More Malcolm on Mass Formation

Here at Motus Mentis, the weblog of Malcolm Pollack.  Pollack is an uncommonly good writer as you will see from the quotation below.  More importantly, he speaks truth against the current madness. In my earlier post on his American Greatness essay, after acknowledging his even-handedness, I suggested that 

. . . he may be giving aid and comfort to a false moral equivalentism.  Left and Right are not moral equivalents. The Left is far worse.

I assumed that he would accept my mild criticism and he has (emphasis added):

Alas, in such times as these – in the growing heat of a simmering civil war – for an observer to comment on social tectonics from such a remote altitude makes him seem almost blithely unconcerned with the great battle shaping up on the plain far below. As a result, commenters and correspondents have taken me to task for being too even-handed in my description of the phenomenon; for making it seem as if the craziness here in 2022 is symmetrically distributed between both factions in our current social and political conflict. Our old friend Bill Vallicella was among them; you can read his post, and my response (from which some of this post is adapted), here.

I think that’s a fair critique, and in my article I should have made it clear that right now, when it comes to the psychological manipulation of public narratives in order to focus an anxious and atomized public’s attention on objects of fear and loathing, there is no equivalence at all between the two great factions. “Mass formation” in today’s America is overwhelmingly a “Blue”, not a “Red”, phenomenon.

Readers of American Greatness, and of this blog, will need little convincing on this score, but a few points are worth mentioning:

First of all, it is a tremendous advantage in the manipulation of mass opinion to control the flow of information, and for many years now the American Left have controlled mass media, social media, internet-search technology, and education to the point of near-total information dominance.

Second, the artificiality of the public narrative blaring from the towering minarets of our institutions is shown by its transience: as soon as one story collapses (remember “Russian collusion”, and “hands up, don’t shoot”?) another takes its place (think of Jussie Smollett, or “two weeks to flatten the curve”). Likewise, the extent to which these narratives are in fact calculated propaganda offensives is given away by the aggressive censorship of dissenting views. (Magna est veritas, et praevalebit, the old saying goes – “Truth is great, and will prevail” – but to make falsehood prevail requires some assistance.)

Third, that the dominance of the Left’s message in America today relies upon a widespread psychological vulnerability is further demonstrated by the extent to which it has managed to override both tradition and common sense in getting large numbers of people to deny what, until now, have been understood by everyone everywhere to be objectively existing features and categories of the natural world.  To participate in polite society today – or, to put that more accurately, to be able to keep your job, get a college degree, or avoid being deplatformed from most media – we are expected to go along with things that most people know in their hearts are simply not so: that sex and race are purely social constructs; that men can become pregnant and bear children; that biology and heritability have nothing to do with human traits, and with their statistical distribution in populations; that cultures and peoples can be mixed and jumbled together at random without affecting the cohesion and stability of formerly homogeneous societies; that “equality” means that people cannot vary in talents, abilities, and aptitudes; that the greatest threat to American society is “white supremacy”; that everything in the modern Western world, from mathematics to nuclear families to pumpkin-spice lattes, is racist; that intelligence is a meaningless and unquantifiable concept; that when different identity groups perform differently on qualifying tests for education and employment, those tests should simply be discarded; that for nations to control their borders is inherently immoral; that the interests of criminals trump those of law-abiding citizens; that parents should have no say in how their children are educated; that members of various, designated groups are not to be considered responsible agents; that the way to deal with rising crime is to stop arresting people; that the 2020 election was squeaky-clean; that the January 6th protest was an assault on a par with Pearl Harbor and 9/11 (while the three-day siege of the White House by BLM and Antifa, in which hunrdeds of officers were injured, and the First Family had to be evacuated, was not); that the protests of that summer were “mostly peaceful”; and no end of other obvious falsehoods and absurdities.

Above all, what marks the current mental state of the American Left as psychologically abnormal is its suicidal self-abnegation. I can think of no other example in all of history of a coherent, prosperous and homogeneous society, with a robust civic culture and a proud historical mythos, suddenly deciding en masse to reject and denounce its heritage, declare its cherished cultural traditions shameful and immoral, fling open its borders to engage in deliberate ethnic, religious, and cultural dilution, and cheer on the accelerating displacement of its majority population and the gradual decomposition of cohesion and civil order. This all seems, when compared to the normal behavior of human societies, completely insane.

Considering all this, then, I hope it is clear that, although the phenomenon now being called “mass formation” has been observed in all ages and cultures, and must be considered in some sense a “universal” feature of our nature, its current manifestation in the United States is anything but symmetrical, and is overwhelmingly an affliction of the Left —  and that those of us who wish to have any chance of preserving the great American experiment must, in this hour of crisis, fight it with everything we’ve got.

Comments

[Dave Bagwill]

Once the metanarrative is gone, people's minds are easy pickin's: it seems fundamental to human life to want to feel part of a 'big story' to give meaning to each individual story. The Left has not provided a replacement metanarrative yet - at least one that has entirely taken over the national consciousnes, that Joe Six-Pack can grok - but every message they send is part of a (mostly) hidden, overarching Progressive Tale.
Perhaps the vicious Leftist grip on the culture is more tenuous than it appears, a house of cards that will tumble with any fresh breeze of freedom. I hope it is not necessary, pace Jefferson, that: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

[BV]

Thanks for the comment, Dave. I too hope that the tree of liberty does not need any sanguinary refreshment. But in the last hour I did clean two shootin' ahrns, no lie, and I don't clean 'em just for the fun of it.

The Progressive Tale, as you call it, is becoming so insane that it might just collapse like a house of cards. 2022 is looking bright for the Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable.

[Malcolm Pollack]

"2022 is looking bright for the Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable."

How I hope that's true. It may well be! I have a sense, everywhere I go, and every time I strike up a conversation with ordinary people I meet in the course of everyday life, that everyone has thought for some time now that things were going crazy, but were afraid to say so because they thought that they were the odd ones out. (It brings to mind a thing called the Abilene Paradox, which is probably worthy of wider attention.)

Perhaps the disease has now (at last!) got to the point where it will trigger a system-wide immune reaction. It may turn out that putting the Democrats in complete control for two years, putting morons like AOC, Ilhan Omar, and Kamala Harris on full display as our ruling elite, and demonstrating to everyone the now-undeniable caducity of Joe Biden, was exactly the reductio ad absurdum that America needed to awaken the nation to what Gurdjieff liked to call, in another context, "the terror of the situation".

But there are no guarantees, and the survival of the nation we cherish may well yet depend on what the Founders called an "appeal to Heaven". All of us should make sure to hedge our portfolios with what is shaping up to be the most "precious metal" of all: lead.

[Joe Odegaard]

We must always depend on an appeal to heaven, and we do. Read what it says above the portrait of Abraham Lincoln on every penny. Do you think the Creator doesn't see? "The gates of Hell shall not prevail" is a promise; I will let the reader find out by Whom it was made. And anyone with common sense can now see that the "D" party is from the Pit. Signed, Joe Odegaard, Architect and Barbarian.