Anybody that studies Jonestown, Waco, Germany in 1938, etc HAS to contemplate what happened to the people who followed and did horrible things to others. In my own contemplations there was a strong drive to look for a single bullet as the root cause: "It was Jim Jones!" "It was Adoph Hitler!" "It was Pol Pot!" Find that source causali…
Anybody that studies Jonestown, Waco, Germany in 1938, etc HAS to contemplate what happened to the people who followed and did horrible things to others. In my own contemplations there was a strong drive to look for a single bullet as the root cause: "It was Jim Jones!" "It was Adoph Hitler!" "It was Pol Pot!" Find that source causality and eliminate it and you eliminate the problem, right?
It's just not that simple. There ARE predators among us, no doubt. But the deeper question in the sorts of cases I just mentioned is WHY do they gain traction? What sort of power do they have over their followers that would take what appear to be regular folks and turn them into monsters (please do not read me to say we should have any pity for the likes Jospeh Goebbels and his ilk--they were monsters who were attracted to somebody that would let them be the full psychopaths they in fact were). How did a church goer and family man become the ghoul that (relucantly or not) was responsible for dropping zyklon gas into the showers at Auschwitz-Birkenau?
Desmet is wrestling with that problem. He is actually building on the earlier work by author, Gustav Le Bon, who's amazing work The_Crowd:_A_Study_of_the_Popular_Mind was mind blowing for me. Look him up--I think the work, published in 1895, is available online for free (if it hasn't been purged!)
Desmet is asking a fair question: How did this happen? How did 2/3 of the western world completely fall for the storyline spun by the likes of a little bespectacled wart and his scarf-wearing hand maiden? What super power did they wield that captured the minds of otherwise brilliant people and made them shut down their businesses, inject their babies, scream at non-compliant friends and family?
The stark answer is something like "because we wanted them to."
Le Bon's basic thesis is just the opposite of what we first think: People get the leaders they, as a crowd, want. We, as a crowd, select for the answers we in our heart desire. The effective leader simply discerns what strings to pluck that will resonate with what we want. In that view, if Hitler had been eliminated in 1932 by a freak bus accident, the German people would have simply "found" another purveyor like him to take his place.
I've read the Breggin's book and found it helpful.
I've read Desmet's recent defense of his view point and found it very compelling and much more nuanced look into my own heart and thinking.
I'm willing to accept both at this point as different viewpoints contemplating the problem that humanity is. The name calling isn't helpful. I would imagine that even the Breggin's have failures in their practice that they aren't proud of. I found their accusation of Desmet's "failure" (if indeed, it is true) as a cheap shot.
Folks, we are the problem. Desmet and Le Bon are asking each of us to look deeply in our soul's mirror and imagine that darkness lives there.
“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
Waco wasn't what the media would have you believe. If we've learned one thing, it's that the MSM has been lying for decades. From Randy Weaver to David Koresh, it's gov't propaganda. If you've lived near and known some of the citizens that our gov't has gone after, you understand.
I understood with Waco. Ruby Ridge too. and Little Elian in Miami forceably returned to Castro's Gulag. OK City Feral false flag. All under the Clintonista Regime.
9/11 and 20 Years War started under the Bushie Cartel. All NWO & Deep Statist DC Ferals.
Solzhenitsyn was on the right track as all of have some secrets we would rather not have exposed.
He also recognized that man is basically good, but with "sin" and can eventually be consumed by evil.
There are however 2% of mankind that once consumed by Evil are enveloped and lose their basic goodness. 20% of the population are easily influenced by this 2% due to their own gradations of evil leading towards the 2%. These 20% are the Sycophants that are mindless, heedless followers of death and destruction, but if disconnected from active pressure from the 2% do recover somewhat, but not fully.
No offense intended. The scary part for me (and I admit to being overly broad in my accusation) is that I've concluded that those who followed the Pots, Hitlers, Maos, Jones' etc did so with absolutely NO doubt they were doing God's Will. Some at the top might be fully aware of their evil, but somewhere not too far down in the stack people begin to feel like special agents of truth and justice. The end justifies the means.
In my own experience (flawed like everbody else), humans in general (hence the "we") are fully capable of doing what somebody else would term as evil and doing so with a clean (unexamined) conscience.
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." - Blaise Pascal
So Pascal identifies ‘religious conviction’ to a vulnerability to do evil cheerfully. In broad terms, mass induced psychosis, seems like a modern secular equivalent exploiting the same vulnerability. The cloth of the modern perpetrators is not quite so colorful, but unmistakable traces of religiosity remain.
Absolutely! The "religious" motivation is on full display, both right and left. That's not to say there isn't something "true" in the universe, but our individual grasp on it is weak. The "ME" culture has eroded what should be a foremost humility in every human. "Maybe I'm NOT the center of the world, maybe I'm wrong" has been lost on most television/tiktok/facebook/telegram/twitter/blahblahblah channels. We're sitting ducks for the first spark to come along and ignite the whole brushheap into an uncontrollable forest fire.
Not trying to gloss over the problem. There ARE monsters among us (heck, under the right circumstances, I might be one!). But what does Desmet's failure have to do with his basic thesis? We hung many at Nuremburg and imprisoned many more. Did that fix the problem? I'm not saying that justice isn't due for the likes of Biden, Fauci, Birx and hundreds more. But why did WE go along (I know. I know. About a third of us didn't. This time.) That's a fair question, isn't it?
I just read a substack article by Bari Weis this morning. I encourage everybody to go over and read and contemplate what she is reporting about "Spoonies." These are mostly young women that revel in being sick. They talk endlessly on TikTok about their illnesses and how they will intentionally lie to doctors to get the diagnosis they want. See how it works? Is a doctor who will surgically alter another person without REAL cause the evil genius that needs to be eliminated? Sure, but the ROOT cause is the girl that identifies as sick and will relentlessly look for somebody that will confirm her in her sickness and give her the treatment she wants.
Anybody that studies Jonestown, Waco, Germany in 1938, etc HAS to contemplate what happened to the people who followed and did horrible things to others. In my own contemplations there was a strong drive to look for a single bullet as the root cause: "It was Jim Jones!" "It was Adoph Hitler!" "It was Pol Pot!" Find that source causality and eliminate it and you eliminate the problem, right?
It's just not that simple. There ARE predators among us, no doubt. But the deeper question in the sorts of cases I just mentioned is WHY do they gain traction? What sort of power do they have over their followers that would take what appear to be regular folks and turn them into monsters (please do not read me to say we should have any pity for the likes Jospeh Goebbels and his ilk--they were monsters who were attracted to somebody that would let them be the full psychopaths they in fact were). How did a church goer and family man become the ghoul that (relucantly or not) was responsible for dropping zyklon gas into the showers at Auschwitz-Birkenau?
Desmet is wrestling with that problem. He is actually building on the earlier work by author, Gustav Le Bon, who's amazing work The_Crowd:_A_Study_of_the_Popular_Mind was mind blowing for me. Look him up--I think the work, published in 1895, is available online for free (if it hasn't been purged!)
Desmet is asking a fair question: How did this happen? How did 2/3 of the western world completely fall for the storyline spun by the likes of a little bespectacled wart and his scarf-wearing hand maiden? What super power did they wield that captured the minds of otherwise brilliant people and made them shut down their businesses, inject their babies, scream at non-compliant friends and family?
The stark answer is something like "because we wanted them to."
Le Bon's basic thesis is just the opposite of what we first think: People get the leaders they, as a crowd, want. We, as a crowd, select for the answers we in our heart desire. The effective leader simply discerns what strings to pluck that will resonate with what we want. In that view, if Hitler had been eliminated in 1932 by a freak bus accident, the German people would have simply "found" another purveyor like him to take his place.
I've read the Breggin's book and found it helpful.
I've read Desmet's recent defense of his view point and found it very compelling and much more nuanced look into my own heart and thinking.
I'm willing to accept both at this point as different viewpoints contemplating the problem that humanity is. The name calling isn't helpful. I would imagine that even the Breggin's have failures in their practice that they aren't proud of. I found their accusation of Desmet's "failure" (if indeed, it is true) as a cheap shot.
Folks, we are the problem. Desmet and Le Bon are asking each of us to look deeply in our soul's mirror and imagine that darkness lives there.
“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
Waco wasn't what the media would have you believe. If we've learned one thing, it's that the MSM has been lying for decades. From Randy Weaver to David Koresh, it's gov't propaganda. If you've lived near and known some of the citizens that our gov't has gone after, you understand.
I always make sure to refer to Bill Barr as William "Ruby Ridge" Barr.
Perfect! And leopards do not change their spots, so he is just as much an evil weasel now as he was then.
I understood with Waco. Ruby Ridge too. and Little Elian in Miami forceably returned to Castro's Gulag. OK City Feral false flag. All under the Clintonista Regime.
9/11 and 20 Years War started under the Bushie Cartel. All NWO & Deep Statist DC Ferals.
Loved your post. Well done 👍🏻
Solzhenitsyn was on the right track as all of have some secrets we would rather not have exposed.
He also recognized that man is basically good, but with "sin" and can eventually be consumed by evil.
There are however 2% of mankind that once consumed by Evil are enveloped and lose their basic goodness. 20% of the population are easily influenced by this 2% due to their own gradations of evil leading towards the 2%. These 20% are the Sycophants that are mindless, heedless followers of death and destruction, but if disconnected from active pressure from the 2% do recover somewhat, but not fully.
Keep the ‘we’ to yourself Quinbus51.
No offense intended. The scary part for me (and I admit to being overly broad in my accusation) is that I've concluded that those who followed the Pots, Hitlers, Maos, Jones' etc did so with absolutely NO doubt they were doing God's Will. Some at the top might be fully aware of their evil, but somewhere not too far down in the stack people begin to feel like special agents of truth and justice. The end justifies the means.
In my own experience (flawed like everbody else), humans in general (hence the "we") are fully capable of doing what somebody else would term as evil and doing so with a clean (unexamined) conscience.
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." - Blaise Pascal
So Pascal identifies ‘religious conviction’ to a vulnerability to do evil cheerfully. In broad terms, mass induced psychosis, seems like a modern secular equivalent exploiting the same vulnerability. The cloth of the modern perpetrators is not quite so colorful, but unmistakable traces of religiosity remain.
Absolutely! The "religious" motivation is on full display, both right and left. That's not to say there isn't something "true" in the universe, but our individual grasp on it is weak. The "ME" culture has eroded what should be a foremost humility in every human. "Maybe I'm NOT the center of the world, maybe I'm wrong" has been lost on most television/tiktok/facebook/telegram/twitter/blahblahblah channels. We're sitting ducks for the first spark to come along and ignite the whole brushheap into an uncontrollable forest fire.
Most human beings are 100% suggestable 100% of the time.
Not trying to gloss over the problem. There ARE monsters among us (heck, under the right circumstances, I might be one!). But what does Desmet's failure have to do with his basic thesis? We hung many at Nuremburg and imprisoned many more. Did that fix the problem? I'm not saying that justice isn't due for the likes of Biden, Fauci, Birx and hundreds more. But why did WE go along (I know. I know. About a third of us didn't. This time.) That's a fair question, isn't it?
I just read a substack article by Bari Weis this morning. I encourage everybody to go over and read and contemplate what she is reporting about "Spoonies." These are mostly young women that revel in being sick. They talk endlessly on TikTok about their illnesses and how they will intentionally lie to doctors to get the diagnosis they want. See how it works? Is a doctor who will surgically alter another person without REAL cause the evil genius that needs to be eliminated? Sure, but the ROOT cause is the girl that identifies as sick and will relentlessly look for somebody that will confirm her in her sickness and give her the treatment she wants.