believe in something, even if it wrecks everything

after all, it's for their own good

ever the insightful observer, thomas sowell is right on point here. i’d like to expand upon this a bit further:

if you are 100% unassailably sure about the rightness of your position and the impossibility of any other view, when your message falls flat the only things you can possibly blame are the delivery or the listener.

this is the road to propogandistan.

you will never, ever stop and think: “am i wrong?”

instead, you’ll think “the benighted masses are incapable of understanding my messaging. how do i enlighten them so that they too may be like me?”

or you say: “these people are too stupid or evil to make their own choices. i must make their choices for them.”

it’s on vivid display everywhere. it’s all a focus on messaging, on spin, on vilification. redefine the definition of everything and then when they call you out, redefine the definition of redefining definitions and call them luddites and wreckers and seek to censor.

it can get pretty dizzying.

and it’s clearly the new mode for the out of touch elitist.

you never blame the message or the messenger:

you shoot the messaging.

and if that doesn’t work, start shooting the listeners.

it’s classic dogmatism. if you don’t agree with me, obviously, you did not understand. i need to explain it better or lie to you until you see the light. and if you will not or cannot, i will make you.

what makes this process so blatant in times like these when the reality is so doggedly refusing to conform to prediction and prescription is that the cognitive dissonance kicks in. you’ve wrapped your identity, your career, and your grand plans up in your claims and if you believe them strongly enough you will reject evidence that would threaten your worldview and the rejection can get pretty intense. it can rise to the point of outright hallucination. you NEED this belief to remain whole.

this is why doomsday cults become more, not less devout when the world fails to end on tuesday. it’s also why the messaging devolves into what reads externally as outright fabulism. it’s the only brew potent enough to keep those determined to believe from sobering up.

it’s always tempting to call these people liars and ascribe grand plans to them, but many are not. most are a sort of un-selfaware useful idiot caught in a cognitive trap. their brains are fizzling and bending perception to avoid having to change their deeply ingrained prejudices. this crazy messaging you see and say “who would possibly fall for that?” is aimed at them. because they do. they believe. they will grab anything no matter how absurd and counterfactual to preserve their cherished mantras.

“it’s not a recession.”

“vaccines were never supposed to stop the spread.”

“that wasn’t real socialism.”

this state of existence is somewhat desperate. it would be pitiable were it not so pernicious.

but what of those who DO know they are lying? (and many do)

what of those actively running the mendacious marxist playbooks like those of saul alinsky? you may not know the name, but he’s been incredibly influential and literally wrote the book for modern manipulative collectivism based on destruction and deception.

saul was the inspiration for barack obama to become a “community organizer.”

hillary clinton wrote her thesis on him.

klaus schwab and his "great reset” and “fourth industrial revolution” borrow heavily from alinsky. (particularly “rules for radicals” and “13 tactics for realistic radicals”)

make no mistake, his ideas have permeated, shaped, and twisted entire generations of global politics at every level.

he is the godfather of the ideology of “break society so that the people will beg us to remake it in our own image.”

and these ideas ARE being implemented with deliberation and forethought.

the useful idiots may be the cannon fodder, but the generals know damn well what they are doing.

and their interests are not your interests.

we can argue about how effective they are and how much can be well planned and orchestrated (and i will certainly come down on the side of “these people are not geniuses”) but i would also warn against dismissing their capability. the incredible power of long term, focused pressure and opportunism pushing relentlessly and inexorably in one direction is not to be under-estimated, especially once it is institutionalized.

this expanding will to power takes control of institutions lock, stock, and show-trial.

it co-opts media, who love this.

it captures investigative and justice agencies.

it entangles everything from regulation to health to environment to education.

that’s what it is designed to do.

it hooks everyone and everything on government gold giving and from that extracts fealty and activism.

the fostering of dependency is a feature, not a bug.

worse, it’s the key feature.

hell, it’s the product.

people wonder what sort of person could do this. are they monsters? psychopaths? lunatics?

i fear the reality is actually even more chilling: they are sure that they are moral and this stance is actually logically and (possibly) ethically consistent if you accept a few pieces of bedrock belief each of which are not actually that implausible unless you see where the shape of the whole leads.

“we must lead them to save them” is an incredibly seductive trap for the “best and brightest” because if one accedes to a couple simple precepts, it presents as the only moral course while also elevating those “of vision” to lofty dictatorial perches.

being given power while also being given justification for taking and wielding it is a helluva drug.

and so these people become 100% sure they are the good guys and the more they are opposed, the more this surety grows and the more intense their perception of the need for “people like them” becomes.

buckle up. you’re not going to like this.

let’s perform a thought experiment. take these as the basis for a logical and moral structure:

1. humans are sheep, not really self-governing, and always wind up following some sort of strong leader. to pretend otherwise is utopian and doomed to fail. leaders always rise and humans always follow.

2. the world is full of evil people and demagogues who will seek to twist this fact to advantage, subjugate the people, and sacrifice their interests to themselves and to their cronies.

3. it is the duty of the intelligent and capable to oppose this and to serve the common good.

4. the good of the many outweighs the good of the few.

what’s the only conclusion one can arrive at from this?

yup.

“so if we do not take over and provide benign leadership to them, they will wind up gulled in by evil aims and subjugated by bad people. so we have to do it. it’s the greater good (or at least the lesser of evils). it’s the only moral choice. ”

in the end, it comes down to the trolley problem.

you’re the brave switch holder that can divert the trolley and kill one to save five.

many would argue that this is the only ethical choice.

but it’s not.

i would argue that it’s stunningly amoral and the road to ruin. let’s explore:

“common good” may be defined in many ways and rights advocates might claim that even if pulling the lever saves 5 at the cost of killing one, that one has a right not to be killed and thus your proactive action to aim the trolley at him is murder. indeed, my view is that the fact that harming you might help someone else more does not give me a right to do it or make it ethical (and that utilitarianism is a bankrupt, subjective ideology that professes quantitative comparisons that are impossible.)

but A LOT of people knee-jerk to “you have to kill one to save five” because the math seems obvious. i suspect it is the more popular and prevalent view. and this has great effect in terms of what is ethically permissible for government.

if you accept the collectivist view that the greater good trumps the individual, then this whole system flows the other way. you MUST pull the lever.

in fact, you must, if need be, harm others and lie and cheat and elbow to be sure that you are the one holding the lever because, if you are not, the “wrong” people might be and the wrong choice made.

it actually becomes permissible to murder the current lever holder and take their place if you believe they will not switch the trolley’s course. it’s still 2 killed to save 5 (and you can call one of them a bad guy).

see how this leads to “i’m doing bad things for good reasons and that makes it moral”?

this is the great peril of “ends justify the means” thinking. it can legitimize any act, no matter how horrible, so long as the perceived stakes are high enough.

this is precisely why these “leaders” gravitate to doomsday ideologies like “millions will die from covid unless we grasp dictatorial control” and “we must take over the global economy and make everyone give up their cars and eat bugs or we all die in fiery cataclysm or watery grave in 10 years”?

they need these high stakes to justify such oppressive action. to act the utter oppressor, you must be saving humanity from itself and from vast, imminent harm. whether the members of the society themselves want to do this or not is literally of no moment. consent does not factor into “ends justify means.” only outcomes and crises averted.

it’s how they wake up every morning and really, truly believe that anyone who disagrees with them is the enemy and that they are on the side of goodness and light.

it also means they cannot hear you. you cannot reason with them or talk them down. these are zealots convinced they serve the collective. talk of “rights” or attempts to contradict “the science” go nowhere. you just get branded as one of the benighted to be silenced, censored, or trodden over on the road to a glorious future.

the history of such endeavors similarly cuts no ice. “we are the smarter guys and this is our time.”

their message will not change, only the manner in which they present it will.

and when that fails, they will come for you.

these are people so bent around their ideals they they can literally tell themselves that taking over the world, destroying the societal institutions of freedom, creating poverty and abject dependence upon the state, and rendering educational institutions indoctrination factories is a moral act.

read that last paragraph again. let it sink in.

this is their actual, self-selected polestar.

they really truly believe that they are the heroes and those seeking liberty the selfish villains. they believe that their way forward is the only way forward or we all die. it’s the sort of system of rationalization that is utterly seductive to the intersection of the venn diagram of intelligence and narcissism.

they aren’t stupid. just sure.

they aren’t monsters (at least in their own minds) they simply believe that they know the common good and that it is their duty to serve it, no matter what the commoners want.

i suspect many of you initially blanched at my framing of the trolley problem and the fact that i would not pull the lever.

see now why i feel that the ascription of morality to a choice to harm one to help others is such a dangerous and slippery slope?

once you grant the “harm one to benefit two” notion you’ve negated the notion of a rights based republic.

not only does it remove the word “no” from the conversation and break every form of emergent structure built upon the pareto optimization function of free choice, but it also encourages the adoption of lies and gross misrepresentation.

in the real world, you never really know what’s on the trolley tracks. the risk and the cost are perception. and perception is often inaccurate. perception is often manipulated. and this is done with malice aforethought.

as soon as you say “it’s OK to inflict harm if it creates more good,” literally everyone starts fighting about what’s on what track and grabbing for levers. that’s just human nature and that fight elevates the histrionic who excel at crisis messaging. they need you to feel the stakes are always high and the costs low if you let them pull the lever. you wind up with government by poorly calibrated liars and it gets mistaken for morality.

we’re coming into the very late stages of this cycle. the command and control common gooders of the church of alinsky are deep into their playbook and this is the time of choice.

it is blindingly obvious that all is not going well. the corruption, the rot, and the destruction are getting unmissable. prices are spiraling, economies are floundering, energy is unreliable and schools unable to teach basic skills. debt is exploding and the poor are bearing the brunt. even militaries are “going woke” and being ideologically purged.

and as the world falls apart, the pawns DBA useful idiots are transmuting this into perceptive shifts that everything is great and the kings and queens agree, but for quite different reasons. this is according to plan. the plan. the grand plan to burn the village that they may save it, to wreck the world that it might be built back better.

they see this ruin as the road. they really do think that this is the time to raise taxes, subsidize energy sources that do not work, prevent development of those that do, and ram ESG down everyone’s throat. the want the military fighting about pronouns and not our enemies. (most terrifying, they likely want the armed forces to change their views about who the enemy is. it would not be the first time this ploy was tried…)

these are not coincidences, they are plans being pursued opportunistically in service of long term alinsky ends.

i doubt that poor brandon has enough fries left in his happy meal to be architecting this, but look at who surrounds him. most of them do and they hail right from the community organizing saul system from the obamas, the clintons, and the neocon nation builders.

BO was too image conscious and constrained to go smash and grab, but with a semi-sentient puppet in place to take the heat, this gang is off to the races and they fear their time is running out.

and the net result is the same.

this system is feeding on itself.

but it’s also defeating itself. each new rarefication of messaging to justify the damage becomes ever more absurd and out of step. it’s past tone deaf and well into menacing. and they really don’t know it.

but society does.

you can see it in all the numbers. you can see if in the massive demographic shifts in policy and political preference. latin immigration may well save the US because boy have they had it with brandon.

but an election will not break this cycle or this megatrend. it will not kill this ideology, just render it dormant. its adherents will crawl into the mud like african frogs when lakes dry up and wait for the rains to come again.

if we really want the american dream and the american republic back, we need to dig them out. this will be the work of years. it must be active work by serious people, not “pressing pause for 4 years.”

the institutions that have been conquered cannot be fixed. they must be excised. it’s time to cut out the cancer. this house is a tear down.

from the EPA to the dept of ed to DHS to big swathes of the justice department, we need to wind down whole organizations and send everyone packing. we just do not need it anymore. what useful role do the NIH or CDC play that could not be done 100X better by private or open source programs? any? they have prevented and wrecked whole areas of policy and fields of science with their graft and willful malfeasance.

let’s wind them down and build open, accountable, private systems instead. let’s break all the monopolies and allow competitive systems to emerge in their place. it’s time to get all this dead wood out of the way and these strangle-vines off the neck of america.

send them all home. sell their office space to condo developers. just end it.

it cannot be fixed and even if it could, could not be trusted to remain so.

this much governmental power is the most attractive of nuisances and will always be captured and turned against we the people by elitists who are sure they are doing what’s best for us.

the cure for those who would burn our villages to save them is to burn their power base to save ourselves.

we must break the trolley lever that none in the future may be tempted to fight to control it.

the opportunity is now because the issues have been rendered so acute.

this is not one you want to miss.

the society you save may be your own.