Guest Post by Eric Peters
A reader brings up a subject worth examining at length regarding the willingness of people to perform the various rites of the Sickness Cult even in the absence of enforcement – as in the case of people who wear their Holy Rag everywhere they go, even within their own vehicle. He brought up the related cult – the Climate Change Cult – and asked why so many people eagerly embrace these faiths, even to their obvious detriment.
He writes:
Last week, Bill Gates appeared on 60 Minutes and talked about climate change, and said something like “every aspect of our lives will have to change” to combat global warming. (Sort of like the “new normal” for WuFlu?) The next day people at my workplace were talking about how “smart” Gates is about so many things and how it’s so good that he wants to “help people” with his money. They also were looking forward to when they’d be “eligible” for the WuFlu shot.
So . . . a multibillionaire with the influence to do so wants to completely change your life to suit his ideals? And the government wants to inject you with a substance that changes you at the cellular level? This didn’t seem to raise any alarm whatsoever — in fact, they were cheering it on! This brought to mind your article about the “wolves and sheep.” Obviously these people are sheep — but do they even know they’re sheep, and why can’t they see that Gates, Fauci, and Biden are just playing them? And can they ever be “brought around” to be wolves? I don’t care what the likes of Bill Gates, Fauci, and Diaper Joe think — much less want them decide how I “should” live my life. But why can I see this and all these other people can’t? What makes “wrong thinkers” (the wolves) different in that we see though the BS?
The answer is as simple as it is frightening. These people do not want to see. They want to believe. Deeply, in the religious sense. In the sense of the religious fanatic; someone not content to just believe but who insists everyone else also believes – and behaves.
There can be no tolerance of heterodoxy in either faith – which faiths are really the same same faith. They are both Doomsday Cults that preach the imminence of the End Times (e.g., mass death and planetary death) unless the faithful abide and practice the tenets of the Faith. These tenets come down to – obey the priests of the Faith – such as Pope Fauci XVII – without question. They are the conduits of the Holy Will and only obedience will save you.
There is a masochistic, hair-shirting aspect to their fanaticism, too. A desire to suffer for the sins they believe they have committed. Which belief has been inculcated. It is a kind of Savonarola Syndrome extrapolated to and afflicting the general population rather than an individual religious fanatic. This is a natural elaboration of at least 50 years’ worth of general hectoring of the population about “the environment” and its imminent collapse – because of our “selfish” ways. The ways that have given ordinary people hot and cold running water, indoor toilets, lights in their homes and food in their refrigerators, the ability to easily travel almost anywhere; in sum a degree of affluence and comfort unknown to kings as recently as 150 years ago but now taken for granted by fools who believe these things just exist and will always exist.
These must all be sacrificed in the name of the Faith. To save the Earth. To prevent granny from dying.
Ever.
.
This masochistic tendency has a sadistic aspect to it – as is true of religious fanaticism generally. The urge to make others suffer. Specifically, to make it so that others cannot evade the suffering the ones urging it regard as necessary and devout. It is the same mindset that felt not only righteous but joyful when another human being was burned at the stake in Medieval Europe for refusing to “confess” and atone for their lack of faith in the one true Faith.
It is probably no accident or coincidence rather that these new religions – which are extremely fervent and ferocious faiths – have arisen as traditional religions have lost their salving effect on many people, having become go-through-the-motions faiths with little fervency and so do not give people the ethereal meaning and sense of connection they need. The Sickness Cult and the Climate Cult give these lost people something to hold onto that they feel is bigger than themselves, which gives their lives the meaning they feel is lacking.
And the direction.
This impulse is the same one Hitler used to fanaticize the Germans; the same one that urges on Marxists. All variants of the same sickness, the same faith.
Americans – who once touted their independence – are now characterized by dependence. Of mind and soul.
On Authority.
They not only like – they crave – being directed; note the casual ubiquity of slogans about “leadership” . . . having been conditioned to it at school. Do what you’re told, without questioning what you are told. Being good means being the same.
Do not disagree.
Social pressure in what has become a hyper-socialized society (viz, the way kids are organized and practically never let alone, almost from the time the can toddle through adulthood) is used to enforce this conformity, this herd instinct. It is a weaponized strain of the childish/schoolyard pressure to wear the “right” clothes and like the “right” music – and so on.
It is how sheep are made from men.
Combine the social pressuring with a habit of mind – or rather a purposeful fracturing of mind; the writer Ayn Rand called it the anti-conceptual mentality. Such minds never developed the habit of mind that was once upon a time the goal of education in modern Western societies; i.e., to examine and question faiths and the do-as-we-say injunctions of Authority, because Authority.
This deliberate stunting of the human mind results in the creation of dangerously obedient people, including some very bright dangerous people, in the technical sense. They can add and subtract and even acquire very high-order skills, as engineers and doctors, even. And yet, they cannot reason in the way once subsumed under the general ideas of humanism and liberalism (in the old meaning of that term, before it was co-opted and corrupted into its opposite by Leftists) which are the antidotes to mindless fanaticism. A person of liberal mindset asks why – and insists on an answer that is more substantive than “because we say so” – or “because the good of the community requires it.”
That mindset led to the Reformation and the Renaissance and the flowering of humanism and the softening of the rigid hierarchies of the Middle and Dark ages. Also to hot and cold running water, indoor toilets and showers, food in the refrigerator and the ability of the average person to travel practically anywhere he wished, as opposed to spending a life within the confines of his village, keeping his head down and knowing his place, evincing the reflexive deference due his Lord and his Faith, forever amen.
That Faith – and the Lords who enforce it – are re-emerging from the darkness of the past and it is welcomed by people who have been prepared to accept it. For them, it is not merely a blessing; it is their salvation.
And those of us who do not share the faith – who question the “good news” – are as much their enemies as they are ours.
Guest Post by Eric Peters A reader brings up a subject worth examining at length regarding the willingness of people to perform the various rites of the Sickness Cult even in the absence of enforcement – as in the case of people who wear their Holy Rag everywhere they go, even within their own vehicle. … Continue reading “Why Can’t The Sheep See?”
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