By James Howard Kunstler
RINF.com
October 4, 2018
The Kavanaugh hearing underscored another eerie condition in
contemporary USA life that offers clues about the combined social,
economic, and political collapse that I call the long emergency:
the destruction of all remaining categorical boundaries for
understanding behavior: truth and untruth, innocent and guilty,
childhood and adulthood, public and private.
The destination of all this confusion is a society that can’t process
any quarrel coherently, leaving everyone unsatisfied and adrift,
and no actual problems resolved.
One element of the story is clear, though.
The Democratic party in the absence of real monsters to slay has
become the party devoted to sowing chaos, mainly by inventing
new, "Imaginary Monsters" using the machinery of politics, the
way the Catholic Church manufactured monsters of heresy during
the Spanish Inquisition in its attempt to regulate “belief.”
“I believe her” is the new totalitarian rallying cry, conveniently
disposing of any obligation to establish the facts of any ambiguous matter.
It was stealthily inserted in our national life during the Obama
years, when Title IX “guidelines” originally written to correct
imbalances in college sports funding for men and women were
extended to adjudicate sexual encounters on campus.
The result was the setting up of officially sanctioned kangaroo
courts where due process was thrown out the window — by people
who have should have known better: college presidents, deans,
and faculty.
That experiment produced not a few spectacular injustices such as
the Duke Lacrosse team fake rape fiasco, the University of Virginia
fake rape fraternity incident (provoked by a mis-reported story in
Rolling Stone Magazine), and the Columbia University, “Mattress
Girl” saga — all cases eventuating in punishing lawsuits against the
institutions that allowed them to spin out of control.
The spirit of the kangaroo court has since graduated into business
and politics where it has proven especially useful for settling scores
and advancing careers and agendas dishonestly.
Coercion has replaced persuasion.
Coercion is at the heart of totalitarian politics.
Do what you’re told, or else. Believe what we say, or else. (Or else
lose your reputation, your livelihood, your friends….)
This plays neatly into the dynamics of human mob psychology.
When the totalitarians set up for business, few individuals dare
to depart from the party line.
It’s the perfect medium for cultivating mendacious ideologies.
And so many Americans may be wondering these days whether
the ideas and principles that have held this country together,
even through a disastrous civil war, can endure through a long
emergency of exogenous events so overwhelming that we dare
not even debate them publicly.
These are climate change, the crack-up of a debt-based money
system, the winding–down of techno-industrial economy, and
the ecological destruction of the only planet that human beings
call home.
Of course, the lives of societies, like everything else in a
living universe, unfold emergently.
Which is to say that circumstances are in the driver’s seat
taking us where they will whether we like it or not.
What humans can do is decide how to ride these events.
For the moment, America has opted for a grand circus of
sexual hysteria.
It’s really an easy, lazy choice because sex is full of easily
manipulated tensions and ambiguities prone to melodramatic
misrepresentation.
Next on tap for this beleaguered nation will be a constitutional
crisis and a financial crisis.
It’s difficult to predict the order of their unfolding except to say
that these will open up a maelstrom of losses which will then be
hard to either adjudicate or correct, once our system of law is
compromised.
As this occurs all the raging hysteria over sex will be overshadowed
by real existential issues as the people lose their homes, incomes,
and futures and desperately search for a way out of more chaos
than they bargained for.
http://rinf.com/alt-news/newswire/imaginary-monsters-lewrockwell
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