Sunday, August 15, 2010

Deprogramming the Left

The Republic is being destroyed from within by a contingency of radicals set on leveling the capitalist economy and crushing the American dream. These true believers are resistant to their political opposition's declamations to cease and desist in their hostile and inhumane activities.

No exhortations succeed in deterring them.

Though a minority, these radicals wield immense influence over millions from their well-situated positions in the news media, entertainment industry, courts, schools, and universities. Those who would dare cross these activists may find themselves slurred in a "respected" newspaper or targeted by a nightly "news" host. These radicals have no respect for morality or decency, employing an Alinskyite ends-justify-the-means mentality while carrying out their strategy of political warfare.

For any insurgency, successful political warfare consists primarily of winning hearts and minds. And this is the key to understanding the left's mental guerrilla warfare.

Not having created or produced anything useful themselves, leftists have no demonstrable accomplishments for people to admire. Everything the left 'accomplishes' is predicated on the labor, creativity, and productivity of others. The left cannot point to the miraculous victory of the American revolution and the unprecedented establishment of a government based on the ideal of human freedom. They cannot point to the immense good that has proceeded from industrialism harnessed by a free market. They can only criticize the "good for being the good," as Ayn Rand put it, and this is the essence of the New Left's "Critical Theory."

To accomplish a mindset guided by the rejection of facts, reason, evidence, and reality, one must achieve two things: The instillation of an all-encompassing utopian worldview held together by sheer emotion, and the social reinforcement of the moral imperative to reject any contradicting evidence, which becomes perceived by the subject as an alien element that threatens the integrity of the utopian worldview.

The radicals' minds are thus systematically programmed from the earliest age to reject facts, evidence, logic, and reason. Abusing social trust when they ascend to authority figures in schools and universities, radicals manipulate the learning environment of students by pressuring or alienating non-conformists. Much of the indoctrination of the next generation of radicals occurs in two ways; the first manner I have to coin "compassionism," the second, is aesthetics.

The pretense that liberals are more compassionate than conservatives is the cornerstone of the leftist indoctrination process. It is what maintains the leftist's distorted mental infrastructure in light of rational argumentation and counterfactual information.

Utilizing the pretense of authority in the presence of the mentally vulnerable, radicals overwhelm any rational resistance to their program with scorn, ridicule, and if necessary, force.

Radicals are not content to indoctrinate the young, of course, They must broaden their assault on the capitalist system. The means of transmitting leftist anti-values in the public sphere tends to fall under the umbrella of aesthetics. Art, music, and film are the trojan horses for inculcating or reinforcing leftism in the masses, oftentimes without people's awareness of it.

The Italian communist Antonio Gramsci realized that politics is carried out on two planes: The hegemonic cultural plane (the dominant set of ideas, values, and beliefs that support and sustain the "superstructure") and the economic base. If leftists came out and outright attacked the hegemonic culture, or "capitalism," there would be instant reaction and opposition.

Instead of carrying our this suicidal plan, neomarxists (the heirs of Marxism who acknowledged the shortcomings of its materialist doctrine) set themselves to infiltrating the cultural institutions, and from there would dictate "political correctness." Their strategy of infiltration was to diffuse the perception of threat to the capitalist system (which the great majority of people benefited from) by undertaking various seemingly innocuous but destructive "causes" like feminism, environmentalism, and black liberation theology, while hiding under the veil of "compassion." Needless to say, there is nothing "compassionate" about destroying the capitalist economy, and the human freedom that both drives it and is sustained by it.

Confident that they have captured the institutions of culture, law, and education, the radicals now feel confident that they can openly capture the economic base. Although they have eroded private property and the independence it gives rise to for over a century, at no point has their assault on the capitalist base been so brazen.

If the neomarxist plan is to fail, and there is some indication that it is struggling to win either the hearts and minds of the public (see here and here) or the enforcement apparatus of military and the police, we must wage an assault upon the leftists' ideals, which are precisely divorced from reality.

But how to implement reason in those people who have been indoctrinated to be both irrational and uncritical in regards to their own belief system? The following is a plan that will confront the irrational, and especially, the intelligent but half-rational, leftists and force them to acknowledge the premises that rationality, freedom, and capitalism are built upon.

Since open political confrontation would provoke immediate reaction from the leftist, or from those guided by leftist assumptions, we should carry out our deprogramming process on the seemingly unpolitical level of assumptions.

Those familiar with post-modernist critique will immediately understand what I am driving at. Post-modernism holds that there are "subaltern" political ideas that are manifested in the culture; including in literature, art, and "news "narratives.  The leftist have used "narratives" to mask their plans to delegitimize any universalist claims to human morality and decency, thereby robbing us of our Enlightenment legacy.  A perfectly anti-Gramscian counter-offensive begins by giving rise to the sublimated; by engaging in the ongoing tacit political warfare that takes place in the culture between elections.

We all have recognized a certain helpless feeling in ourselves while anticipating the elections that increasingly seem to decide the fate of our Republic. While the left carries its warfare our on a day-to-day basis, we are left breathlessly fighting at shadows or striking out at the superficial manifestations of the fundamental, deeper war taking place for our minds.

Here is something we all can do, or to integrate into our daily battles with the left, who are, for all intents and purposes, crypto-communists. It integrates and makes explicit common-sense, which is appreciated by the dwindling majority of people who work in material reality, and undercuts the irrational and unrealistic basis that leftism is erected upon.

The following is but an illustration of the kinds of assumptions that can be directly attacked while maintaining an apolitical veneer. I recommend forcing a true or false response, or a yes or no answer, from the soft leftist, and explicitly reinforcing such assumptions in our youth, who are exposed most intensely to leftist arguments:

Deprogramming the left

1. Rationality (or preferences among alternatives)

Do we have to make choices in life?
Are some options better than others?
Are all opinions equal?
Do actions have reactions?
Does behavior have consequences?
What would a life without science look like?
Is emotion sufficient for man's survival?

2. Morality
Do we make up morality?
Or is there some other source (i.e., reality) that morality derives from?
Is a man born into the world owned by others? Or is he free?
Should good behavior be rewarded?
Should bad behavior be punished?
Should feeling good be the basis for morality?
Can one have a right that imposes a demand on another's life or labor? If so, what happens to others' rights?
Who controls the expenditure of one's energy?
Who should control how one lives one's life, as long as it doesn't interfere with others' lives?
What does freedom mean? Does it mean the ability to make choices among alternatives?
What is the relationship of reality to freedom?
Can politicians be trusted to safeguard your freedom?
Do groups actually exist in reality? Or, do collectives actually exist?
Are some cultures better for human beings than others?
Should countries strive to become better or should they strive to become equal with others?

3. Economy (the most overly political and the most difficult for radicals to understand)
Should human beings have to work to live?
Is labor an assumption of human life? In other words, is your labor voluntary?
Should where you work and how you work be voluntary?
Do you control what you buy, or does what you buy control you? If so, how does it control you?
What interest does your boss have in employing you?
Are your interests and your boss's interests opposed to one another?
Are there material limits on resources?
If so, what does this imply for an economy?
How should we recognize limits on resources and how they get distributed? By what politicians want, or by what individuals want?
Are individuals similar or different? Is so, why?
Think of a random number from one to a hundred. Why don't I think the same number?
Is money different from wealth?
Does printing money increase wealth?
Should paper money represent value?
If one is paid money, should it be in trade or for adding value to the economy?
What happens when the government gives money to unproductive people?
What are the consequences of this for those who do produce goods and services?
Is debt a good or a bad thing?
Do debts have to be paid back?

These are but some illustrations of the main idea, and that is to uproot leftism by attacking its unrealistic and irrational assumptions. To force people to make prudent and wise choices, both personally and politically, this is the ultimate task that is required to re-establish and sutain a rational, free, and prosperous nation.

No comments: