The writings of Thomas Harrington explain how we got here and what everyone else is thinking
https://brownstone.org/author/thomas-harrington/
Tom Harrington is a Brownstone Institute Senior Fellow who provides us with sharp cultural and psychological analyses that have been missing from common discourse. They contextualize our situation in a way that few others have been able to do. For example, he explains that we have been drowning in false narratives our entire lives, particularly those that made it okay for the US to be an imperialist power that attacked other nations at will, mostly to steal their resources.
…Imperialism [has had] enormously toxic effects on the psychic and cognitive health of the empire’s home-borne population.
At the core of all imperial efforts is dehumanization; that is, the idea that some human lives are inherently much more valuable than others…
The truly tragic thing about all this is that once you commit to doing or supporting violence under the rubric of this mental contrivance, it is very, very hard to turn back because doing so means admitting that you are much less morally pristine than you like to imagine yourself to be. It means admitting that you are “fallen” and thus in probable need of self-reflection and behavioral reinforcement from historically ratified sources of ethical learning.
Doing this has always been difficult. But it is harder to do today owing to what the German-Korean philosopher Byun Chul Han, in his short but masterful The Disappearance of Rituals (2022) refers to as the cult of authenticity, wherein we are encouraged to see ourselves as wholly autonomous beings whose prime life goal is generating an outward-facing “performance” designed, in keeping with the demands of consumer capitalism, to see ourselves as being absolutely unique, forward-looking and, above all, economically “productive.”
Reflection? Engagement with longstanding rituals that underneath their pomp and seemingly stale banal repetition are designed to make us ask big questions about who we are and want to be as friends, children, parents, neighbors and citizens.
Sorry. No time for that. The productivity train is always moving and if I don’t get on it and sell my wares, someone else might and reap the benefits. And then I’ll turn into an ontological nobody.
It is owing to this generalized inability to engage in self-reflection that the imperial citizen in a consumer culture frequently becomes a compulsive dissembler who, over time and out of a very real need to stamp out the ever-looming threat of cognitive dissonance in his life, often passes little by little into a state of full-blown delusion.
I prefer this theory of society’s hypnotic trance to Desmet’s, fwiw. Though I still suspect that the hypnosis is (at least in part) enabled by the targeted messaging that can now be individually directed due to machine learning/ artificial intelligence that is associated with military grade psychological warfare.
In this piece, Harrington explains what is wrong with kids these days, and how it benefits the oligarchy.
I just wanted to introduce my readers to Tom Harrington (and the amazing Brownstone Institute, which was created to explain the pandemic morass) as we are in desperate need of social critics, who seem to have scrambled for the exits when the plandemic appeared. Tom tries to help us understand ourselves and others in 2020’s America. Finally.