the dangers of propaganda to propogandists
stare too long into the big lie and the big lie stares back into you
we have all seen the big lie in action and the effects of its relentless repetition and of the ruthless suppression of any narrative but THE NARRATIVE.™
we have seen what it does to those at which it is aimed.
but what of the liars themselves, for if the endless hearing of a tale can so ingrain it into the perceived reality of the listener, what must its interminable narration do to the storyteller?
telling is more potent persuasion than hearing. performative repetition will flat out brain wipe you.
you depart from consensus reality and move to something entirely hallucinatory. it’s how you wind up sounding like melissa above and literally lose the plot to the point where you’re expecting plaudits and attagirls for telling parents that they should stop feeling possessive of their children and surrender them to the collective.
every time you say it, you believe a little more.
this is not a toxin you can handle without getting contaminated yourself; it’s intellectual polonium.
she is not even “saying the quiet part out loud.” she has lost the conception that this IS the quiet part. she is running headlong into a brick wall that she has mistaken for the overton window.
these people sound absurd because they have literally succumbed to self-hypnosis.
to tell a lie over and over, you must believe the lie or accept yourself as a villain and few have the strength to embrace overt villainy. so they conjure and contrive internal tales and dialogues that make them out to be the good guys.
they become transfixed by their own sales pitch until they need it to be true. it becomes the cornerstone of their identities and their philosophies. they would involuntarily cluck like chickens if they demanded it of themselves.
this is why you should always be DEEPLY wary of “people who are their ideas.”
people who have ideas can change their mind. people who are their ideas face a crisis of personal identity when their ideas are challenged and experience what feels like personal destruction when their ideas fail. so they fight like cornered animals to keep such ideas alive and they think they are the good guys when they do it even and especially after it has turned them into something altogether monstrous.
this “collectivism” and the totalitarian-fascist structures it uses to impose itself is not just “another way of looking at things.” it’s a form of mental illness rooted in a narcissistic spiral of self delusion. always has been. and it will always manifest this way.
it has led, from hitler to mao and stalin to the khmer rouge, to the greatest mass murders in the history of humanity and all were done “for the greater good.”
castro and chavez alike thought they were helping. and at the time, many believed them.
and it can happen again. it can happen here. everybody wants to think it can’t, but jeez guys, take a look around…
look at the weird dead eyes and creepy smile she can barely keep off her face as jacinda talks about the rise in new zealand suicide. this is the same woman who cackled with glee discussing making life impossible for the unvaxxed who fail to submit. she’s is not well. she’s flat out deranged. if i were dong a casting call for “american psycho goes to new zealand” she’d be top of my list.
the whole notion of forcing submission for the collective weal is rooted in dangerous delusion and this is why only deeply dangerous people do it.
it’s based on a simple and pervasive lie: we know what’s good for you and we are going to give it to you, by force if need be, for your own good.
but everything about this is wrong.
there is no common good in any but a purely abstract sense.
it cannot be measured or ascertained.
it cannot be known. it is not knowable.
it’s a pure fiction rooted in aggregation fallacy.
it’s also an ego trap.
the very idea that there is such a thing as “the common good” and that you happen to know what it is represents such a seductive self-delusion that those fixated upon and transfixed by it become prone to manifold additional hallucinations.
it selects for and feeds a loop of projection, narcissism, and violence. and it ALWAYS gets out of control.
once you have sufficiently departed reality, both imagination and indoctrination are free to run riot unfettered by sense or sensibility. it may grow from sane seeming seeds, but the tree is everywhere and always poison because the process itself is a collector of toxicity.
they start with an idea. they see the world and they think that the world would be better of it were like X than it is today.
there is nothing wrong with this, per se. lots of things start that way from software companies to inventing suspension bridges or from founding universities to starting a weekly poker game.
where this goes wrong is around coercion. that’s the first hurdle.
if you or i thought to ourselves, “self, this neighborhood would be better of we had a weekly poker game!” we might be right. perhaps it would be fun, help neighbors get to know neighbors, and generally be a good time for all.
so we’d ASK the neighbors if they’d like to come play.
but we wouldn’t force them if they said no. we would not round them up at gunpoint and make them play so they would see how fun it is and thanks us. because reasonable people don’t do that.
but unreasonable people do.
if one is sufficiently arrogant and narcissistic, they feel ENTITLED to make you. they know best what you need, and will be sure you get it. no longer can you say “no.”
so they seek the power to make you. they do not believe in you, your choice, your agency, or your basic rights. they believe in “the collective good” and this manifests most aggressively when it runs into pathologically narcissistic personality types who are imbued with a “mission” that “serves the collective good” upon which they have laid the foundations of their own identities.
when you get a narcissist that cannot tell themselves apart from an idea, pretty soon, it all boils down to this:
there is a truth, known to you because you possess superior virtue or intellect or vision that will make society better and serve the collective good.
you cannot convince others because they lack your vison and the more they push back, the more special you realize you must be.
so you coerce. if they cannot see, they must be shown. it is, after all, for their own good.
those who resist are reactionaries. they are fighting against the collective good that you are so sure that you can see. this makes them, wittingly or no, evil and thus you are just to vilify them and to wage war upon them.
and when things start to go bad, as all collectivist and authoritarian schemes to make the ant farm run as it should always do, you cannot blame the ideas without invalidating yourself and sense of identity, so you blame the victims.
they needed to comply. they needed to believe. what the hell is wrong with them? so you blame and you shame and you balkanize and you attack. you condemn them for not doing as you say hard enough and attack those who falter or seek to escape your diktats with the zeal of a 13th century dominican inquisitor rooting out heresy.
and as your outrages grow more extreme, so does the resistance to them and therefore so must your determination to crush this reactionary impulse. this is a cycle that leads to all out war and either the people rise or you subdue them so totally that generations are lost to bleak oppression.
it’s not even about the idea itself anymore. it’s about a wounded narcissistic leviathan curled up around its own pain at the destruction of its identify lashing out at anything that gets close enough.
that is not a pleasant place for anyone.
and this is where we are.
once you see the pattern, you’ll see it all around you.
people who may even have started off meaning well have told so many lies of such surpassing wrongness that they have become their lies, woven them into the weft and warp of their identities, and used them as the basis for the aggregation of power.
and as the truth comes out, they feel attacked to their very core and devolve into some sort of self-righteousness singularity.
they cannot be reasoned with.
they are past reason.
there is no data that will convince them, no cunning new way to look at it that will help them see it at last.
they are on complete tilt and every new “fact” that proves them wrong makes them more fervent and aggressive in their faith because feeling it slip away feels like ego annihilation.
these people are sick, and it makes them dangerous.
and it’s time we were rid of them.
vote them out if you can, but more important (even and especially if you do manage to vote them out) crowd them out like your society depends upon it. because it does. (or do you need another lesson?)
support those who stand up.
because together, this can be ours again. it was never theirs to take, and it’s time we made that clear.
be peaceful, but implacable.
disobey.
deny the thieves of joy their loot.
this is not authority.
this is not the common good.
this is derangement and jumped up officiousness putting on airs of serving the imagined collective welfare as a pretext to rule you.
and its 15 minutes are done.
One insidious thing that I have noticed is how being in the 'in' group might start off innocently enough, but in order to keep your membership in the group, the lies get more and more outrageous. Drop off the train at any point, and you'll find yourself on the outside -- and even more hated than if you had been on the outside the whole time.
You're on a roll, gato! Yesterday's lawn darts and now this. You've got the clearest common sense I've read in all the noise. Thank you. All hail chairman meow!