Archive for March 27th, 2007
Realists They AIN’T
Posted by Bob in How Things Work on 03/27/2007
In his advice to his nephew Wormwood the Tempter on how to damn souls, Screwtape said that one could get humans into the condition in which they regard misery and agony as real, and a child playing in the sunshine as a mere illusion. I can’t find it right now but it looks as if, circa 1940, he had just read a defeatist’s words.
Defeatism has always seemed the height of wisdom. Why? We have a Judeo-Christian religion that condemns most pleasures and demands grimness. For two thousand years monks showed that the more you torture yourself, the happier God is. Wisdom came from crabby old people who were down on life. The happier old people are remembered for the fun they gave us. The nasty old ones are remembered for their Wisdom, simply because they didn’t say anything else.
But the simple fact is that grimness and pessimism are seen as Realism, as Screwtape, to his joy, noted.
Think for a moment. Try to imagine someone being called a “Realist” if he has a smile on his face.
This pairs in nicely with another point I made. If I tell you how the future is sure to be, you will laugh in my face. UNLESS I tell you the future is a blank wall of pure unmitigated misery. Anyone who says THAT isn’t laughed at. The guy walking around with a sign that says “The World is About to End” is a staple in comedy films. But someone who claims the future is a blank wall of misery is considered a Serious Thinker and a Practical Man.
This is not just an error. This is a SICKNESS. Screwtape viewed it exactly that way and was all for it.
I am unable to say what I REALLY think because everybody in the movement is carrying a huge load of baggage they don’t even know about. I can explain the basic problem very simply. Everybody who has never had any money knows all about making it. Anyone who has never even been close to power knows all about it. Every person in the movement has a picture of vast, unified, and above all, SMART powers that guide our destiny. Being where I was makes you a total atheist abut the religion that permeates our movement.
And it IS a religion. And it comes from the same source as religion first came from: We don’t know something so we find somebody who looks Wise and Grim to make up a good story. The story becomes holy. People who have spent their entire lives reading the Holy Books of Conspiracy are no more likely to change their minds than a TV evangelist is going to give up all that Old Testament he read.
So we worship the Brothers Grim. But if you live in a fantasy world, you lost out in the real world. I do not know how many hours I have listened to people explain how Washington works to me, how Capitol Hill works, how lobbies work. I listen, of course. I try to get a LITTLE reality into the discussion, but I have to do it very, very carefully. Otherwise my REAL attitude might show.
Mark: Webb Has a Catch-22
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session, Comment Responses on 03/27/2007
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And a man with as big a mouth as you, MrWebb should certainly have an alternative plan to Bob’s. Can we hear it — or is all you have just the same bullshit? Come on, man — tell us your plan to topple the big bad media. Come on! Tell us Already!
Or can you?
Mark
ME:
Mark, if Webb DOES come up with a plan and somebody agrees with it, that person will become what Mr. Webb calls a “heel-clicking follower.” So Webb, like all defeatists, has a perfectly good excuse to do nothing.
http://www.nationalsalvation.net/
Dave
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session on 03/27/2007
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AFKAN is a very interesting participant in this seminar.
AFKAN, you imagine yourself fully out of fashion. But you are not. I’m a West Coast person and I run with affluent professionals.
It is quite the fashion among them to openly condemn both Israel and Jews. I was at a cocktail party when a Palestinian woman was formally introduced to a crowd containing a smattering of judges, city officials, professors, and legislators. This Palestinian woman made a few comments about the plight of “her country”. This crowd of dyed in the wool liberals wildly cheered her.
If I were a Jew in that crowd, I would have tried to sneak out of the door. I had to pinch myself for assurance that I had not been transported by a time machine to the 1930s.
It is obvious in my liberal City of Seattle that Jews are increasingly not being invited. For example, the odd Jew lawyer in the boutique law firm is being dropped from the marketing brochure, subtly being told to join a “Jew firm”. Jews just aren’t showing up on the invite lists at yuppie shindigs.
And it is almost hilarious watching prominent Jews performing acrobatic maneuvers in transparent attempts to resign from being Jews. They’re Jews “but not Jews” simultaneously.
This is becoming standard. It is almost like they are sensing a coming pogrom, but what they are really afraid of is being out of fashion.
My point is that your dislike of Jews is becoming mainstream, but as always with intellectuals you are pretending to be the rebel.
However, your analysis is well worth reading and far beyond the usual stuff that comes fashion trend followers like the fashionable pro-Palestinian lefties.
Keep contributing to this seminar.
Comment by Dave —
ME:
Yes, and who among the defeatists just a little while back would not have lauhed at the idea that the LEFT is where anti-Semitism would be growing while the Right would totally discredited itself by its drooling love of Israel?
Defeatists don’t THINK. So it never occurs to them that there is NO SUCH THING as a Prophet in this world. They think that because they claim to be prophets of Doom, they are somehow practical, not like tea leaf readers. But a Prophet of Doom still claims to be a prophet, and he AIN’T!
You know all those idiots who end up on a hill waiting for Doom’s Day every time some twit claims he has had a Revelation From the Lord? That is EXACTLY the way I look at defeatists. They are just more harmful.
http://www.nationalsalvation.net/
www.nationalsalvation.net
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session, Comment Responses on 03/27/2007
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Bob, do you have any idea how handy and helpful this new site is? I really like
the way it’s laid out. Bob’s Mantra and so much other great stuff in such an easy
to explore format. I’m going to spread www.nationalsalvation.net far and wide and
hope everybody else here does the same. A lot of people could actually learn how to
think as a result of this.
Comment by C.E. Whiteoak
ME:
It’s WONDERFUL!
I have wanted to pick out my ideas that really matter and put them down this way, but I can’t do it. You know how hard it is for you to edit your own writing.
It takes another mind on my own level to do this. If someone wants to start on this blog,
www.nationalsalvation.net is better than looking at the blog itself
You may want to make some suggestions abut it yourself. Don’t make Dave work ALONE. I am embarrassed to have ignored it for so long, and my apologies.
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The Brave but Anonymous Mr. Webb
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session, Comment Responses on 03/27/2007
Mr. Webb may be a guy I worked with for many, many years.
Finally he became a complete Jewish Supremacist, shouting, “Resistance is useless!”
Then he came up with a newspaper scheme that would make him some money. He tried to sell it to us. He would start with how hopeless everything was with the same story of a card shark, and how the Jews were geniuses and cheated, too, so all was lost.
It was the same spiel, over and over.
BUT, he said, if someone would pay for him to start a local newspaper, all could be won. It was a good scheme, as all such schemes sound, but he had no newspaper experience, and, as I say, I have been through my share of world-saving schemes that also make money.
His first theme, like Mr. Webb’s, was that all is lost unless we buy him a newspaper. If you don’t accept his scheme he is a fanatical defeatist, a fighting, insulting, total defeatist like Webb.
Most people go through that stage early and outgrow it. I had the Only True Way disease a few times myself. But I didn’t try to discourage my whole side to get them to go along. This guy’s second childhood seems permanent.
http://www.nationalsalvation.net/
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