Reader Andrew Philips comments on a recent post:
You’ve cautioned us against ascribing rational motives to the folks who are running things right now, so I won’t. Who knows if any of them believed all the things they said about angry white men, domestic terrorism, white supremacy, institutional racism, or any of the rest of it. Even if it was all just ritual cant, the folks whose fathers, grandfathers, and so forth, have served under a field of stars (in one configuration or another) haven’t had much reason to doubt their sincerity. They do give every indication of hating us. They told us we’re not wanted, not good enough, and that everything that’s going wrong is all our fault. They took a knee while Buy Large Mansions reveled in iconoclasm and damnatio memoriae.
While the civilians were doing that, the generals and admirals demonstrated to all the world they can’t steer ships or win wars. Why should anyone risk life and limb for leaders who can’t demonstrate competence, much less tell friend from foe? If they were trying to convince young, able-bodied Americans to reconsider their family traditions, or to transfer their loyalties back from the nation to their states, communities, or families, would they have done anything differently?
I noticed the other day that the latest Gallup poll shows institutional confidence is down across the board. That’s not a surprise, really, when it feels like society is coming part at the seems. The surprise to me is that confidence in the military is still as high as it is. It’s somewhere north of 60%, on average, but down significantly from last year, and more so among Republicans than Democrats. Confidence in the civilian institutions that control it, however, is in the toilet. Folks smart enough to be assets in military service know who gives the orders, so that might also explain their collective decision: “Don’t risk your life for people who hate you.”
My response:
The Death Cult’s organizational structure can be likened to a corporation’s. The CEO needn’t issue memos to every employee personally. Instead, there are layers of bureaucracy that delegate operations.
Corporate culture is another factor. Most Cultist behavior is learned through passive observation of other members. They come to sense and react to changes like a school of fish.
The Cult functions in a way that’s the diametric opposite of how they tell everyone else to act. Despite their avowed love for diversity, they are the most insular, cliquish people on Earth.
What they do is worm their way into gatekeeping positions in the institutions. Then they use nepotism to bring in their coreligionists. That’s when the secret email list collusion comes in.
Not that Death Cultists think of each other that way. They see their insane beliefs as the default and view other Cultists as normal folks just behaving as decent people do.
As with most things, we have to beware of false binaries, here. The enemies of Christendom may subscribe to a hysterical Death Cult. But that doesn’t mean all of them are acting on 100% irrational motives all the time. If they did, they couldn’t function at all.
We may be approaching that point, though.
Some institutional bigwigs aren’t full-on Kool Aid drinkers. Instead they’re accomplices who aid and abet the Cult for selfish reasons. Conservative pols and pundits tend to populate this category.
One thing Top Gun 2 proves is that mainstream entertainment has little, if any, relationship to the free market. The movie is a 90-minute commercial for military contractors, as the contractors who financed it are well aware. The billions they rake in from the government dwarfs their box office cut. A key principle of business is that you want to get as close to the source of the money as possible. The government now outpaces the people in terms of cash generation, so big businesses cater to the folks with the money printer.
You might observe that the Death Cult’s corporate stooges are rationalizing motives that make no sense in the long run. And that’s fair to say. Because it’s hard to argue someone out of a position his paycheck depends on.
But in the end, the result is the same. The Cult’s jihad on reality is advanced, and its enablers’ crusade for a quick buck is self-doomed.
Don’t pay people who enable cults that hate you.
“Corporate culture is another factor. Most Cultist behavior is learned through passive observation of other members. They come to sense and react to changes like a school of fish.”
This is more true than you know. I’ve seen people at year beginning or even quarterly meetings act like superfans at a football game, but the best illustration is what I call “corporate mass” (named after the stereotype of Catholic Mass being a succession of standing, sitting, and kneeling on cues the parishioners know). The first people to show up to a large (auditorium style) meeting are either cultists (and hangers on) who sit in the front and start getting pumped, and normal people who grab a seat on the back near the door and pull out laptops to do some actual work. By the time the auditorium is full, everyone is neatly sorted by cult buy-in, with the last people showing up sitting in the middle, neither eager for a good seat nor eager to leave at the end.
When the meeting starts, the cultists are so pumped up that they’ll give a standing ovation to anything. The announcements at the beginning are minor and least deserving of a standing ovation, yet the tiny amount of social pressure from the fanatics will get the lesser fanatics to stand, and it will cascade backwards until the people at the back have to put down their work and stand because they are now the only people not, and their failure to stand will be noted.
Since a standing ovation was given to trivial matters, it would be rude to stay seated for anything even slightly less trivial, so by the time the cultists are settled in, the whole crowd is committed to standing for everything, so they end up standing and sitting over and over until 15 minutes of announcements plus 15 minutes of grandstanding by people on stage lasts 90 minutes, minimum.
The fascinating part is that where you sit is not determined by background or how long you’ve been at the company, but where the rest of your team sits. Genuine enthusiasm (or lack thereof) follows shortly thereafter.
“and it will cascade backwards until the people at the back have to put down their work and stand because they are now the only people not, and their failure to stand will be noted.”
True story: My friend and church organist from a few years back was in a music graduate program in NY. One day there was a meeting in which one of the faculty was “transitioning” and there was a standing ovation. My friend refused to join it, was observed, and was hauled before a star-chamber of faculty who threatened his academic career if he didn’t take sensitivty classes. This was the early 2010s.
One thing that I have learned is that there is a tremendous amount of power in not caring and ignoring. Faculty will gladly throw out threats to you if they can get you into a private meeting. However if you simply do not show up it’s harder, since the meeting rarely has any official capacity and attempts to make it official will require everyone to admit that they are trying to chastise someone for not being enthusiastic enough.
I mean, for years I was supposed to go to three hour chemical safety training despite never working in chemistry labs, under the reasoning that my office was in a building adjacent to a building that contained labs. Nothing ever came of me skipping them, even though that technically might have been an OSHA violation. (They’ve since dropped the requirement for anyone who doesn’t actually enter a lab, so it looks like I’m in the clear for the long term.)
But it only goes so far. Eventually the institution will get woke enough that everyone will be willing to say that they are getting you fired simply for not clapping hard enough (or else they all will be willing to lie and give you no recourse to defend yourself.) At that point there’s no good you can do in the institution anyway though so it still isn’t much of a loss.
We passed the point when there was any good left to be done through the institutions a while ago. GamerGate, the Ivy League lawsuits, and the 2020 election showed us that much.
The first of Stalinism:
Don’t be the first to stop clapping
This is what folks who get frustrated by their failure to red pill normies don’t understand. Cultists now have the power to destroy anyone’s life with a charge of heresy. It takes more than mere information to stand up in the face of such threats. It takes real courage gained through long practice or the Holy Spirit.