The writings of Thomas Harrington explain how we got here and what everyone else is thinking
https://brownstone.org/author/thomas-harrington/
Tom Harrington is a Brownstone Institute Senior Fellow who provides us with sharp cultural and psychological analyses that have been missing from common discourse. They contextualize our situation in a way that few others have been able to do. For example, he explains that we have been drowning in false narratives our entire lives, particularly those that made it okay for the US to be an imperialist power that attacked other nations at will, mostly to steal their resources.
…Imperialism [has had] enormously toxic effects on the psychic and cognitive health of the empire’s home-borne population.
At the core of all imperial efforts is dehumanization; that is, the idea that some human lives are inherently much more valuable than others…
The truly tragic thing about all this is that once you commit to doing or supporting violence under the rubric of this mental contrivance, it is very, very hard to turn back because doing so means admitting that you are much less morally pristine than you like to imagine yourself to be. It means admitting that you are “fallen” and thus in probable need of self-reflection and behavioral reinforcement from historically ratified sources of ethical learning.
Doing this has always been difficult. But it is harder to do today owing to what the German-Korean philosopher Byun Chul Han, in his short but masterful The Disappearance of Rituals (2022) refers to as the cult of authenticity, wherein we are encouraged to see ourselves as wholly autonomous beings whose prime life goal is generating an outward-facing “performance” designed, in keeping with the demands of consumer capitalism, to see ourselves as being absolutely unique, forward-looking and, above all, economically “productive.”
Reflection? Engagement with longstanding rituals that underneath their pomp and seemingly stale banal repetition are designed to make us ask big questions about who we are and want to be as friends, children, parents, neighbors and citizens.
Sorry. No time for that. The productivity train is always moving and if I don’t get on it and sell my wares, someone else might and reap the benefits. And then I’ll turn into an ontological nobody.
It is owing to this generalized inability to engage in self-reflection that the imperial citizen in a consumer culture frequently becomes a compulsive dissembler who, over time and out of a very real need to stamp out the ever-looming threat of cognitive dissonance in his life, often passes little by little into a state of full-blown delusion.
I prefer this theory of society’s hypnotic trance to Desmet’s, fwiw. Though I still suspect that the hypnosis is (at least in part) enabled by the targeted messaging that can now be individually directed due to machine learning/ artificial intelligence that is associated with military grade psychological warfare.
In this piece, Harrington explains what is wrong with kids these days, and how it benefits the oligarchy.
I just wanted to introduce my readers to Tom Harrington (and the amazing Brownstone Institute, which was created to explain the pandemic morass) as we are in desperate need of social critics, who seem to have scrambled for the exits when the plandemic appeared. Tom tries to help us understand ourselves and others in 2020's America. Finally.
I'm not sure I know how to say what I'm thinking without making a completed hash of it but I'll give it a try. It seems to me that what he is wishing for or defines as the problem is something that usually takes a lifetime to achieve for most people and most don't. To me, Desmet's thesis is more broad, more general and overarching. It encompasses a much longer history of thought where Harrington is in the here and now. I don't disagree with Harrington at all but I believe the argument is too narrowly focused like he is biting at the edges of the circumstances we are in. This problem has manifested itself throughout the ages but with different causes appropriate to the times and situations. I see it as more of a humanity problem than a COVID problem.
Twenty or twenty-five years ago I had a very unusual experience. I won't go into the situation that caused this but I happened to be on a gravel two-track road between a line of decrepit houses and an open field. My life was at a particularly low point and I was feeling. quite hopeless. Instantly, my ego died and I mean dropped dead. A cat crossed the road and jumped into the unkempt field and suddenly an entirely different perceptive frequency opened up to me and I have no other words to describe it other than brilliance - everything was simply brilliant - shining clarity - seeing without the haze of ego. This was not a 40 year old acid flashback, it was much more and the impact of the experience lasted weeks; perhaps months before my circumstances improved and I got back to my "normal" life and the safe hum-drum career. It did not,
however, die and inspired a not quite subconscious sort of awareness of life. Desmet's discussion of Mechanistic vs Spiritual prompted a lot of thought and hit me like a hammer in the head and I'm picking up where I left off all those years ago, Synchronicity, something I never quite understood, makes perfect sense now and I expect I have enough time left to get something much needed out of my life, I have purpose again and I owe much of that to the little spark Desmet provided.
We aren't just bodies; we just happen to have them.
https://live.childrenshealthdefense.org/chd-tv/shows/good-morning-chd/vaccine-passports-are-coming-with-jeffrey-tucker/
Jeffrey Tucker on Good Morning CHD. brilliant and entertaining.