Guest author Michael Hanby describes how a perfected system of totalizing control can be instituted without apparent violence and without firing a shot.
Most of us are so busy “living” that we don’t even realize that we don’t have time to think. In many cases I believe we fill our lives with things to do. For example, as a small child I was lucky to have “down time”. There was no TV, soccer practice, or video games to fill the empty spaces of the day( 1940s) so I played with what children were available, read my books or “helped” my mother. I learned early to entertain myself. It gave me time to think. Most children these days are busy every afternoon or evening with “enriching” opportunities but little time to just be. I feel sorry for them.
Enjoyed reading this, thank you. As an English major, I read all kinds of things that I can now say I did not understand at all until living enough life. How can anyone know beauty or truth from written word? After marriage, kids, work, pain, joy…I find myself suddenly realizing what some short story or poem really meant, only because I lived it personally. what is going on now- this notion that beauty or truth can be found anywhere outside of one’s own experience. And that there is this single objective truth that must be handed to people by some class of ‘experts.’ The idea of ‘misinformation’ is so bizarre.
" ... in a perfectly absolute society, whose rule was indeed total, no one would ever know he was being coerced. There would simply be truths that could no longer be perceived, ideas that could no longer be thought, experiences that could no longer be had, and no one would ever know what he was missing."
I might argue that the "ideas that could no longer be thought" are what constitutes the totalitarian society, through the application of censorship and propaganda.
But more than this if individual sovereignty is respected such that the state cannot control individual behavior, then this opens the way for lived experiences such as those of beauty, without fear that the state will censor these apprehensions as not conforming to its designs.
A beautiful essay. My take is that people are made stupid through government censorship and dictates and propaganda to "nudge" the population into stupidity the better to control them. The antidote is that the government should answer to the people, not the people to the government; individual self-determination should be the order of the day, and people will find their way as they live and love, and maybe lose. Life reveals itself if it isn't constricted by incessant government mandates and strictures that foster paranoia, as it was during High Covid.
Government transparency, individual opacity. The government shouldn't be able to look into, and manipulate, our lives. Yet this is exactly where we're heading, and it will lead to stupidity if we let it.
The concept of beauty as an objective reality is as foreign to me as the beliefs of rural folk who think plastic pink flamingos and a shiny orb in the front yard make it look spiffy. If we're allowed to appeal to the supernatural for solace and guidance, we might start small with a being like Thor. He has a day named after him and few dicta to close our horizons, say forbidding the avoidance of an unwanted life-changing event. Jesus was also mum on abortion, in contradistinction to some currently at the wheel of the Godmobile.
Most of us are so busy “living” that we don’t even realize that we don’t have time to think. In many cases I believe we fill our lives with things to do. For example, as a small child I was lucky to have “down time”. There was no TV, soccer practice, or video games to fill the empty spaces of the day( 1940s) so I played with what children were available, read my books or “helped” my mother. I learned early to entertain myself. It gave me time to think. Most children these days are busy every afternoon or evening with “enriching” opportunities but little time to just be. I feel sorry for them.
Enjoyed reading this, thank you. As an English major, I read all kinds of things that I can now say I did not understand at all until living enough life. How can anyone know beauty or truth from written word? After marriage, kids, work, pain, joy…I find myself suddenly realizing what some short story or poem really meant, only because I lived it personally. what is going on now- this notion that beauty or truth can be found anywhere outside of one’s own experience. And that there is this single objective truth that must be handed to people by some class of ‘experts.’ The idea of ‘misinformation’ is so bizarre.
" ... in a perfectly absolute society, whose rule was indeed total, no one would ever know he was being coerced. There would simply be truths that could no longer be perceived, ideas that could no longer be thought, experiences that could no longer be had, and no one would ever know what he was missing."
I might argue that the "ideas that could no longer be thought" are what constitutes the totalitarian society, through the application of censorship and propaganda.
But more than this if individual sovereignty is respected such that the state cannot control individual behavior, then this opens the way for lived experiences such as those of beauty, without fear that the state will censor these apprehensions as not conforming to its designs.
A beautiful essay. My take is that people are made stupid through government censorship and dictates and propaganda to "nudge" the population into stupidity the better to control them. The antidote is that the government should answer to the people, not the people to the government; individual self-determination should be the order of the day, and people will find their way as they live and love, and maybe lose. Life reveals itself if it isn't constricted by incessant government mandates and strictures that foster paranoia, as it was during High Covid.
Government transparency, individual opacity. The government shouldn't be able to look into, and manipulate, our lives. Yet this is exactly where we're heading, and it will lead to stupidity if we let it.
I stopped reading after "the dismal election of 2016."
You saved some time. It gets real spooky.
Very thought provoking. Thank you!
The concept of beauty as an objective reality is as foreign to me as the beliefs of rural folk who think plastic pink flamingos and a shiny orb in the front yard make it look spiffy. If we're allowed to appeal to the supernatural for solace and guidance, we might start small with a being like Thor. He has a day named after him and few dicta to close our horizons, say forbidding the avoidance of an unwanted life-changing event. Jesus was also mum on abortion, in contradistinction to some currently at the wheel of the Godmobile.