{"id":2245,"date":"2022-01-16T12:54:39","date_gmt":"2022-01-16T12:54:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2022\/01\/16\/more-malcolm-on-mass-formation\/"},"modified":"2022-01-16T12:54:39","modified_gmt":"2022-01-16T12:54:39","slug":"more-malcolm-on-mass-formation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2022\/01\/16\/more-malcolm-on-mass-formation\/","title":{"rendered":"More Malcolm on Mass Formation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here<\/a> at Motus Mentis<\/em>, the weblog of Malcolm Pollack.  Pollack is an uncommonly good writer as you will see from the quotation below.  More importantly, he speaks truth against the current madness. In my earlier post on his American Greatness<\/em> essay<\/a>, after acknowledging his even-handedness, I suggested that <\/span><\/p>\n

\n

. . . he may be giving aid and comfort to a false moral equivalentism.  Left and Right are not<\/em> moral equivalents. The Left is far worse.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I assumed that he would accept my mild criticism and he has (emphasis<\/span> added):<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Alas, in such times as these \u2013 in the growing heat of a simmering civil war \u2013 for an observer to comment on social tectonics from such a remote altitude makes him seem almost blithely unconcerned with the great battle shaping up on the plain far below. As a result, commenters and correspondents have taken me to task for being too even-handed in my description of the phenomenon; for making it seem as if the craziness here in 2022 is symmetrically distributed between both factions in our current social and political conflict. Our old friend Bill Vallicella was among them; you can read his post, and my response (from which some of this post is adapted), here<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

I think that\u2019s a fair critique, and in my article I should have made it clear that right now<\/em>, when it comes to the psychological manipulation of public narratives in order to focus an anxious and atomized public\u2019s attention on objects of fear and loathing, there is no equivalence at all between the two great factions. \u201cMass formation\u201d in today\u2019s America is overwhelmingly a \u201cBlue\u201d, not a \u201cRed\u201d, phenomenon.<\/span><\/p>\n

Readers of American Greatness<\/em>, and of this blog, will need little convincing on this score, but a few points are worth mentioning:<\/span><\/p>\n

First of all, it is a tremendous advantage in the manipulation of mass opinion to control the flow of information, and for many years now the American Left have controlled mass media, social media, internet-search technology, and education to the point of near-total information dominance.<\/span><\/p>\n

Second, the artificiality of the public narrative blaring from the towering minarets of our institutions is shown by its transience: as soon as one story collapses (remember \u201cRussian collusion\u201d, and \u201chands up, don\u2019t shoot\u201d?) another takes its place (think of Jussie Smollett, or \u201ctwo weeks to flatten the curve\u201d). Likewise, the extent to which these narratives are in fact calculated propaganda offensives is given away by the aggressive censorship of dissenting views. (Magna est veritas, et praevalebit<\/em>, the old saying goes \u2013 \u201cTruth is great, and will prevail\u201d \u2013 but to make falsehood<\/em> prevail requires some assistance.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Third, that the dominance of the Left\u2019s message in America today relies upon a widespread psychological vulnerability is further demonstrated by the extent to which it has managed to override both tradition and common sense in getting large numbers of people to deny what, until now, have been understood by everyone everywhere to be objectively existing features and categories of the natural world.  To participate in polite society today \u2013 or, to put that more accurately, to be able to keep your job, get a college degree, or avoid being deplatformed from most media \u2013 we are expected to go along with things that most people know in their hearts are simply not so: that sex and race are purely social constructs; that men can become pregnant and bear children; that biology and heritability have nothing to do with human traits, and with their statistical distribution in populations; that cultures and peoples can be mixed and jumbled together at random without affecting the cohesion and stability of formerly homogeneous societies; that \u201cequality\u201d means that people cannot vary in talents, abilities, and aptitudes; that the greatest threat to American society is \u201cwhite supremacy\u201d; that everything in the modern Western world, from mathematics<\/a> to nuclear families<\/a> to pumpkin-spice lattes<\/a>, is racist; that intelligence is a meaningless and unquantifiable concept; that when different identity groups perform differently on qualifying tests for education and employment, those tests should simply be discarded; that for nations to control their borders is inherently immoral; that the interests of criminals trump those of law-abiding citizens; that parents should have no say in how their children are educated; that members of various, designated groups are not to be considered responsible agents; that the way to deal with rising crime is to stop arresting people; that the 2020 election was squeaky-clean; that the January 6th protest was an assault on a par with Pearl Harbor and 9\/11 (while the three-day siege of the White House by BLM and Antifa, in which hunrdeds of officers were injured, and the First Family had to be evacuated, was not); that the protests of that summer were \u201cmostly peaceful\u201d; and no end of other obvious falsehoods and absurdities.<\/span><\/p>\n

Above all, what marks the current mental state of the American Left as psychologically abnormal is its suicidal self-abnegation. I can think of no other example in all of history of a coherent, prosperous and homogeneous society, with a robust civic culture and a proud historical mythos, suddenly deciding en masse <\/em>to reject and denounce its heritage, declare its cherished cultural traditions shameful and immoral, fling open its borders to engage in deliberate ethnic, religious, and cultural dilution, and cheer on the accelerating displacement of its majority population and the gradual decomposition of cohesion and civil order. This all seems, when compared to the normal behavior of human societies, completely insane.<\/span><\/p>\n

Considering all this, then, I hope it is clear that, although the phenomenon now being called \u201cmass formation\u201d has been observed in all ages and cultures, and must be considered in some sense a \u201cuniversal\u201d feature of our nature, its current manifestation in the United States is anything but symmetrical, and is overwhelmingly an affliction of the Left \u2014  and that those of us who wish to have any chance of preserving the great American experiment must, in this hour of crisis, fight it with everything we\u2019ve got.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here at Motus Mentis, the weblog of Malcolm Pollack.  Pollack is an uncommonly good writer as you will see from the quotation below.  More importantly, he speaks truth against the current madness. In my earlier post on his American Greatness essay, after acknowledging his even-handedness, I suggested that  . . . he may be giving … Continue reading “More Malcolm on Mass Formation”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[180,221],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-decline-of-the-west","category-psychology-and-personality-typology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2245\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}