The Secret Knowledge (16 page)

He is the champion of Good, chosen because
someone
(the Candidate) has finally recognized his excellence.

His problem resides in this: that the doctrines, policies, and programs presented for his endorsement are senseless and destructive, and can be so-proved by any slight referral of them to the impartial verdicts of history.

What will the Superego do?

It will ensure that the referral will never occur.

How will it do this? By ensuring that the referral would occur only at the cost of relinquishing membership in the herd.

The Superego cannot increase the
benefit
of compliance (as it did with the stoplight), but will increase the
cost
of noncompliance. Questioning = excommunication.

The Left, in addition to its embrace of the false (higher taxes means increased prosperity for all), and its acceptance of the moot as incontrovertible (Global Warming); must account for the incidental effect of the sum of these decisions. This effect is the destruction of our culture.

All strife to the Left is error, and poverty and all human ills eradicable by new programs. But these revolutionary revisions destroy the human ability to interact, which, in its entirety, is known as Culture.

Note that, under the Statist revisions of the Obama administration, racial tensions have devolved to acrimony unknown in this country for decades. Sexual relations are universally subject to constant revision, and limits on language and behavior, once imposed unconsciously, and learned in family, community, and school, are returned to the conscious mind, erasing spontaneity and ease, and replacing them with consternation and fear.

Our beautiful American language is now subject to revision by those screaming loudest, and we have the enormity of s/he, the clunky continuous reiteration of his-or-her, and so on. This revision is presented by the Left as an aid of equality, but its result is an atmosphere not of happy compliance, but of anxiety, circumlocution, and a formalism destructive of the free exchange of ideas.

Our culture is being destroyed by the Left. What difference that the good-willed do so in the name of Equality? It is being destroyed.

The decision to allow a thirteen-story Islamic Center to be built in the vicinity of Ground Zero may be defensible under the rubric of law; but it is a cultural obscenity, allowable only if the State, the Left, or the individual asserts that every decision must be adjudicated according to the new understanding of the anointed.

The Government sues the State of Arizona for the enforcement of laws the passage of which are not only the right of the state under the Constitution, but the content of which is virtually identical with federal law.

The State of California sentences the farmers of its Central Valley to drought, and their farms to destruction, because a small fish called the delta smelt has been declared endangered.

That our culture is falling apart is apparent to any impartial observer. But what observer can be impartial? Conservatives are aghast; we are shocked at the actions of the Left, and we are astounded that they do not acknowledge these actions' results.

It is not that they do not care. But that they cannot afford to notice, for comparing their actions to the results would bring about either their ejection from the group (should they voice their doubts) or, should they merely follow their perceptions to their logical conclusions, the psychic trauma incident upon a revision of their worldview.

The Superego, here, has made a terrible bargain.

It has offered membership in a group whose size and power allows the individual to submerge his doubts. And then to forget them. But the cost is the surrender of his reason.

He may live his entire life never talking to a Conservative, never reading a Conservative publication, or listening to any news at all save that of the Left. That four hundred Liberal journalists have been revealed as involved in a long cabal to distort that which they offer as news, in aid of Liberalism, makes no difference to the Liberal. It cannot; for he cannot risk his membership in the herd. And he must remain unaware of his bargain. Like the young lady in Rumpelstiltskin.

The Gnome in the story came to offer her release from the Evil King. The gnome, however, was no one
other
than the Evil King, and his demands, like those of the King, eventually became intolerable. Prior to that point, she was dedicated to self-delusion. Maybe, she thought,
this
savior will aid me. Maybe, the Liberal thinks,
this
new iteration of Government Programs will prove useful. Perhaps this previous new panacea has failed (as all its like have failed) because it was Underfunded.

The Liberal is caught. To reject the herd protection is to, inevitably, undergo the shame and humiliation of recognizing his prior, destructive folly.
⁴⁷

So the Liberal stands pat. He, who never talks to anyone outside of this group, accuses the Conservative of being brainwashed; he explains the abysmal performance of Obama by saying “look at the mess he inherited,” as if the President did not campaign (as do all politicians) on the platform of cleaning up the prior mess. (Those of the same party as the outgoing incumbent campaign on
improving
his accomplishments—which is to say the prior mess.)

The Liberal is subsumed in the herd. How, then, to explain, as he must, the unfortunate state of things? The herd supplies the answer: blame the Opposition.

Obama's plans are questioned? Call his opponents Racist.

Palestinian Terrorists are dedicated to the destruction of our ally, Israel? Blame the Israelis for saddling us with a challenge to our delusion of Universal Brotherhood.

The Left, in suspending reason and accountability, is ravaging our beautiful culture.

But the necessity of Culture is a part of human interaction. Strand ten bus riders in a blizzard, and they will extemporize their own culture.

The drive to discard our evolved American culture, to replace it with the “reasoning” of idiot teenagers who have blessed, by their presence, the schools of the Ivy League, results, as it must, in a
new
culture. But in what does this culture consist?

The Nazis and the Communists railed against and discarded religion, and instantly, automatically, created their own religion, each with all the formal trappings and operations of—though with different content than—those religions they displaced.
⁴⁸

So the Left creates its own,
new
culture.

But this culture is confusing, amorphous, and constantly shifting. It not only resembles, it
is
the Party Line, avant la lettre. The confused Liberal must grope, each day, to find how to explain (to his
own
satisfaction, for he will never talk to a conservative) the inexplicable vagaries of his tribe.

How can he do so? “Call
MoveOn.org
, and just do whatever they say.”

In what does this new culture consist? In obedience.

What is it that Liberal African Americans have not recognized about the Left? That there is no one home. The Left has abandoned the country, come out against capitalism, exploitation of resources, the free market, and work, and announced its refusal to defend our borders. All this as a matter of principle.

Al Sharpton and those calling (under whatever name) for reparations for ancient crimes are, in effect, suing for crumbs from those they, by that suit, designate as their (somehow) superiors. But they have no superiors. There is no one home. The slave owners, along with the robber barons, and “the interests,” have left the building.

Reverend Al Sharpton, in Chris Rock's wonderful documentary
Good Hair
, takes on the overwhelming Asian ownership of hair salons in Black communities. He calls this ownership “exploitation.” But who is exploiting the Black community, the Asians who, perceiving a need, are catering to that need, or the Reverend Sharpton?

The Asians, like the Jews, immigrants one hundred years ago, saw both a market and a vacuum of power, and responded. They saw in effect that
no one was there
.

My father bluffed his way into Northwestern Law on the GI Bill, having (perhaps) finished two years of community college. He graduated first in his class. I asked him what his secret was, and he explained that
he didn't realize how little was required of him
.

President Obama announces every day (and his presidency could, indeed, be reduced to this announcement and its results) that the West is finished: with capitalism, with Democracy, with self defense, and that anyone who wants it can have it. Will our opponents, those declared and those indeed stunned into wakefulness by our lassitude, be any less likely to respond to opportunity than the Asians in Harlem?

The same rules governing commercial real estate must govern geopolitics—how could it be otherwise, as each are only expressions of the universal nature of human interaction?

If the other fellow has damaged his property, if he has mismanaged it, and depressed or miscalculated its value, if he does not engage in its supervision and upkeep, it becomes a Bargain, and the bargain
will
be snapped up by the observant.

Where do these conditions of mismanagement and unconcern apply more frequently than in the case of property that is inherited (“shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations” being proverbial)?

Our forebears struggled and fought and died to establish and to preserve and broaden those freedoms they bequeathed us, and which have made us the most prosperous country in history. To denigrate our culture and traditions, to turn our back on our place and duty in the world—to, in effect, live off the interest and call it Humanism, or One-Worldism, or re-distribution of wealth, is an act of folly like that of any thoughtless and weak (not to say ungrateful) inheritor of wealth.

But the Liberal West must hide from itself its dysfunction, noting only those trends and occurrences indicative not only and not even primarily of the success of its theories
⁴⁹
but of their
rationality
.

To defend the practice of the irrational consumes any organism's energy and, as with the Reverend Sharpton's cry of “exploitation,” blinds the irrational to better uses of his time and power. What is to prevent African Americans from either opening their own hair salons, or, like the Asian Americans, casting about for a need to fill and filling it (as Reverend Sharpton has)? Nothing.
⁵⁰
And those who do so are rewarded according to the rules of the free market: “Give me something I want or need and I will pay you for it.” Mr. Rock's film, in fact, contains a striking instance of a successful Black-owned business, Dudley's Hair Care & Cosmetics, which produces and distributes a vast amount of hair, skin, and makeup products to the African American community.

To defend the irrational or inconsistent becomes, in the dysfunctional organization, the
prime
goal—and any other use of energy secondary—for the dysfunctional organism's life, that is, its ability to function as constituted, depends on the devotion, among its members, to fantasy.

Here is an example. President Obama, in a speech in July 2010, declared that the Government should be ready to support Green Business—that if anyone wanted to create these jobs, the Government would be there to help.

What was the help? He was offering rebates. But what are rebates but tax cuts?

To suggest that giving back (to approved entities)
some
of the money drained from them in taxes, and to characterize this as “help,” is like a mugger pausing in administering his beating and characterizing this pause, to his victim, as assistance.

If, as President Obama announced perceptively, cutting taxes creates jobs (as it does; as anyone not blinded by theory knows: when taxes are raised, businesses close), then why not cut
all
taxes?
⁵¹

This inconsistency is ignored only by those who benefit from it (the administration), and the confused (Liberals).

Why not, O Liberals, vote to cause the Government to keep its filthy hands off the possessions of its citizens, and let those citizens and their country thrive?

It's not the largess of Government which is required (the money existed
before
they confiscated it—it simply was not
theirs
) but its reduction. This can only be brought about by reducing taxes, for government and taxes are each the secret name of the other.

To whom is this, in his sober moments, other than evident?

To defend and continue the practice the irrational, and thus necessarily destructive, consumes energy and time which cannot be expended on production, innovation,
actual
revision, or on anything else. For the dysfunctional group—a state or family—congeals around and must spend increasing amounts of its energy defending a lie.