postmodernism

Cultivate Attention and Discernment (3)

Photo by Spencer Imbrock on Unsplash

“There is no consistent, integrated conception of the world which serves as the foundation on which our edifice of belief rests. And therefore… we are more naive than those of the Middle Ages, and more frightened, for we can be made to believe almost anything.”

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)

Reading time: 20-25 mins

Fear, Superstimuli, Indoctrination

Fear is a wake-up call to pay attention and see truth. But this instinct can be easily subverted to an irrational and automatic body-mind reaction for survival and self-protection against a perceived threat. The father of propaganda Edward Bernays, the Rockefeller dynasty and their social science directives; Freud and psychoanalysis; Alfred Kinsey and his sexual revolution and the ever-present mainstreaming of occult directives have flowed through the mass mind and shaped Western societies toward a highly narrow conception of reality.

Education, mainstream media, entertainment, art, fashion, advertising, marketing, public relations – even our family unit, peer groups and working life – all reflect the above directors of an Official Culture. All are defined by consumption, commodity, image, sensation and artifice. The original source of these traditions and pursuits have lost their psycho-spiritual meaning and now float in a sea of narcissistic irrelevancy.

Instead of bringing out the true meaning of human existence – to love, learn, bond, create and commune – our current reality is a constellation of subverted constructs which are pathological due to a predominance of psychopathic and sub-deviant human beings who have taken control of societies. They have continually re-interpreted and subverted the best of human ingenuity and innovation toward their own conscienceless, machine-like perception. This continuing psycho-materialist paradigm has been translated and mediated into so-called normative social, political and cultural structures. They continue to exist purely due to a consensus trance reinforced by cultural hypnosis, of which most people are entirely unaware.

“Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.”

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 3, p. 19

The overriding and long-term objective behind this inculcation is toward complete control of the mass mind. The Three Establishment Model via their corporate oligarchs and power-brokers are the aforementioned 4C’s alongside economic, political and sociocultural warfare using three main prongs of attack:

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Strive For Simplicity, Economise on Energy (4)

“A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life: he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Reading time: 15-18 mins

Energy Conservation

To conserve our energy in the way we think, feel and act we need to know how they might all relate in simple terms. So, let’s simplify it.

Think of energy efficiency (upgrades) and energy conservation (energy use) leading to the correct economy for your life. The home can be thought of as a metaphor or symbol of your mind and body. (If you like, this is an extension of Jordan Peterson’s thinking of tidying up your room).

Energy conservation involves using less energy by changing your behaviours and habits. Energy efficiency, on the other hand, involves using techniques, traditional systems of knowledge and new technologies that requires less energy to perform the same function.

Energy efficiency = all those qualities and techniques you can find to maximize your potential and minimize chaos. Accumulate energy for creativity and minimize loss from internal and external entropy.

Energy Conservation = simplifying your life through judicious, careful attention and limiting unnecessary drains on energy. employing measures which ensure you are not only efficient but have a constant supply on tap. Conservation sometimes means getting very creative. The more you conserve, the more likely that can be!

In other words, to be energy efficient means looking at ways your personality system can be upgraded so that less energy is needed to perform certain functions and which provides qualitatively better results. This can be “costly” in the short-term but requires much less effort in the long-term. This includes insulation, replacements, careful monitoring and upgrades.

Energy conservation involves actively seeking new ways to on your internal efficiency. You change your relationship to energy within your home. You seek ways to receive energy for minimum loss and a minimum amount of effort. It is strategic, long-term and eminently practical. It requires a re-calibration of existing appliances (organs of perception; centres) in order to extract a maximum amount of energy. The energy that you have is used wisely.

In other words, it means a change in overall behaviour through commitment and a creative application of knowledge.

How might we use our energy more efficiently?

Insulate, upgrade and monitor.

Insulate your mind and body from that which would drain but remain porous enough to let constructive influences through. And if you have good quality insulation then you have more energy to produce warmth and proper flow of electricity and therefore creative potential. (It might be stretching this metaphor to its limit but it’s no coincidence that key brain areas found to have more nerve fibre insulation or “myelination” equates to advantageous personality traits!)

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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.

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Why Young Lives are Losing Meaning and Purpose I

By M.K. Styllinski

Photo by Mikito Tateisi on Unsplash

“Young adults are facing more stressful conditions than older generations, such as an increasingly competitive labor market, rising costs of housing, an increase in higher education costs, and issues of self-identity and confidence driven by more widespread use of social media.”

— Morag Henderson, sociologist at University College London

Reading time: (25-30 mins)

The crisis of meaning and purpose is something many of us are grappling with today. Girls and boys and young adults in particular are not succeeding in this battle. The path which defines our lives up to middle and retirement age is for the majority, mostly a constellation of conditioned responses encouraged by Official Culture. It replaces true meaning with a role that serves the technosphere as opposed to our true calling. Not always, but all too frequently. Then we are back to that existential crisis of youth where something deep inside knows that to find true creative balance takes a life time of struggle against forces that oppose any kind of spiritual liberation. Unless that is, we have the support to explore the transformation that comes knocking at the door of consciousness at various stages of our lives. To even have the awareness to heed that call requires a very different society than we have now.

Life is extremely complicated for young people these days, whether they are in Western, Asian, African or Middle Eastern societies. The predisposition of tyranny from our hierarchical institutions and social systems means that such a danger will always be there, even when there is momentum toward autopoietic * social innovations. The imbalance inherent within state authority and the unceasing drive of so many to live outside it’s influence is growing. This is a welcome reaction against the finite and unsustainable nature of cartel capitalism and rampant state-sponsored crimes against humanity. But we haven’t yet found that crucial tension, that balance that provides a psychological inoculation against psychopathic infiltration which so often turns civilisations into crucibles of centralised control.

The corruption of hierarchical power always weakens the structure to the point of catastrophic failure. And there are always young folks who act as literal and symbolic precursors to that descent, usually by embodying those ills and thereby showing us what long term or immediate future lies ahead. Each epoch manifests that see-saw between managed chaos and mass creativity which eventually bursts forth in destructive ways, sweeping away everything that went before. Children and young adults are the tuning fork of future generations in this regard. Nonetheless, there is has been a very wide historical berth when it comes to defining how our youth interact with the world. The older generations have a distinct challenge to make sure our younger generations are correctly tuned to that which offers hope, spiritual strength and resilience to face what is certain to be an unpredictable and challenging future.

But let’s rewind for a moment…

Take Medieval England for example. During that time the majority of medieval people were young with far fewer older people with around thirty-five to forty percent under fifteen years old. There was a distinct and recognised period where the early formative years were largely employed for utilitarian ends. If there were not distinct roles then the family didn’t survive. As a result, the Church law and common law regarded children as equal to adults in many ways. Parenting was just as important and often imbued with strict moral and community-based values inspired by the Church and folklore. Though play was a vital part of growing up and of far greater importance than today, if a child was unprepared for the realities of what was a rather brutal world, it meant that the longevity of the family would be weakened as would the life of the child. Conscientiousness in one’s work had to be learned early on as it was quite often a life and death situation. ^[1]

The ubiquity of young folks meant there were major social differences in every community and sphere of activity. A feudal hierarchy of industry meant clearly defined roles with a narrow band of what could constitute freedom from our perspective today. It also meant that on average, there was seventeen years’ less experience of life to draw on and very few elders and betters that children had to go to for advice. This high proportion of young people experienced a violent, feudal world which saw hand-to-hand combat; brutality passing for entertainment; state sanctioned slavery and appalling daily health hazards – including periodic visitations of the plague – as the backdrop to their lives. Medieval boys for example, had what amounts to a man’s job from the age of seven and could have his wee hand chopped off if he decided to pinch some fruit from a market stall. If he graduated to a more audacious deed like stealing a hairpin or a Lord’s hat, he could be hanged by his doubtless scrawny neck. Boys could legally marry at aged fourteen and were considered ready to fight in the King’s army. Those born into the nobleman’s life or royalty had material comforts but a different level of responsibility. For example, Prince Edward, at just sixteen years old was in command of whole battalion.

Not a lot of leeway for a “safe space” in that milieu.

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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

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The Hissy Fit Generation and the Loss of Free Speech VII: The Subversion of Social Justice (2)

Courtesy of Susan Duclos of All News PipeLine| Click on image for larger version

“Since the 1990s, there’s been a change. The most scared thing at a university is the victim. Not in all departments and not in the sciences, but in the social sciences, especially in the humanities, the victim is the most sacred thing”

“The net effect [of safe spaces] is that the very people you are trying to help are rendered weaker and they become morally dependent.”

— Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist

In the last post we explored the landscape of social justice and the influence of the Social Justice Warrior (SJW) mindset expressed in particular through activism in universities and through rules and laws in education. We’ll be doing more of the same in this post with particular emphasis on racism and sexism in schools and universities.

In the Alice in Wonderland worldview of the SJW, racism, sexism and the accusation that anyone who is a straight, white and male and happens to disagree is immediately on the wrong side of the SJW contingent and opening themselves up to an array of derogatory labels. We become right wing provocateurs; “privileged” and misogynist; white supremacists and “——-phobic” (fill in the blank). Critics must feel terminally guilty and contrite for being borne into a racial demographic that in the past presided over genocide and institutional racism, pre-civil rights era. Not withstanding the irony that comes from the inherent privilege of students and academics, there is no evidence it exists now on the scale touted by these terminally offended young minds.

True racism is someone who expresses distaste or hatred for someone, simply due to their race. This form of ignorance is still around, but hurling abuse at anyone who is conservative, white, not a member of a minority or whose sexual orientation happens to be heterosexual (how passé) is displaying the exact same sexism/racism in reverse. This is the same contradiction that claims intolerance by enforcing tolerance.

In fact, SJW ideology is predicated on the most hackneyed contradictions sourced from its postmodern philosophical roots and which are sometimes so obvious it’s almost comical. Almost.

When feelings are facts, sexism, mis-gendering – whatever suits the hysterical SJW’s purpose – then literally anything can be twisted into an excuse to virtue-signal for a standardized “equality” > conformity. Unfortunately, this unhealthy mix of unthinking ideology and emotional histrionics (which is even more apparent with young women who appear to make up the majority of the SJW camp) results in a deepening of inequality, and empowering only the vampiric nature of victimhood identity. It creates new tears in the fabric of an already traumatised and infantilised society by accentuating social divisions and intense resentment.

This radicalism has not only emerged through left-liberal progressivism but thrives on the emotional drama of “us and them” and the subsequent promotion of violence and vindictiveness. Despite the default enemy of the alt. and ultra right, even moderate liberals and conservatives (in fact anyone who doesn’t agree) become the demonised “other” simply because they represent an alternative view. One only has to look at Facebook rants and Twitter storms to how this righteous indignation can go viral in a very short space of time.

For all those young activists who are actually prepared to make the effort to read, research, contemplate and to observe themselves in relation to the world, this hijacking of peaceful civil disobedience is a most dangerous dynamic to be unleashed. It is dangerous because it is sourced not from the love of Truth but the love of conflict as a salve to a troubled self. This phenomenon neuters the creative power of conscience in the young; their hope, their ideals and their potential to provide solutions and by subverting it into nothing more than a tool for the maladjusted it therefore proves useful as another tool for the Establishment. When protest feeds on fear and toxic emotions it can be maneuvered to where it can be of best use, in much the same way coloured revolutions can be fomented for regime change in any given country.

(Expect the SJW to be triggered by the term “coloured” revolutions. This is not a joke – that’s the level this craziness has reached).

Thanks to SJWs and their enablers, the United States and parts of Europe must now cope with a culture war designed to irrevocably confuse millennials about their sexuality, ethics, morals and values, which results in greater ethnic and political divides and turns us away from Establishment culpability. Most importantly, it ensures that young minds identify with extremes of mob rule or suffer from being sandwiched between two poles of pathological hypocrisy.

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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.

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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.

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The Hissy Fit Generation and The Loss Of Free Speech II: Microaggressions and Trigger Warnings (2)

“Trigger warnings might also communicate to people that they’re fragile, and coax them [to] interpret ordinary emotional responses as extraordinary signals of danger.”

— ‘Trigger warnings do little to reduce people’s distress, research shows’

The New Lexicon of “Offence” and Para-Morality

In the West, we are already suffering from information overload and a loss of quality communication. It seems people are more afraid of exchanging pleasantries with a stranger than ever before thanks to an overemphasis on negative news in the media as well as the addiction to our smart phones. If you simply want to say “hi” to an attractive man or woman; to chat with someone you don’t know over the deli counter, the gas station or in the street while waiting for a bus… there will increasingly be this niggling thought of saying the wrong thing and offending someone through a cultural programming that is changing our language as well as restricting it. We have a very real collective fear of saying the wrong thing that is causing a conformity to a flawed consensus that doesn’t exist, except in the minds of those who get paid to push this agenda. The Orwellian Offence Police are active in entertainment, universities, the work place and in government, with numerous examples of the most insane persecution imaginable.

The following phrases are in most left-liberal academic and social justice warrior’s lexicon wrapped up in the desire to virtue signal – that now overused phrase from the right – used to dismiss the logic of free speech advocates and ordinary people in their daily lives.

Trigger Warnings – According to the Oxford English Dictionary a trigger warning is: “A statement at the start of a piece of writing, video, etc. alerting the reader or viewer to the fact that it contains potentially distressing material (often used to introduce a description of such content)”. This is a very convenient way for the Establishment to make sure that its population self-censors. Trigger warnings were originally developed by psychologists for war veterans, victims of sexual abuse or common trauma as a means to flag content which might stimulate a re-run of painful memories. Unfortunately, this has now been extended to the university campuses and the arts & entertainment industry (which is perhaps less of an issue given the state of graphic sex and violence on TV) and is now used to provide protection from words and opinions this precious generation doesn’t like; any discomfort at all in fact, a far cry from the preventative measures designed for genuine victims of war, violence and/or sexual abuse.

This postmodern paranoia has infiltrated minorities and student life with a vengeance. Sex, race and politics are all foci for trigger warnings causing protests, demonstrations, self-important letters with lists of demands for faculty members and even their removal due to perceived bias, sexism, racism or the violation of their hallowed safe spaces. ^[1]

Trigger warnings have been imposed in many university curricula due to students’ demands. The control of university policy – whether it is ethnic minority students feeling victimised or screaming young feminists demanding attention – any kind of encroachment of reality and therefore distress has led to warnings on such books as Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald, and The Merchant of Venice. Yes, now Shakespeare is deemed threatening, a trend that is also taking place in Britain, with Cambridge University picking up the PC gaunlet. ^[2]

To pander to this inner health and safety zone one student offered his university faculty tips on how to proceed: “For instance, one trigger warning for “The Great Gatsby” might be: (TW: “suicide,” “domestic abuse” and “graphic violence.”) […] Thanks to the vague tags within the warning, readers and unaffected students alike can approach a narrative without the plot being spoiled. Yet, at the same time, students who are unfamiliar with these works can immediately learn whether courses will discuss traumatic content. […] Professors can also dissect a narrative’s passage, warning their students which sections or volumes of a book possess triggering material and which are safer to read. This allows students to tackle passages that are not triggering but return to triggering passages when they are fully comfortable.” ^[3]

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The Hissy Fit Generation and the Loss of Free Speech II: Microaggressions and Trigger Warnings (1)

By M.K. Styllinski

“Never has never there been a modern age more saturated in irony and hypocrisy, where blind emotion shreds any semblance of measured reason.”

In the last post we explored the bedrock of postmodernist thinking which informs so much of the present left-liberal system of beliefs. The ridicule and disdain of so called conspiracy theorists – most of whom are merely highlighting the camouflaged nature of social and geopolitical realities – is a frequent hobby of the postmodernists who delude themselves and others into thinking that social constructivism and the very notion of free speech is …a delusion! Certainly, there is a case to made that much of our world is socially constructed and deterministic – especially when we factor in social engineering. However, broadly speaking, for postmodernists subjectivity is an end in itself, nullifying any attempts to arrive at an objective appraisal of reality, and thus the search for truth that potentially binds us together. It is a vacuum of endless open-ended relativity that shuns solutions in favour of an intellectual and epistemological void where anything goes because nothing really exists – its all in the mind as a materialist soup of interaction without practical meaning. Such people draw their emotional succor (masquerading as intellectualism) by focusing on a perceived institutionalised racism, sexism, and a social science that has over emphasised the ‘nurture’ interpretation of social dynamics. This has produced an unhealthy, wholly out-of-balance platform for change, elevating the rights of minority groups over the majority.

Being against Monsanto, the evils of capitalism and the general tenets of anti-globalisation is laudable on paper. However, what use is protest if one is high on the drama of division rather than solutions? Engaging directly with the beast merely feeds it. Peaceful protest is necessary but only as an adjunct to creating alternatives. It’s even worse if you are unknowingly in the pay of Establishment minions like fake philanthropist George Soros who funds various left leaning organisations and activist groups for an entirely different agenda. Hugely important issues raised from the spectre of of 9/11; state-sponsored terror; the weapons industry; child sex rings; human trafficking; the modern-day infiltration by CoIntelpro or even the obvious and continuing conspiratorial nature of the National Security State as a whole, are deemed strangely unworthy for much of the left and radical left, thus easily dismissed as conspiratorial nonsense. (Noam Chomsky and the late Howard Zinn are prime examples of this conscious or unconscious gate-keeping).

We have witnessed how easily activists on the radical left have fallen for obvious psyops and limited hangouts which mobilised progressive and anarchist movements on behalf of the Deep State. Left academics lament Trump while ignoring overarching realities which encompass patterns of criminal corruption that traverse the right-left divide. Meanwhile, their erstwhile activist colleagues on the street demonstrate Trump and on occasions, turn out to be more violent than the local Neo-Nazis whom they frequently bait.

The wish for a just society and equality for all is the reason for this type of social activism, we are told. Yet, it can be as superficial as it is disingenuous, often based on nothing more than personal dissatisfaction with one’s lot and the sense of power and meaning that comes from being a member of a cause. It emboldens the ego and the individual’s idea that s/he is socially significant; that s/he has earned a self-righteous badge of honour in fighting for freedom and the emancipation of the oppressed. If you cannot or do not wish to see the core reasons for how easily crowd psychology can be used against you, that one is merely a pawn and fighting for nothing but one’s own fragile identity, such energy can be swiftly exploited for all its transient worth by those in power. Without the wisdom to accompany this adherence to “social justice” more false narratives and ineffective “solutions” will nibble at the edges of resolution.

“Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Identity politics reflects the same unhealthy postmodernist programming and activism of choice. Whatever dark projections of unresolved trauma one wishes to externalise in order to exercise meaning and/or exorcise pain – group identity becomes the arbiter of reality rather than substance and facts. Of course, like any addiction that just makes it worse for the individual and much worse for all of us who have to deal with the psychic pollution and material chaos it creates. We don’t have social activism on the real issues. Instead, we have the collective hissy fit best represented by the Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) who are neither warrior-like or just. We have the violent emergence of Antifa who label themselves as anarchist and anti-fascist yet in truth, they are about as far from true anarchism as it is possible to be, whilst employing distinctly fascist methods to impose their views.

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The Hissy Fit Generation and The Loss of Free Speech I: Postmodernism (2)

“Don’t you give me that postmodern bullshit. There is truth, There is a truth. And what you want, or you feel, or you need, isn’t going to change the truth. Any more than it’s going to topple a skyscraper. There’s truth, and there’s belief. Don’t call a mule a stallion.”

— Carol Plum-Ucci, young adult novelist, essayist

You don’t need to give a shit about postmodernism and other tangential beliefs for them to work on you.

Before long, people are programmed to act in a certain way, use the correct language and associate with the right people because thinking this way becomes part of the socio-cultural constructs in which we live and have our being; it becomes a default auto-suggestion, a kind of neuro-linguistic leveller for interpersonal relationships acting at the subconscious level. Academia’s psychology of choice is transposed to cultural precepts and channelled swiftly across the global brain of info-tainment technology. People don’t even know they are following the herd because postmodernist thinking is designed to homogenise and consensualise; to enforce conformity through ostensibly benign principles. That’s how it seduces intellectuals who are happier living in their head than their heart, hence the seeding of these ideas in universities.

Canadian clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, Jordan Peterson is passionately against this brand of postmodernism and their adherents, having been on the receiving end of their witch-hunts for refusing to use the correct gender pronouns. (We’ll look at gender issues later on in the series). Peterson’s view on postmodernism is unequivocal and asserts the origins of this philosophy is rooted in cultural Marxism. From a recent interview given to The Epoch Times (see video below) he explains that by the 1960s even French intellectuals had to concede that state communism was a disaster and needed re-branding into a new ideological platform “under a post-modern guise;” identity politics would then swiftly take over the reins of popular socio-political movements for change.

It didn’t take long for this catch-all philosophy to spread through Anglo-American academia channelled through the traditions of workers’ emancipation and minority group rights. The unpopularity of Marxism meant that insights from the Frankfurt School of cultural Marxism were brought into play. Peterson states: “They started to play a sleight of hand, and instead of pitting the proletariat, the working class, against the bourgeois, they started to pit the oppressed against the oppressor. That opened up the avenue to identifying any number of groups as oppressed and oppressor and to continue the same narrative under a different name.” Postmodernist thinking s actually the same form of intellectual tyranny exemplified by state communism but re-invented through philosophical circus tricks ostensibly based on a collective social conscience. Unfortunately, it is anything but the latter. The professor explains:

“It was no longer specifically about economics,” he said. “It was about power. And everything to the postmodernists is about power. And that’s actually why they’re so dangerous, because if you’re engaged in a discussion with someone who believes in nothing but power, all they are motivated to do is to accrue all the power to them, because what else is there?” he said. “There’s no logic, there’s no investigation, there’s no negotiation, there’s no dialogue, there’s no discussion, there’s no meeting of minds and consensus. There’s power.”

“And so since the 1970s, under the guise of postmodernism, we’ve seen the rapid expansion of identity politics throughout the universities,” he said. “It’s come to dominate all of the humanities-which are dead as far as I can tell-and a huge proportion of the social sciences.”

“We’ve been publicly funding extremely radical, postmodern leftist thinkers who are hellbent on demolishing the fundamental substructure of Western civilization. And that’s no paranoid delusion. That’s their self-admitted goal,” he said, noting that their philosophy is heavily based in the ideas of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, “who, I think, most trenchantly formulated the anti-Western philosophy that is being pursued so assiduously by the radical left.”

“The people who hold this doctrine-this radical, postmodern, communitarian doctrine that makes racial identity or sexual identity or gender identity or some kind of group identity paramount-they’ve got control over most low-to-mid level bureaucratic structures, and many governments as well,” he said. “But even in the United States, where you know a lot of the governmental institutions have swung back to the Republican side, the postmodernist types have infiltrated bureaucratic organizations at the mid-to-upper level.” ^[1]

Peterson does not think its dangers nor “the degree to which it’s already infiltrated our culture can be overstated.”

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The Hissy Fit Generation and the Loss of Free Speech I: Postmodernism (1)

By M.K. Styllinski

Freedom of Speech

Right, as stated in the 1st and 14th Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, to express information, ideas, and opinions free of government restrictions based on content. A modern legal test of the legitimacy of proposed restrictions on freedom of speech was stated in the opinion by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in Schenk v. U.S. (1919): a restriction is legitimate only if the speech in question poses a “clear and present danger”—i.e., a risk or threat to safety or to other public interests that is serious and imminent. Many cases involving freedom of speech and of the press also have concerned defamation, obscenity, and prior restraint. – Encyclopedia Britannica

***

Hissy Fit

uk /ˈhɪs.i ˌfɪt/ us /ˈhɪs.i ˌfɪt/ informal: a sudden period of uncontrolled and silly anger like a child. – Cambridge English Dictionary

What Happened?

No, the above sub-heading is not a reference to Hillary Clinton’s embarrassingly awful publishing deal in which she attempts to cast herself as saintly victim of (non-existent) Russian malfeasance. This is about what happened to the principles of the left and its liberal brother; why we are seeing such psychological chaos rising up through left-liberal activism and the younger, socially-minded generations.

Take a look a some of these headlines from the past few years:

Institutional child abuse: First grader sent to principal’s office after ‘misgendering’ classmate

Denmark Offers Homes, Education To Jihadists In “Hug A Terrorist” Rehab Program

Stanford University course to study ‘abolishing whiteness’

Teacher suspended after ‘calling a trans boy a girl’

SJWs finally lose it: California college students claim no such thing as truth, ‘Truth’ is a tool of white supremacy

Berkeley snowflakes protest mid-term tests, demand ‘take-home’ exams instead

Compelled speech comes to Canada: Citizens using the ‘wrong’ gender pronoun could be accused of hate crimes

Collapse of masculinity: Millennial men turning to plastic surgery to increase self esteem

Hyper-activists target Confederate monuments across U.S. as Baltimore calls for them to be torn down

France may set age of consent at 13 after man acquitted of raping 11yo

Fired Google engineer Damore says the company is hiring and promoting workers based on race or gender

Swedish Left Party Chapter Wants To Make Urinating While Standing Illegal For Men

Black Lives Matter: Being born a white person automatically makes you a racist

———————

Alarming no?

30 years ago when I was a young, very bewildered 18 year-old, I was firmly of the belief that environmentalism and a liberal sprinkling of old school Marxism was just the ticket for a more humane and just society. Times have radically changed. Or maybe I just grew up. If my 18 year-old self could have had a brief window into his 48 year old future self that now sides with conservative values over left-liberal activism, he would have shook his head at the horror of it all.

Admittedly, I often think I’ve of stumbled into an alternate reality.

The truth is, I don’t naturally resonate to conservatism, moderate or otherwise. If you had to rubber stamp my forehead with an “-ism” then it would have to be agorism with a dash of old, peace-loving anarchism in the truest sense of the word. Nevertheless, I count myself as a liberal on certain issues, more libertarian or conservative on others. Call it a pick ‘n’ mix position of the best that our philosophical and political traditions can offer.

Shouldn’t that be the whole point in a sane and rational world?

Most political ideologies – much like most religions – have at their inception nuggets of golden knowledge which can potentially enrich societies. Obviously, that approach is not what we have in the world; only “My way or the highway” rules the day. Equally, this is not about whether we are left or right-leaning in our worldview and further entrenching the problem along partisan lines. This is concerned with upholding free speech for everyone so that reasoned discourse can be given the chance to prevail. Such a principle is unalterable for very precise reasons, as we will discover over the course of this series.

When I use the terms “moderate conservatism” and “left” or “left-liberal” I refer to the mindset rather than whatever political party is in power. The latter is irrelevant since the Conservative and Labour parties in the UK and the Democrat and Republican parties in the United States are still very much under the yoke of the (Deep) State’s social and economic dictates. It is this essential point that much of the left-liberal worldview is missing and gives nourishment to far right fringe groups by adopting an increasing and equally authoritarian line. This may sound very odd indeed if you consider yourself a traditional fighter of the liberal-left. But we will be explore how much of the left has been comprehensively ponerised i.e. infected by radical beliefs, in turn, turbo-charged by pathology and the implications for free speech.

I also want to make it absolutely clear that I am not throwing the baby out with the bath-water and suggesting that there is no racism, sexism or bigotry in general or that it should somehow be ignored. It does occur and it should be called out – if it is genuine. There has been great strides in addressing these issues, far greater progress has been made than one would think if listening to 3rd wave feminists, anti-racists and the like.

Which is why the focus is about those who have a vested interest in perpetuating and inflaming these “issues” due to their own psychological predispositions rather than any genuine wish to see a more equitable and fair society.

As the world becomes increasingly unstable (particularly in America) this mindset is growing like a virulent fungus and represents a dangerous threat to free speech and expression. It will mean whether we live in a democracy (however fragile that may be at present) or a form of soft totalitarianism that sometimes crudely or very subtly determines what you say or think. In other words: fascism. This is a shift which has developed through a form of neuro-hacking over decades, creating division and apparent tribalism, yet paradoxically encouraging conformity through a form of vertical collectivism. As I stated in World State Policies I:

So, what form has this “socialism” in the West actually taken? Simply put, collectivism is the opposite of individualism, where group thought, philosophy, action and principle overrides the needs of the individual. The term can be divided into horizontal collectivism and vertical collectivism. The former is collective decision-making among largely equal individuals, and is therefore based on decentralisation, while the latter is drawn from hierarchical power structures and socio-cultural conformity, and is based on centralisation. While such a drive to group endeavour can bring out the positive aspects of our interdependence and our shared experiences across the planet, the kind of collectivism we will explore is an overreaching form that employs both vertical and distorted horizontal forms into one vast entity – its expression having been ponerised by emerging strains of psychopathy. The onset of ponerogenesis will manifest by whatever channels deemed suitable in order to achieve Pathocracy. Remember that none of these ideologies are evil in themselves, but used in a pathocratic context, they become tools of destruction.

It is manifesting in complex, perhaps irreversible ways, through the very traditions that ostensibly speak up for the oppressed and disenfranchised. Such a collective social conscience is in danger of being replaced by a something quite different. It is being seeded in the younger generations who are least able to process its effects, therefore becoming it’s primary foot-soldiers. Since they are our future, this should be a concern to us all.; if that is, we can step outside our political allegiances and look squarely at the nature of the beast.

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