Amerika

A leopard does not change its spots, the old guys down at the bar say, which is a variant on William Blake’s notion that “some are born to sweet delight, some are born to the endless night” or the idea of John Calvin that we are born predestined to be what we become.

In politics, each philosophy attracts people because it can do something for them. For some, it makes sense of a hostile world and reveals the hidden goodness within. For others, it justifies and validates their own dysfunction as the fault of someone else and gives them a few moments of feeling good in a life that feels on the whole bad.

We are entering dark Soviet times again, at least if the diversity and neurotic vote (mostly single people stuck forever in entry-level jobs) has its way, although they seem to be more prevalent on the internet than in real life. We have already seen the rise of disinformation as a token:

The term “Active Measures’ came into use in the USSR in the 1950s to describe overt and covert techniques for influencing events and behaviour in foreign countries. Disinformation – the intentional dissemination of false information – is just one of many elements that made up active measures operations.

In this case, the Left has flipped around the question of disinformation: they accuse anything that is not promoting their narrative of being disinformation, and use that as a pretext to ban it and harm those who promote it. This is political correctness applied to everyday life.

Political Correctness operates by definining what is “correct” and assuming that any deviation from this is incorrect and therefore, only promoted because of some nefarious agenda on the part of the speaker. This enabled the PC people to see deviation as moral failing and to condemn and destroy those speakers however possible.

The new method seems to be to categorize any dissent from the inertia toward Communism as foreign disinformation and therefore effectively to accuse the speaker of being a traitor. Since traitors work against the group, the PC people can summon a personal army to demonize, ostracize, and deplatform the speaker of heresies.

Steve Sailer refers to the “point and sputter” method of debate, where someone says something off-narrative and a whole bunch of neurotics stand out and express outrage but never make an argument. This is implicit kafkatrapping: if you deviate from the orthodoxy, asking for a reason why you are persecuted shows you are not part of the orthodoxy herd, therefore you are bad and must be destroyed.

Some of the most famous disinformation campaigns turned into urban legends and lore that live on today:

The KGB and Stasi relied on forged documents and inaccurate testimony from purported experts to suggest that HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, had originated not from infected animals in Africa but from biological warfare research carried out by U.S. military scientists at Fort Detrick in Maryland. Operation Denver proved remarkably effective, writes historian Douglas Selvage in an article featured in a recent issue of the Journal of Cold War Studies; indeed, even more effective than the KGB and Stasi had originally expected. Before long, immense numbers of people around the world (including in the United States) came to believe, falsely, that the U.S. government was responsible for AIDS.

Disinformation works because the average citizen lacks the IQ points and integrity to follow up with research. If it sounds good and makes him feel better about his situation, he believes it, and will not stop believing it until he dies. Voters are basically monkeys that rationalize.

The Leftist strategy attempts to make their disinformation into the Official Narrative, and then because that is based in egalitarianism, claim it is a universal good and therefore that anyone who opposes it desires bad for others and is selfish. This is how you take over a complacent, over-fed, and mentally lazy democracy.

In fact, we can style the history of democracy as a series of more daring raids on the public purse. Eventually they steal too much and end up in Communism. There is no drug like public money because there is so much of it, and it becomes the attractive nuisance that humans cannot resist.

Ironically, it was part of this takeover of the world by a democracy that was already tending toward socialism that prompted Russian (not Soviet) disinformation:

In the aftermath of the Soviet collapse in 1991, the Russian political leadership was busy reforming Russia and surviving the tumultuous changes of the young democracy in transition. Boris Yeltsin (the first president of Russia), who ousted Mikhail Gorbachev and oversaw the demise of the Soviet Union, was a pro-Western politician at his core. He understood the faults of the Soviet regime and that its ideology had become exhausted by years of disbelief of the Soviet population in the 1917 socialist revolution’s cause. On the one hand, there was nothing sacred in the Soviet past that could have been transferred into the new democratic society. On the other hand, the USA — the USSR’s fiercest enemy — turned into a close partner. Millions of Russians embraced the changes, as well as the new pro-Western agenda of the government. Even Yeltsin’s successor, Vladimir Putin, in the early years of his rule, was not an anti-Western hawk: he even spoke of the possibility of Russia joining NATO.

What we now understand as a turn of the tide, with amplified reinvestment in old Soviet strategy, took place in the mid-2000s — in a way, as a reaction to US advancement in post-Soviet countries. US President George Bush Jr’s first administration (2001–2005) called for the promotion of democracy around the world, including in former Soviet states, and this call had a profound effect on Putin’s office. It represented an existential threat to Putin’s rule, to which he publically responded in his famous 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference: he expressed the view that a unipolar world led by the USA was turning the planet into a dictatorship of one country, and that Russia should stand against it and take the risk of challenging the global US hegemony.

Both sides are preaching the same ideal of political correctness: they assert a universal, objective, and absolute morality of individualism/humanism and apply it to varying degrees with different methods. They do this because this allows them to style their enemies as cruel and elitist, which unifies the herd against them.

At its core, individualism is a means-over-ends philosophy, similar to pacifism and pluralism: “do whatever you want, just don’t hurt me personally.” This is considered intelligent by humans although history shows us that the stealing of public wealth never slows down, and societies destroy themselves with it.

Without a surplus of people created to work jobs, societies would never have this problem. No one needs individualism except the person who cannot succeed on the basis of his contributions alone. Over time, societies accumulate resentful but obedient job-serfs who then take their revenge and destroy everything in hooting monkey jubilation.

To protecting the hooting troupe of monkeys that are the waste humans produced by jobs and the control mechanisms behind them, humans invent means-over-ends thinking and use it to declare certain methods immoral. This allows them to paralyze the opposition through the pretense of morality.

This shows us a variation on the classic methods of Control: the use of limits on methods to change the thinking of the subject population, and then to manipulate them in order to both reinforce control and to make the controllers feel more powerful. It is the inner narcissism of humanity coming out as meddling and bullying.

Control is enforced by peer pressure. When the controller declares something bad, anyone who says “well, maybe we should think about this” is viewed as persona non grata and the group takes its revenge upon them. This systematically creates uniform belief, but also creates an echo chamber that becomes more unrealistic with each passing year.

We are in the stage of that suicidal echo chamber now of endorsing censorship of off-narrative data (“disinformation”) as a social good:

Stelter kicked off the discussion by framing “disinformation” as the central conundrum of our times—all other problems being downstream of this issue. Sulzberger wholeheartedly embraced this view.

“I think it maps, basically, to every other major challenge that we are grappling with as a society, and particularly the most existential among them,” he said, lumping in disinformation—false information, intended to mislead people—with “conspiracy, propaganda, and clickbait.” Disinformation is why society seems so fractured, why trust in elite institutions is declining, and why democracy itself appears to be retreating, they implied.

But the very experts who would claim for themselves the power to monitor social media and police wrongthink have an astonishingly bad track record of distinguishing falsehood from truth. Facebook’s third-party fact-checking partners, for example, routinely flag true statements for moderation.

They are at war with free speech because free speech does not permit them to make taboo any idea that is not part of the Leftist narrative. That tells us that at this point, for their empire based on their disinformation to thrive, they require censorship to prevent people from noticing how everything has gone terribly since they took power.

Even more broadly, the fact that we are reprising Jacobin/Soviet methods shows us that we are headed to failure just like those revolutions. We have become so unrealistic that logical thinking and realistic perception go unrecognized and are in fact demonized for interrupting the great prole party.

This is the path that society goes down once it requires workers instead of independent farmers, hunters, producers, artisans, and warriors. It escapes reality, asserts the human ego, and then promptly self-destructs in an orgy of revenge and theft.

Tags: crowdism, democracy, disinformation