politics – Page 235

The Right is Surging Because Authority Has Failed the People of the West

donaldtrump

Doom and gloom abounds in the public consciousness. A popular line of reasoning at the moment is to follow the parallels between the rise of totalitarianism in the early 20th century and the current global political situation. Predictably, fingers are being pointed, but those of us with an understanding of history are reluctant to do so just yet.

A currently popular NZ Herald article outlines the reasoning. In short, “there are chilling similarities between the terrifying dictators who led us into WWI and WWII and modern politicians such as Vladimir Putin, Robert Mugabe and US Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump”.

Apparently our world is in an especially precarious place right now because of countries like Russia, which is “a dictatorship with a charismatic leader using fear and passion to establish a cult around himself”. The article goes on to predict that a great war is coming because politicians are running for power based on a platform of division and scaremongering.

The joke is that every authority figure does this – setting the people against each other is simply the only way to stay in authority! It isn’t limited to Hitler and Trump – every king, every prime minister, every president, ever, has always stoked fear and chaos for the simple reason that only scared people will give their power away to authority figures.

If you disagree, try to name a single politician who has ever been voted to power on a platform that stoked up no hate against anyone. It’s impossible! At the very minimum, the left always stokes hatred against the rich and established and the right always stokes hatred against the poor and disenfranchised. The libertarians have created a niche by stoking hatred against both the right and the left, and the Greens have found a niche stoking up passive-aggressive hatred against the working classes. In wartime the enemy is some foreign tribe, and in the absence of anything else politicians can always stoke hatred against the Jew.

The problem is not that Trump and Putin are shamelessly taking advantage of a “perfect storm” of adverse factors. The problem is that authority figures have consistently failed us – every time we have given them our power, they have used it against us to control us, to steal money from us, to send us to die on military adventures or to put us in cages.

It’s time to realise that this is the very nature of authority, and that crime is what we will get by continuing to submit to it.

George W Bush and Tony Blair have not faced prosecution for their illegal invasion of Iraq that killed over a million people. Hillary Clinton blatantly broke the law and was nominated for President anyway. Barack Obama has committed war crimes with the US drone program and will not be prosecuted. All authority figures in the West have persecuted their own people with the War on Drugs, and no-one has been held to account. It seems that once a person achieves a certain level of authority, we are happy to let them be above the law.

This problem cannot be solved by voting for a different authority figure! The constant use of bait-and-switch, in which the ruling class gives us all manner of choice for leader but only within a very narrow, controlled band, guarantees that we will never get an authority figure in power who actually cares about the people. And if anyone stands up who does, the media will tell us that he is a populist and therefore the next Hitler!

We, the people of the West, need to take back our power from the authority figures that have failed us.

Do not give your power to politicians by voting.

Do not give your power to the Police by dobbing in your neighbours for victimless crimes.

Do not give your power to the media by giving your attention to their squawkings and hatemongering.

Do not give your power to the corporate machine by buying things you don’t need.

Do not give your power to religions that claim God has declared another group of people to be inferior. It doesn’t matter if it’s gays, women, or outsiders – do not give your power to any priest that tries to divide you against others.

Do not give your power to the usurers by borrowing money for short term pleasure.

Do not give your power away to anyone claiming to be an ‘expert’ who cannot demonstrate a superior capacity for reasoning and honesty.

Do not give your power away by believing anything you are told, including this article.

If we, the people of the West, do not give our authority away to incompetent bullshitters and swindlers, we will be able to build a decent world from the ashes of what’s coming.

The West is awake!

Anatomy of Failure

This photoessay, to be taken between now and November, will chart the failure of Hillary Clinton’s Presidential bid. The medium chosen is the form of screen captures of my BetFair account, in which I document making heaps of money as Hillary’s campaign goes down the toilet.

01 MAY (the day God told me Hillary was going to lose)

brexit

21 JUL

trumpatelection

28 JUL

crookedhillary

03 AUG – Hillary storms back into a dominant position! Must be time to load up on Trump some more…

03aug

04 AUG – Over three months until the election, Hillary is in to $1.33. The Donald has blown out to $4.50, are we going to look silly here going against the Clinton machine?

trumpback04aug

11 AUG – The Donald collapses on news that he has been encouraging his supporters to kill Hillary Clinton in event of him losing the election.

11aug

14 SEP – after surging for a while, concerns about Hillary’s health come into play when she falls ill at a 9/11 memorial.

14september

If You Have Ever Obeyed an Authority Figure, You Are Capable of Murder

nazideathditch

The title of this article is the subject of today’s psychology lesson. When we read about history, and we read about the sort of thing that humans are capable of doing to each other, we often come to ask ourselves how it came to be that humans are so willing to do terrible things to each other, and if there is any way that the rest of us could prevent it.

Almost implicit in this line of reasoning is that we, ourselves, would of course not have done such terrible things had we been there. We would not do those evil things because if an authority figure told us to, we would simply refuse. Simple as that, right?

Evidence suggests that this line of reasoning is based on a flawed understanding of human psychology. When it comes down to it, the vast majority of people will obey almost any order given to them by someone they consider an authority figure, even if that order is to directly cause the suffering of another human being. This was demonstrated by the Milgram experiments conducted in the 1960s.

The most surprising thing about the Milgram experiments may not have been how willing people were to hurt other people on command from an authority figure. Arguably more surprising was the fact that very few people, not even those with an education in psychology, anticipated this result. The vast majority of people believed that very few experiment participants would go as far as inflicting a high voltage electric shock to someone who had already been electrocuted unconscious, merely because the person telling them to do so was wearing a lab coat and therefore looked like an authority figure.

The truth is this: human beings are, for the most part, craven, arse-licking cowards. Mostly it’s our own egos that prevent us from accepting this fact.

If this argument is not fully convincing, consider the following thought experiment.

You are at war. You have not slept for 72 hours as you have seen constant combat. Your body is agony from adrenaline shock. The inside of your pants are covered in sticky shit, as you shat yourself when a shell went off near you yesterday and the shockwave almost stopped your heart, and you haven’t had a chance to do anything about it. Every time you catch a moment to breathe, you see an image of your buddy who had his head blown off about 200 metres back.

Your squad has taken some men captives, and your officer is trying to work out if they are combatants or the civilians they say they are. The people you have detained are young men, some probably teenagers, just boys.

Then a message comes through the radio. Your forces have suffered a setback on a nearby ridge and your company is to be pulled out from their current location to plug the breach. There is no longer any time to determine if the men are combatants or not, and if you let them go they might come back and kill you or your buddies.

Your commanding officer decides that most of them are of fighting age, and those who are not soon would be anyway. The next thing you know, the captives are up against a wall, you’re looking at them over the barrel of your rifle, and your commanding officer gives you an order to fire. The last thought you have before you hear the order is that there are certainly some innocents among them.

In that situation, do you pull the trigger?

If you know much about human psychology, you will know that fewer than one person in ten thousand would refuse to pull the trigger in a situation like that. Not out of hatred, not out of sadism, not out of inherent malice or anything like that.

Because it isn’t hatred that leads to mass murders. It isn’t prejudice. It isn’t things like saying that blacks have low IQs, or that Asians are cruel, or that Europeans produce an inordinate amount of sex offenders.

The human quality that leads to millions of innocent people being stuffed into gas chambers is obedience.

If you believe that any other person has the right to decide who you should kill and when, you are already a murderer in potential if not in deed.

Is Angela Merkel the Yin to the Yang of Adolf Hitler?

hitlermerkel

Angela Merkel and Adolf Hitler are in many ways very similar, and in many ways very different. Both have been absolute disasters for Germany, but in entirely different ways, reflecting the 50-60-year cycle of the oscillations of the Great Pendulum of history.

Hitler was a disaster for Germany because of an excess of masculine energy. His time as leader was marked by ceaseless aggression against all enemies, real or imagined. In a world where only those with the will to commit violence were worthy of life, to rest was to die. His hubris was to believe that through an act of genius it was possible to go to war with France, Britain, the USSR and the USA all at the same time and to win.

If the fundamental masculine error is attacking when one should have stayed peaceful, the fundamental feminine error is a failure to act when one should have acted. In our societies today, this manifests as an inability to draw distinctions. It is not fashionable to say that another group of people is in any way different to ourselves. Drawing any distinction is seen as prejudiced – an act of hatred, which is one step towards building gas chambers for the undesirables.

Merkel’s passivity in the face of what amounts to an invasion of foreign, military age men, will prove to have been a disaster for Germany because of an excess of feminine energy. Ample warning was given as to the likely consequences of throwing open the borders. Merkel was told that some Islamists would use this as an invitation to enter Europe and commit acts of terrorism. She chose not to act on these warnings, perhaps naively trusting that the refugees would be good-natured.

After all, yin energy is against the very concept of borders as this necessitates a division of the Earth, which is of course a yang action.

We are currently in a feminine age as a consequence of the fear and shame created by the masculine excesses of World War II. This has been positive and negative. On the positive side, recent decades have been marked by a heightened degree of compassion towards many of the vulnerable in our own societies. On the negative, we have failed to act in time to protect ourselves against environmental and demographic threats.

This column believes that we are in an age of change. It is possible that, in the same way Hitler’s excesses led to a feminine age of tolerance and compassion, Merkel’s excesses may lead to a masculine age of confrontation and division.