Answering A Question...

One of the better Blogs out there, Dr. Sanity, is basically asking the question of how we got where we are today, with the crisis of the western Spirit, to coin a phrase.

What we seem to be facing is not something that has recently happened, but rather is something that has accumulated over time. The crisis we are facing is not a crisis of the western Spirit, but rather a crisis of that ideology that dominated most of the last century, the crisis of socialism.

What did socialists want? They were radical utopianists, believing that they would be the culmination of the historical processes described by Marx, who was inspired by Hegel. Dead white males all of them.

The key to understanding socialism isn't the usual mickeymouse ideological palaver, but rather understanding that it was the attempt by European intellectuals of the 19th century to find a way to come to power, to grasp control of their societies from the hereditary genetic cesspools of European nobility. In order to do this, they had to create a new man, the utopia of a new man. To achieve their goals they also needed to generate a new mode of behavior, a pre-revolutionary actionism, embodied by the anarchists and nihilists that ended up generating WW1 by killing the Archduke Ferdinand and bringing ruin to the established societies of Europe. Germany was just a few meals away from socialist revolution, while England lost its empire due to exhaustion; France was decimated, losing an entire generation of petite bourgeoisie.

The key to any sort of revolution or pre-revolutionary activity is the creation of the activist, the committed party member whose dedication to the revolutionary goals stops at nothing, not with family, not with laws and civil society, not with morals, not with anything but the revolution as such.

This person believes that they understand society better than the society itself ever can, and that they are morally superior to that society, because the society is per definitio morally corrupt and incapable of reform. This moral superiority exists only in the minds of the revolutionary elite and is based on the need for destruction of the existing system, regardless of the costs, because the future goal, the radical utopian society, is valued above all. Destroying the existing society in order to achieve the radical utopian society is absolutely necessary, for in reality the revolutionary must transcend his or her former morals, social strictures and civil constructions.

The dedicated revolutionary has nothing but contempt for those living in what they believe to be the outmoded society, as the failures of that society condemn it, in the revolutionary socialist construct, necessarily to destruction, with the rebirth of the future radical utopian society guided, of course, by the revolutionary elite. This is standard leninist revolutionary theory, and serves as the core functionality for all communist revolutions in the 20th century.

It is, of course, condemned to failure as human nature will invariably bring the collapse of the revolution and it's descent, as has been the case for all socialist and communist revolutions, into corruption, mass murder and abject failure.

But the problem is that for a certain kind of individual, the potential for power is so fundamentally attractive that they will do anything, literally, to achieve the kind of power to reshape the world as they see fit.

For this purpose they need what they call, in the literature, "useful idiots". Useful idiots are a manifestation of the failure of society, as they are committed to destroy it without the necessary revolutionary consciousness: they possess, at best, "false consciousness" that after the revolution provides the basis by which the true revolutionary elite can purge them from any sort of position of power.

What makes a "useful idiot"?

First of all, that they can be manipulated by the revolutionary elite for their aims. The good and proper useful idiot is someone who unreflexively adopts revolutionary positions and thought as their own, unable to understand that they are adopting positions that lead to their own destruction. They are usually shallow individuals, failures themselves in bourgeois society, people of unsound intellectual abilities who adopt the revolutionary themes as a replacement for their own failure to leave a meaningful life. They parrot the terminology without being able to think for themselves, indeed adopting positions that invariably lead to their own destruction, as they long for superior positions in society - that they feel are wrongly denied to them - while the revolutionary elite will never allow them to take such positions, as they are reserved for themselves.

Unreflexive, unthinking support is the key: this is best spread amongst the young and impressionable, with special emphasis on recruiting the attractive, exploiting as well the loopholes and contradictions of sexual mores so as to appeal to the lower instincts. True revolutionaries are not distracted by such methods, but useful udiots are.

Further, useful idiots are the kind of political activists for whom literally everything is about politics, where politics are forcibly introduced into all streams of human activity, where the entire goal is the politicization of every day life, with the goal of "exposing" the contradictions of society and creating the kind of emotional responses that only radicalized politics (or fundamental religious fervor) achieves: the shutting down, as it were, of the higher intellectual thought processes in order to install unthinking hate and reflex disgust. The methods are well-known and require only funding and finding the necessary provocateurs to create a pre-revolutionary mass, unthinking and reflexive, furious with the existing power structure, with the demonization of their opponents, up to and including the declaration that the political opponents are not really even human (usually describing them as pigs, jackals, hyenas, dogs, etc).

Any existing society has its problems and contradicitons. That is why any given society can be attacked by not merely exposing those problems and contradictions - that is the start - but more fundamentally turning that society into nothing more than the problems and contradictions. Hence the positive aspects of any society must be nullified: if a society has a strong and robust economic sector providing high levels of employment, that must be attacked and the economy severally weakend in order to achieve pre-revolutionary status; if a society has strong family structures, then these must be destroyed for the same reason. The key for the revolutionary elite is to create the pre-revolutionary situation, where none are satisfied, where the demand for change and leadership becomes paramount, where the revolutionary elite can start to show itself and achieve control of the revolutionary process.

We're not talking here of any concrete example, any concrete society: this is much more the generic blueprint of how a leninist elite attacks any society, be it agrarian, developing, developed or whatever.

Now, Dr. Sanity asks this question:

Is it any wonder that we are horribly confused and disoriented, not knowing who we are or where we are going? Is it any wonder that today's events do not seem to have any rhyme or reason?

Does what I have written now start to make sense? I am not convinced that we are looking at a pre-revolutionary situation in the US, but we are looking at the attempt. The uncertainty, the lack of direction, the "failure" of the system are at the core of what we are looking at.

She also says this:

Somewhere in the last fifty years or so, the entire field of philosophy has been completely hijacked by its most narcissistically-inclined branch--politics. Metaphysics, epistemology, and even ethics, are all now subservient to politic hows. Normally there is a heirarchical relationship between all the branches; with the base being metaphysics, the study and the nature of existence. Epistemology is dependent on and closely related to metaphysics, and it is the study of how we know reality and existence; while ethics, the study of how humans should act, is dependent on epistemology. Politics--or how humans should interact in society--should be dependent on ethics. Yet in our postmodern world we have turned it all upside down. We are told how we should properly interact and it has become the ethical standard of behavior. Having set up this relativistic ethical standard; postmodern intellectuals can now question both how we know reality and even insist that it does not exist separately and independenly from our senses.

The question isn't how it came to this: we know that liberal society has been under attack for decades. Post-modern intellectuals have become the useful idiots of the 21st century: for them, everything is politicized, everything is interpreted by the filter of political activism and the core underlying will to power; the only thing that matters, literally, is power, its achievement, with little or no thought as to why this power is supposed to be achieved.

The Democratic Party has abdicated to the radical left that is now trying to write the future, a very ugly future, and is filled with useful idiots, the screaming and gesticulating fools whose fundamental lack of understanding for what they are doing will condemn either them to perdition or will lead to a massive break in the US body politic.

Which is exactly what any revolutionary elite wants. For them it's a win-win situation: on the one hand, the Democratic Party, if it collapses from within due to its own internal contradictions, with its great tradition and history, will be destroyed, sacrificed to radicalize a significant portion of American society; on the other hand, if there is a massive break in the US body politic, with massive alienation from the ideals and goals of this over 230 year experiment in republican democracy, the strains of that rupture will achieve the same effect.

Who is this revolutionary elite?

Well, they're not hiding. They have no need: no one is willing to take them at their word, just as no one was willing to believe what Lenin had written, as no one was willing to read what Hitler had written.

They are the people behind Move.On, behind the "democratic grassroots" activism, the people behind ANSWER.

And they truly believe themselves to be the revolutionary elite that will perservere, as they see their useful idiots falling over themselves to finance their own destruction. They do hide in the shadows, but only because they have been able to find so many useful idiots.