That was a good summary of how zealotry leads people into very dangerous places.
Some US opinion seems to be that poking sticks at China plays well with wavering voters and might help the Democratic Party in upcoming elections. In other words it’s just Punch And Judy for domestic consumption. Carlson’s interviewee calls it posing/posturing.
If the only indication you have of how someone, or some corporate entity, intends to behave in future is their current outward behaviour and their prior patterns of behaviour, then that is what will influence the outside observer. Private phone calls saying it’s just some panto for the plebs, Xi, don’t worry, ain’t gonna cut it. Individuals who repeatedly threaten other people and use violence often, alas not always, end up in life imprisonment. That is where the political classes belong, starting with the US.
Sorry for the delay, K. I must admit that I had to look-up Egregores - I found it very interesting - - would you say that’s something akin to a herd mentality? Groups of people acting as one - - I recall the funeral of Kevin Brady at Milltown Cemetery in 1988 - - 2 British soldiers blundered into the cortege and the car they were in was surrounded by mourners - - when one of the soldiers discharged his gun from inside the car, aerial footage of the incident showed the mourners response, as they en masse moved away from the car and then converged back on it - a herd instinct.
In my view of the evil doers of today I don’t see them acting as a herd/group in an instinctive manner per se (beyond a natural desire to nest feather), as each individual has plenty of time to ponder what it is they are doing - - remember that old notion that we can distinguish between right and wrong…well nowadays I don’t think people can.
Old TLNers may recall that I often fell out with the poster West Virginia - but there is one very simple comment WV posited that I value greatly: ‘something has been done to people’! Something indeed has been done to people - it seems that many people never reach a stage of development where they can distinguish right from wrong - good from evil. Just to give one example of how people (children really, as they turn them when they’re young - - it’s a more sure fire way of increasing the psychopath quotient), and I am sorry to mention Ian Hislop here - but I heard him on Marcus Brigstock’s ‘I’ve Never Seen Star Wars’ last evening - the premise of the show is that guests have to try things they’ve never experienced - one of Hislop’s trials was to play the game, Grand Theft Auto - like any right-minded person he found the game revolting - - well it may seem like something of a stretch, but I’d say that stimuli such as GTA (Tour of Duty…etc) are part of the reason evil in this world appears to be so evident and escalating to horrendous proportions - - ‘something has been done to people’ - and the doing isn’t done - - the toxicity of ‘debate’ nowadays is shocking - - in fact people don’t ‘debate’ - it’s all hectoring and shouting - - I tried a year or so back to talk about the C19 bollocks to a friend - on paper he is incredibly smart - but could he hear what I was saying - NO, because he literally put his fingers in his ears and started making noises to drown-out my utterings - he just simply could not bear to hear me. That’s where we seem to be - we’re at a juncture where the notion of rational ‘debate’ is a thing of yore.
Very briefly, Rhis - I don’t agree - I really don’t think humans are war-addicted in any natural sense - the martial mentality is part of that thing that ‘has been done to people’. I reckon humans have been so wrenched from our natural environment and mindset that we nowadays simply don’t understand who and what we are, or could be if we could only rid ourselves of the inhuman’s yoke.
Absolutely not. I think puttering around the edges of truth, if that even means anything, is all we can safely do. So here’s a bit more
I don’t have any great wisdom to offer on egregores but will be reading around the subject. I think maybe a collective consciousness or mass formation generates an energy. Egregores supposedly feed on this. It sounds very like the sort of thing Jung touched upon, and Erich Fromm in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (which I’m halfway through). If I meditate with a group of other people it feels different, somehow more powerful, than sitting alone.
Herd mentality, or mimesis/contagion, are other words for this I think. People can think as individuals and as ‘parts’ of something larger, even at the same time: our bicameral minds can think AND observe that thinking. We can act without thinking too, or perhaps more accurately in a highly distracted way.
Mass formations are not necessarily a sinister thing, fellow feeling can be very noble,
and being part of the crowd when your favourite team is doing well is a fine feeling. This is easily exploitable though. And people are always keen to get another hit of that fine feeling. Gaming exploits this.
I’ve never seen Star Wars but vaguely recall seeing one or two episodes of I’ve Never Seen Star Wars. My sons both played GTA, the older and more ‘intellectual’ was quite into it for a while. (The younger tends to flit about and not get immersed in quite the same way.) He’s still a big gamer and one he plays now seems to be a Wild West version of GTA where wandering around stealing horses and shooting people takes the place of wandering around stealing cars and shooting people. Which is vile, but it’s the systems of reward and steadily increasing stakes that hook people. This is evident in the Candy Crush and collecting unicorns games aimed at the very young too. As you said: “they turn them when they’re young”.
I gather that the latest GTA will offer more feminised user experience, whatever that is supposed to mean. More female/trans characters with gats and 'Raris I guess.
Darren Allen likens these games to porn, in the sense that they condition people to think of themselves and others as objects.
Si, I too think that humans left to live in little self-reliant sub-Dunbar-number groups, in the great wilderness, with plenty of empty, unpopulated (with humans) space to vanish into when necessary, will mostly be peaceable, hospitable to passing strangers, and generally the naturally tolerant and generous way we like to think of ourselves.
The problems seem to arise when people start living in swarms, in cities, and doing settled agriculture to feed the large numbers. That always seems to bring out different behaviours in hom-sap, not at all like the easy-going behaviours of gatherer-hunters living in an apparently limitless Garden of Eden.
Whatever the reason, there’s no denying that, by some motivation, our species has been chronically committed to wars and the preparation for wars, for several thousand years at least, since the Agrarian Revolution began spreading from its - mutliple - birth-places; and possibly for some time preliminary to that.
I think it’s all triggered by population-density thresholds, which simply switch us onto alternative behaviour suites, as we pass up through the thresholds. And it gets worse, the bigger the population-overshoot balloons, as it has in recent decades: hence the sense of some new evil in the world, perhaps…?
Maybe. But living in the present is to live inside reality. Building up a surplus, and worrying that someone might steal it, but in any case having too much time on one’s hands… The devil will find work for idle hands to do.
Some of the massive Neolithic projects like Silbury and Avebury may simply have been about “doing” in a purposive way. The end result was a marvellous achievement but the collective effort, and no doubt much wassailing and feasting along the way, must have been excellent social cement. I say this as a dedicated grumpy misanthrope, bear that in mind
Morning Si. I’m not saying your wrong - I’m not sure if you’re right or wrong. I’m conflicted on the issue and this has been bugging me for a long time. I have great faith in Fletcher Prouty’s revelations and his quote I posted above supports what you’re saying I think.
I’ve been reading these two very interesting but long articles by Cynthia Chung (posted further below and well worth reading if you have the time) which rely on FP a fair bit. Allen Dulles had powerful connections with the Nazis before, during and after WW2 and had enormous influence on how the CIA developed since 1947 and what it became. Sometimes I get the feeling that there’s something missing in all of this and that Dulles was actually working for the benefit of persons unknown. i.e.not just the US elite and their push for global hegemony but perhaps the group of people FP was talking about. (Well, no shit Sherlock!)
On the other hand it seems we now have the world being split between the western globalists that appear to have lost the plot and the “sovereignists” Russia and China, BRICS etc:
