Amerika

The problem with humans is that because we have big brains, we can decide to make a reality in our heads that is more real than what’s going on outside.

(If you’ve ever read Jane Austen’s Emma, you can see how when we feel miserable for ourselves, projection is almost essential. You might also find Melville’s Moby-Dick to be interesting, viewed in this light.)

When we project our fears onto the world, we invert them. So death becomes eternal life, and fear of murder becomes the notion that we can make murder illegal, and that somehow makes it go away.

The origin of this idea in the West is Judeo-Christian thought, but sadly, that has now been superseded by its secular component, liberalism. In Judeo-Christian thought, everyone is equal and the meek inherit the earth. It views the natural order, red in tooth and claw, as evil and suggests that we not only project a world, but force it upon nature so that we eliminate the “evil” of predation, violence, etc.

In other words, we come up with a morally perfect order and use it as a justification to destroy all other views of the world. It is intolerance — based in tolerance. It is injustice — based in justice. It is vengeance against nature for being unfair, but in turn, it is unfair to anyone who disagrees.

This crazy world-projection of ours has started endless wars, and kept us always in a state of suspension: we’re always fighting evil. But what are we fighting for? No one is sure, but we’re sure it’s not evil. Yet far too many times it has turned out that our “good” has become “evil,” in part because it’s so easy to act good, fool others, have them destroy our “evil” enemies, and then take over.

But we still exist in this projection, this idea that we must impose a moral order of equality over every scrap of the earth, or we won’t go to heaven — or even the secular version of that, which is that we’ll be “bad people” without friends, dying virgins, alone without even video games:

Party leader Jimmie Ã…kesson and the rest of the Sweden Democrat members of parliament stormed out of the church on Tuesday afternoon after bishop Eva Brunne began to speak about racism and xenophobia.

“The racism that says that you don’t have as much worth as I do; that you shouldn’t have the same rights as me; aren’t worthy of living in freedom, and that is the only reason — that we happen to born in different parts of our world — that is not worthy of a democracy like ours to differentiate between people,” said the bishop. – The Local

God help us if one square inch of this earth isn’t home to EVERY culture, sexual orientation, ideology and social class.

If it isn’t, we’re evil.

Never mind that in Sweden, maybe, they want to have Swedes. Not some random person you stuck a helmet with horns on, but real ethnic Swedes. And since Swedes are a minority, it makes sense to protect them and keep them apart so we don’t lose them to time.

But that’s not how the moralists see it. They are terrified that somewhere, someone is being immoral and so they’re going to intervene.

They’re like our church elders from years past who would tear down the lover’s lanes to make sure that no one was having sex. Sex is evil; racial purity is evil. It’s the exact same thinking, and the same “tolerance” disguised as intolerance.

No one calls out these “tolerant” people and says, hey, why are you racist against Swedes? They’ll defend themselves in the time-honored method of resentful people, which is to say that Swedes are privileged, rich even — they don’t need defense.

It’s a passive way of saying “Get the torches, and let’s burn these richies/aristocrats/white people down!” Same impulse. Same projection!

It’s great to see the church, which had fallen off the radar as the vanguard of such a thing, becoming so obvious in its manipulation. It is like most ideologues blind to the fact that once it has insisted on the destruction of every unified social order, it will be the first to fall — but people who are projecting don’t like to hear about reality. They don’t like to know that in years past, every possible combination of human government has already been tried, and that this has been so for centuries. Every possible social order has as well. We know what works and what doesn’t; many of our equal citizens, however, prefer to ignore reality and think about morality instead.

So what happens when we one-sidedly define “good” and war against “evil”?

Endless internal friction:

Bobby Spurlock, who identified himself as imperial wizard knighthawk and grand dragon of South Carolina and North Carolina, said the KKK has met with school officials and plans to protest the school’s treatment of 24-year-old Jennifer Keeton on Oct. 23 from 1 to 4 p.m. Klan members will be in full dress across from the school’s main Walton Way entrance in the median at Fleming Avenue.

Spurlock said the KKK believes Keeton’s rights were violated when the school required her to participate in a remediation program after she objected to counseling homosexuals.

“It’s your constitutional right, so how could you tell someone you have to do something completely different?” Spurlock said. “We’re not out to harm her. We’re trying to protest the constitutional rights that they are trying to take away from her.” – The Augusta Chronicle

Tolerance includes every right but the right to disagree with approval of everything and everyone.

What if someone comes to the conclusion, using their own brain, that homosexuality is a Bad Thing?

Well, we’ve already defined Bad as being anything that opposes acceptance of everything, including homosexuality.

Is it possible to have two “bad” things, one which is too much acceptance and one of which that is too little?

That’s way beyond the average voter, even before CNN and Fox News got to them.

The end result is that by creating one right way of doing things, and projecting it on the world, we have made it a single decision point — like a magic wand.

Everyone wants to possess that magic wand, and so corruption is rife:

According to a report issued Tuesday by the Center for American Progress, a liberal policy group in Washington, the [United States Chamber of Commerce] is getting “dues” payments of tens of thousands of dollars from foreign companies in countries such as Bahrain, India and Egypt, and then mingling the money with its fund to advocate for or against candidates in the midterm races. – NYT

The NYT has a liberal bent, so this article tries to make the spin that such corruption is right-wing. But then the left panics if you look into payments by the entertainment industry into Washington, and likes to hide the fact that it gets more corporate money than the right.

All of this would be impossible if our government were based not on morals, but on practical concerns. But we’re scared. Life is so much easier if you project a world and live in that, instead of trying each day to understand the reality around us, and adapt to it.