left-liberal

8. Cultivate Detachment and Non-Identification (1)

“We live in a society where detachment is almost essential.”

— Philip K. Dick

Reading time: 15 – 18 mins

The quote above highlights a growing shift in the consciousness of Western populations – if not the globe – namely, the detachment and separation from our political system to offer any kind of resolution to domestic and international problems. The defeat of the remain camp in the Brexit exit poll to the election of Donald Trump are both symptoms of disillusionment with establishment politics. They represent a negative detachment of progressive politics not from rejecting the conservative “other,” but from an attachment to a dream of what ought to be, thus in direct oppostion to objective reality.

As Gilad Atzmon notes in his recent book Being in Time: A Post Political Manifesto (2016):

The Post-Political condition is an era defined by a complete failure of politics (Left, Right and Centre) and ‘Grand Ideological Narratives.’ Liberal Democracy, Marxism, communism, capitalism, and free markets are all empty, hollow signifiers as far as contemporary reality is concerned.

Total detachment describes the current relationship between ‘the political’ and ‘the human.’ We Westerners are becoming keenly aware that we have been reduced to consumers. The present role of ‘the political’ is to facilitate consumption. Our elected politicians are subservient to oligarchs, major market forces, big monopolies, corporations, conglomerates, banks and some sinister lobbies.

Liberal Democracy, that unique moment of mutual exchange between humans and the political, has failed to sustain itself. ^[1]

In the context of politics and culture, non-identification is essential if we are to separate from belief and move toward constructive solutions. Not to play the game of identity politics is to reject the idea that just because there is disagreement with a certain ideology does not mean prejudice against a race, sexuality, gender or religion. Identitarians would have us all categorised into rigid groups of tribal affiliations according to opinions, feelings and surface image rather than the logic and plausibility of the idea itself. Since identity is enmeshed in ideology and persona, to oppose an ideologue is to launch a personal attack. A specific defence mechanism is thus created to maintain this triad.

Examples of this would be:

Being white and male you are privileged and inherently racist
If you vote for Trump you are sexist, misogynist and a white supremacist Nazi.
Everyone knows there is a rape culture and if you deny it you support it.
If you disagree with pre-school education on transgender sexuality means you are transphobic
Criticising Islamic extremism means you are “Islamophobic”.
Criticising Israel’s human rights record against Palestinians means you are anti-Semitic
If you stand against police brutality you support radical anarchists like antifa
Institutionalised racism exists and police target black people as a result.
All those who criticise the science of human-global warming are “climate deniers”.
Being pro-Brexit and skeptical of the EU means you are xenophobic and right wing

Such identitarianism is spellbound by image and feeling rather than reason an logic. There is no room for nuance or complexity. With identify politics, radical feminism and social justice groupings, group identity and its beliefs take precedence over individual belief and autonomy. Any attack against the group is an attack against personal identity, the latter of which the individual give ups to further group cohesion. The ability to discriminate and critique based on reality rather than personal sensibility is lost. As such, it is a collective defence mechanism called “splitting” which we will look at later on.

To identify with someone’s pain or difficulties is to engage empathy. But when we identify with the ideology and belief – regardless of good intentions – we limit our ability to see outside that ideology. It is then that empathy becomes politicised and distorted toward power and projection fuelled by the momentum of the group itself.

(more…)

Why Young Lives are Losing Meaning and Purpose II: The Big Three and 11 Factors

Photo by Dmitry Ratushny | unsplash.com

“Community connectedness is not just about warm fuzzy tales of civic triumph. In measurable and well-documented ways, social capital makes an enormous difference in our lives…Social capital makes us smarter, healthier, safer, richer, and better able to govern a just and stable democracy.”

~ Robert D. Putnam

Reading time: 20-25 mins

In the last post I looked at the decrease in meaning and purpose parallel to the increase in loneliness and isolation for today’s millennial and Z generations. Sociologists, economists and psychologists generally all agree that the key to developing and holding on to meaning, purpose and well-being is sufficient social interaction with a core group of friends and family that define one’s support. This is not the same as an extended family that usually arises from enforced socio-economic factors, but one that naturally evolves based around shared vision of support and nourishment because it is both practical and sustainable, offering real world benefits.

John F. Helliwell, a prominent expert in the economics of happiness believes the quality of our relationships determines the quality of our lives at the deepest levels. And the quality of those relationships is reflected in how well we have activated our response-ability and activities that offer a form of service to the community – whatever form that might be. This is what creates and deepens ties with others: constructive actions alongside key initiatory ideas. Helliwell draws his work from very large data sets called the World Values Survey which has accrued answers from people in over 150 countries about life satisfaction along with other socio-economic information. When Helliwell crunched the data he and other researchers found that there were six reliable and consistent factors which accounted for well-being:

Social support
generosity
trust
freedom
income per capita
healthy life expectancy ^[1]

Four from the list are connected with social interaction within a community. The other factors are relational and occur as a response to, or as a natural property of social support. So a stratum of support covering all aspects of human aspiration is a really big deal, the lack of which will play a large part in the development of our social ills.

The Big Three

It seems to me, the development of meaning and purpose is rooted in three foundational products of social interaction which, if healthy, underpin a successful society, the constituents of which all operate symbiotically and grow parallel to each other. Thus, the creation of an individual emerges and is informed by:

Parents
Family
Community

Obvious perhaps, but in crisis nonetheless. These three make up the strata in the soil of society/culture which is dependent on the level of access to community (should it even exist) a solid connection to nature and the quality of the environment upon which all three rest. ^[2]Similarly, the healthy functioning of the three will have within them poor psycho-spiritual “nutrients”, or a rich, fertile ground that is self-sustaining and therefore community-sustaining. The presence of Helliwell’s six factors will be informed by the quality of the Big Three.

(more…)

The Hissy Fit Generation And The Loss of Free Speech VII: The Subversion of Social Justice (3)

It is this obfuscation of truth by an ideology that favours nihilism and deconstruction for its own sake that is causing serious problems to the very idea of social justice since it focuses not on the major issues of our time that could promote unity as we strive to obtain solutions, but directs enormous amounts of intellectual and emotional energy upon that which divides us. This is ironically, the centuries old principle of the Establishment classes. Further, there is no evidence at all that institutionalising microaggressions and trigger warnings assists the development of well-adjusted and resilient students – quite the reverse. Universities are becoming enablers of a generation that is manifesting a range of mental illnesses which the psychiatry Industry and its Big Pharma paymaster happily exploits and enhances. With child abuse, neglect and the rise of infantilism and narcissistic family dynamics, one wonders how much of the SJW angstivism is actually a product of degrees of undiagnosed trauma.

It’s a widening of core imbalances in societies which can be likened to a series of psychic explosions overlapping in concentric circles – each fuelling the other as they touch. In the central core are what I call the Four Drivers of the Deep State infused by the psychopathic mind. It is this that determines the profitable yet wholly unsustainable machinery of our world. All else derives from this core imbalance. Any subjective, lazy thinking which inspires division and tribalism acts as a mask over which this darkness continues to thrive. Mental illness and trauma-based dysfunction offers a fertile base for ponerological expansion.

And rising up amongst all this in troubled America is yet another symptom of social chaos in the form of militant anti-fascism, or Antifa. Like so many on the hard left, Mark Bray (quoted above) chooses not to see that the authoritarianism of which he speaks knows no ideological boundaries. Its pathology rises up just as easily within the left radicalism he worships. Bray and others believe they are taking pre-emptive measures against neo-Nazism and choosing not to see that using the same rule book as their nemesis will feed that particular beast and indeed, magnify its reach. The more Antifa fights fire with fire the more likely it is that such direct action will be used by the very Establishment forces they claim to be against. For an academic with a focus on history Bray’s rationalisations appear to have made him blind to its lessons.

“Despite our many differences over specific policies, most Americans have traditionally supported the side of liberty, tolerance, free speech, and peaceful political change, within broad parameters. That side is in opposition to the violent, authoritarian thugs of the right and of the left. If we regain our faith in what we already have, there’s no reason to choose between rival siblings competing to rule over the ruins of everything that’s worthwhile on behalf of their illiberal family.”

– Choose Sides? You Bet. But Antifa and Fascism Are the Same Side, By J.D. Tuccille

(more…)

The Hissy Fit Generation and the Loss of Free Speech VII: The Subversion of Social Justice (1)

By M.K. Styllinski

How can Free Speech be conditional? (Photo: Michael Barera Wikimedia Commons)

“The intellectual battlefields today are on college campuses, where students’ deep convictions about race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation and their social justice antipathy toward capitalism, imperialism, racism, white privilege, misogyny and “cissexist heteropatriarchy” have bumped up against the reality of contradictory facts and opposing views, leading to campus chaos and even violence.”

— Michael Shermer

We have explored the toxic effects of postmodernism; the change in culture and left-liberal politics toward infantilism; the influence of cultural narcissism and the role of social media in shaping the younger generations. Now, we’ll have a look at how all these various factors are producing a singular form of millennial activism in our universities and colleges.

Social Justice, it seems, has gone the same way of so many traditional beliefs and traditions in society in that it doesn’t necessarily refer to upholding justice at all. Rather, it has become another way to virtue-signal and reinforce a tribal grouping above and beyond reason and facts. After observing this phenomena over the past several years it is still stunning to behold this level of cognitive degeneracy when faced with the vocal and often violent forms of this new activism – the Social Justice Warrior or SJW.

A term which began as a positive description of young activists was later used as a pejorative term by their detractors. It describes those who prefer emotion and group-think over reason and truth, whilst claiming the latter. They are the natural – often well-intentioned – product of all that’s been discussed hitherto. This umbrella term is equated with left-liberal issues which typically include (what used to be) socially progressive views such as 3rd wave feminism, multiculturalism, gender equality, identity politics, sexism, racism etc. Unfortunately, all of these issues are riven with assumptions, myths and opinion which have been propagated as fact by the MSM.

SJWs gained notoriety in the wake of the Trump election for their inability to accept the result and engaging in monumental hissy fits as objective reality came crashing down. The fact that this was, in all probability one of the rare occasions that democracy actually functioned made no difference at all; it didn’t match their reality so a collective tantrum ensued and the pathology of the SJW was seared into public consciousness. The Trump election acted as one collective macroaggression that triggered all those fully invested in a social justice that was based on a misreading of reality. It didn’t matter that Hillary Clinton is a criminal and sociopath, Trump was the personification of everything that the left loathed – the facts be damned. Therefore, nuance and Deep State realities were irrelevant, if knowledge of these issues even featured at all. As one mainstream media presenter commented after the result: “Everybody is crying and so upset – it is the end of their world.”

Boo-hoo.

Or as another feminist pundit put it: “Get your abortions now, because we going to be fucked and we are going to have to live with it.”

Charming.

We then have the radical left and “anarchist” group Antifa who sit alongside SJWs and have about as much to do with true anarchism as reality TV has to do with talent. Both are utterly bereft of any semblance of creativity and thrive on sensation. This group therefore represents the subversion of true activism and civil disobedience which, until the coming of age of millennials, was still relatively focused, even as recent as 2010. No longer. The dark side of the left has been fully unleashed and has remained on show ever since. Now that the Dark Triad appears to have successfully taken over, it’s no wonder that so many are re-evaluating what “progressive” and “left” really means today.

(more…)

The Hissy Fit Generation and The Loss of Free Speech VI: The Jekyll & Hyde of Social Media (3)

Photo by Zulmaury Saavedra on Unsplash

“People will accept ideas presented in technological form that would be abhorrent in any other form. It is utterly strange to hear my many old friends in the world of digital culture claim to be the true sons of the Renaissance without realizing that using computers to reduce individual expression is a primitive, retrograde activity, no matter how sophisticated your tools are.”

— Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget

Censorship and Fakebook News

Since the fake news trope has been doing the rounds Facebook is now the Establishment’s social media tool of choice to combat the rise of alternative news outlets, as well as more mainstream but editorially more responsible news rooms such as Russia’s wildly popular flagship news network RT. Under the banner of “tackling fake news” Zuckerberg’s crusade is the perfect platform for the terminally offended and the easily swayed by the vast echo chamber of predominantly left-liberal delusions that make up Facebook’s political discourse. News is further filtered, sanitised and put through the algorithmic grinder of FB’s ideology.

It doesn’t matter whether you are left or right leaning in your views – one political belief censored in favour of another is bad news for free speech and democracy. Indeed, in late 2016 Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided to employ a few websites that would have the honour of labelling stories as “fake news” according to an agreed media consensus. These include ABC News, Factcheck.org and PolitiFact, and the so-called myth-busting website Snopes.com. According to conservative website The Daily Caller there is a problem: “Almost all of the writers churning out fact checks for Snopes have a liberal background, and many of them have expressed contempt for Republican voters. The Daily Caller could not identify a single Snopes fact-checker who comes from a conservative background. Snopes did not respond to a list of questions from The DC regarding the site’s ideological leaning.” ^[1] Match this with Facebook curators and you are unlikely to get unbiased news, rather it will be selected according to what is deemed acceptable to modern day, left-liberal thinking. As discussed previously such thinking is no longer the kind of leftism that values free speech but has slipped into opinion-hungry authoritarianism.

Debunking spurious news stories is less admirable when it comes from mega-corporations who are walking in step with Establishment, the cogs of which are greased by psychopathic perceptions. Thankfully, a large proportion of the public are simply not buying it.^[2]This is due to the hard evidence provided by independent media of the very thing of which it has been accused: propagating lies and fake news propaganda. This is what makes it so painfully ironic. The mainstream media is, and has always been fake news. It has been caught red-handed, with its pants down on numerous occasions, peddling sometimes subtle psyops and on other occasions ludicrous BS that would have made Machiavelli cry with shame. Whether it’s 24hr fear-mongering, Deep State anti-Russian propaganda, paid-up editorials, or the ping-pong of culture wars, the MSM has been at the forefront of the most atrocious fake news for many decades.

Facebook has elected to take on the “disinformation” circulating from alternative news outlets and conveniently forget the most obvious examples of fake news which was spread by most of the corporate-chained MSM. The explosive details of tacit media support and collusion for the Clinton election campaign exposed in the Wikileaks Podesta emails and by The Intercept was purposely omitted and suppressed by Facebook, Google and Twitter as a matter of policy – policy which is founded on personal opinion of their CEOs and shaped by the Liberal arm of the Establishment. This included drafting news pieces and handing them to suitably “friendly” media plants dotted around MSM outlets. ^[3]An internal strategy document dated January 2015 reads: “As we discussed on our call, we are all in agreement that the time is right [to] place a story with a friendly journalist in the coming days that positions us a little more transparently while achieving the above goals.” ^[4]All of this and more was happily shared on social networks with Facebook as the primary disseminator.

(more…)

The Hissy Fit Generation and the Loss of Free Speech IV: The Narcissism Factor (2)

“…the oversensitivity of individuals today, including political correctness and microaggressions, all stem from this idea that people operating under the notion of the pristine self view you as evil because you are showing them something other than love.”

— Howard Schwartz, professor emeritus of Oakland University,

Continuing from the previous post which looked at how narcissism defines our present culture, and how it may feature in the younger generations of today. We now turn to the main sources manifesting normalised cultural and/or personality narcissism and its perpetuation.

Here are six key areas:

Parenting

We have to differentiate between cultural narcissism and the kind of abuse that comes from neglectful parents or what is called the narcissistic family. In the latter, this is a form of emotional abuse or covert narcissism sourced from one or other of the parents’ needs and desires taking precedent over the child’s. From an emotionally deficient family life the child’s sense of self is warped leading to intense shame since the expectation of a nurturing environment is absent. Psychologist Joseph Burgo describes this trauma and arrested emotional development as a result of “disappointed expectations”. When the genetic inheritance that offers a “blueprint of normality” is disrupted in the child, he knows at a deep level, that his fundamental development has gone awry and he feels insecure and unsafe. Burgo explains: “instead of instilling a sense of beauty, an abusive or traumatic environment leaves the infant with a sense of internal defect and ugliness.” ^[1]

This sense of disgust and shame at the self has huge implications for the processing of feelings and social functioning. However, such covert narcissism is likely not the primary cause of the cultural narcissism we are now witnessing. There is very little empirical data to support it, whereas more modern studies show clear evidence that inflated feedback is the primary cause. In other words, the conditioning of overpraising and over-protection, where the child or infant is told over and over again that s/he is special and unique.

Telling a child that s/he is super smart and intrinsically special has been taught for several generations. Far from providing a healthy self-confidence this focus has encouraged a prince and princess syndrome; a generation of entitled, spoiled children with little defence against the objective realities of this world. Such well-intentioned coddling often results in a role reversal where the child becomes precociously “adult” and the parent reverts to child-like infantilism due to the dominance of the child’s personality – a wholly abnormal state of affairs. Far from feeling a deep-seated shame, the child genuinely believes that s/he is special and superior since it comes from a learned behaviour of entitlement – wired into the brain.

Although authoritarian parenting is most certainly not the answer, the pendulum has now swung toward the opposite extreme where indulgence misinterprets nurturing. Discipline and structure is an essential part of a child’s navigation and learning, but such an “old-fashioned” view is now shunned in favour of letting the child do and have exactly what s/he wants; where the child is constantly love-bombed with no boundaries or limits. And when the child or young adult eventually faces the real world he comes face to face with the fact that his love-cocoon, this pristine self has programmed an essential weakness in the face of life’s vicissitudes. Far from creating self-reliance and resilience this parenting creates the exact opposite, namely, a generation of “snowflakes” where all aspects of living are seen as a form of bullying and act of offence. The capitulation of university campuses when confronted by these collective hissy fits only makes matters much worse.

(more…)

The Hissy Fit Generation and the Loss of Free Speech III: Millennials and Generation Z

“My life feels like a test I didn’t study for.”

– quote from a Millennial

“…if this nation has any chance of survival, of carrying its traditions deep into the 21st century, it will in no small part depend on members of my generation, Generation X, the last Americans schooled in the old manner, the last Americans that know how to fold a newspaper, take a joke, and listen to a dirty story without losing their minds … We are the last Americans to have the old-time childhood. It was coherent, hands-on, dirty, and fun.” – ‘Why Generation X Might Be Our Last, Best Hope’ By Rick Cohen, Vanity Fair

I am also part of Generation X. We experienced life without the internet, emails, cell and smart phones and navigated through different challenges and struggles, from the revolutions and socioeconomic upheavals of the 1970s; the celebrated greed of the 1980s and the structural transformations of the 1990s. The same challenges exist for today’s young adults but with many more layers of social and cultural complexity. Technology, under the direction of the social engineers is only making things worse, since it offers yet another form of addiction on top of intense political and ideological interference, all of which is channelled through these younger generations who have almost no defences against it.

I found making sense of our Official Culture immensely challenging during my twenties and early thirties manifesting as depression and panic attacks, the struggle of which took up most of my sense of self. It eventually required serious soul-searching and the confrontation of the root causes of these fears and traumas in order to move forward. I was lucky to have assistance in that endeavour even if it was a form of “tough-love” to get me to the place where a more objective perspective was possible. Such a process is deeply unpleasant; often like a form of dying as emotions are healed and the old, false self of programming and egoic survival is stripped away. This takes time, effort and a lot of patience, which is one reason why it is so assiduously avoided.

So, I have sympathy with the psychological crisis that millennials are facing and how important it is that they are given the information and assistance to turn their lives around. But it will be monumental task.

When children have been brought up to be narcissistic and entitled through no fault of their own; where society itself normalises those same qualities, young people have to attempt to navigate through such a morass of conflicting messages and superficial dross that it is no wonder they are floundering. Millennials have (literally) everything at their fingertips but wholly attached to unrealistic aims and ambitions, but detached from social skills and dynamics that would build and sustain them through the inevitable challenges they must face. In one sense, we are witnessing a re-run of the 1960s, that surge in potential awareness of what could be…This time, a genuine millennial passion is shackled by prior conditioning, an unstable foundation that is constantly shifting beneath their feet making it all but impossible to orient themselves. They have been brought to believe themselves special; nurtured to anticipate and expect great things, but they do not have the inner resources to match the outer reality. Hence, the internal or external “hissy fit” when expectations fail to match that reality, be that from differing views or workplace demands.

When seeking to analyse and appraise younger generations and the challenges they must face, there are no doubt plenty of exceptions to this rule and a great many young adults who do not fit into the following psychological profile. Yet, it seems there are not enough, otherwise we wouldn’t be having the symptoms rising up in our youth that we do. Similarly, the following is not designed to rip apart millennials in order to feel better about my own generation. It is concerned with pin-pointing the problems in order to achieve clarity and possible solutions. The older generations have a responsibility to assist those who come after since, as parents, we have also played a part in shaping them. With the right kind of mentoring and the right kind of knowledge, they might develop the self-awareness and life skills they need. Building that knowledge-base will be up to them, as will facing their fears and discovering their own higher nature and creativity within. Our collective future depends on it.

(more…)