, where Unison Young Members Forum chairman Graham Smith told the crowd: “The last time we saw this many young people out of work was in 1992 – under the Tories again. – Morning Star

And yet, the calls for more entitlements increase. Where does the money come from? They don’t know — print some, or steal some, or have a bake sale, who cares. All they know is that their college degrees are more expensive, and even though they lack the intellectual ability or inclination to benefit from college, they want that high-paying easy job where they sit in a heated office and preside over paperwork. Fixing things with your hands? Taking risk or initiative? Screw that. Hook me up on the system’s fat IV of lazy cash. No one is thinking about the consequences of many if not most of us doing that, or how we’ll bleed ourselves dry. They think the money will keep its value no matter what because they have the attention span of gnats.

So we bleed ourselves out, and in the meantime, our politicians rig up a dog and pony show based on The Revolutionary Narrative. There must be a bad guy or we’ll see that we are the bad guy. So we invent them, and in doing so, create an environment where anyone who has more than the rest of us is a target to be destroyed:

• Multiculturalism continues to divide us by forcing different cultures together, ignoring the fact that if they were compatible they would not be considered different cultures.
• The entitlements continue to avoid race riots yet we’re making people surly because our gift-giving puts us in the position of Master yet again, just now it’s Master Giver. And we bleed money here faster than any other segment of our government budgets.
• We support Revolutions but ignore the consequences of “empowering” a population that was so crazed, violent, kleptomaniac and out of control that it required a local strongman in the first place.
• A violent mob grows that threatens violence yet we ignore them because they have the “right” opinions, which is to say they endorse The Revolutionary Narrative, even while insisting they’re not tools of the system.

We create the atmosphere of a lynch mob, urging the crowd on to destroy the privileged or those in power. Yet as mentioned above this doesn’t solve our problems, but requires more of the same, which in turn eats away our social stability and replaces it with an environment of thinly-disguised hatred:

A number of years ago, I was the victim of a brutal street crime. Although I was left with a broken nose and two black eyes, I learned soon thereafter that I wasn’t a “good victim.”

A progressive friend, Fran, clued me in. When I told her what happened, she said, “What you went through wasn’t half as bad as what he has suffered.” Fran was referring to the fact that I am white and the assailant was black. In other words, my suffering didn’t matter.

Fran’s reaction is not at all unique in these parts; here, there are good and bad victims. For instance, a couple of years ago, a middle school teacher was stoned and beaten in her classroom by a vicious mob of students. And yet, because of the racial makeup of the victim and the assailants, the media had little to say, except to imply that the teacher may have been a racist.

When I mentioned my horror about this heinous crime to yet another leftist friend, she responded in the prescribed, politically correct way. Without showing an ounce of compassion toward the battered teacher, my friend blamed “white privilege.”

With Obama and the hard left in charge, we see nationwide what I’ve witnessed up close and personal here in Berkeley. Thus, when a young white couple were beaten unconscious after leaving a GOP fundraiser, the mainstream media did not find their plight worthy of reportage. Similarly, when a conservative had his finger bitten off, or when a frail, diabetic conservative was beaten, the silence was deafening. Sarah Palin’s church being torched with children in it didn’t deserve even a blip on the evening news.

When thirteen U.S. soldiers at Fort Hood, including a pregnant woman, were mowed down (and thirty more wounded) in cold blood, President Obama didn’t interrupt a Native American shout-out to renounce the horror. When Obama finally did speak, he urged us not to jump to conclusions. Since then, next to nothing has been said about the slaughter. The fact that the murderer was a Muslim automatically disqualifies the soldiers from being “good victims.” – American Thinker

I disagree with the writer above on one crucial point: the media does not pander to the lynch mob because they are leftists. The media are leftists in order to pander to the lynch mob. The media is selling newspapers, which works best if they whip us all into a feeding frenzy and then point us to a target and say: “See that? That there is the bad guy. All of the horrible animal instincts you’ve been suppressing — rape, subjugation, murder, mutilation, sodomy and immolation — you can unleash those against this socially-acceptable scapegoat and vent all that anger from within you. Use these guys as a punching bag.”

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights came out in December with a draft of its interim report on the New Black Panthers Party scandal. Earlier today a final report was posted on the commission’s website, and with it, a flurry of rebuttals and separate statements from a number of the commissioners. The import of these statements should not be minimized.

The statements indicate several points: 1) the New Black Panther Party case brought by career Justice Department employees was meritorious on the law and the facts; 2) there is voluminous evidence of the Obama administration’s political interference in the prosecution of the New Black Panther Party case; 3) there is ample evidence that the Obama administration directed Justice Department employees not to bring cases against minority defendants who violated voting rights laws or to enforce a provision requiring that states and localities clean up their voting rolls to prevent fraud; 4) the Justice Department stonewalled efforts to investigate the case; and 5) vice chairman Abigail Thernstrom has, for reasons not entirely clear, ignored the evidence and tried to undermine the commission’s work. – Washington Post

Let me give you a hint, middle class America: the lynch mob is not going to attack the super-rich. Heck, no. Attack the powerful and you lose.

They’re going to attack you, middle class America, for having risen above prole status. When we’re all equal and we all go to the same jobs, we are “happy.” But if some rise above, if not even to the height of our moneyed overlords, those people need to be pulled down to the level of the rest. They must be equalized.

If you’re white, you’re privileged. If you’re middle class, you’re an oppressor. If you have employees, you’re a fascist. If you give orders, you’re a Hitler. If you aren’t working at the same level of everyone else, you’re a parasite — even if having a lot of people who are barely working, at interchangeable jobs that don’t accomplish much, is the biggest parasite and the elephant in the room.

They’re attacking you, middle class America. They will first attack you for being white, then for having money, then for having education, and finally, just for knowing things they do not. They will achieve equality by forced means, namely by destroying anything that rises above the lowest common denominator.

Don’t believe? Read some history on the Revolutions in Russia and France; read about the actions of Communists in Southeast Asia and Africa. Watch what’s about to happen in Egypt. When the lynch mob gets control, they destroy those who have more or have more abilities than the mob’s members do. They tear down those who rose above equal. History repeats itself and they’re going to do it again.

Tags: crowdism, democratization, globalization, revolution