Certified_Heterosexual
The Falklands are Serbian, you cowards.
The theory behind vaccination is that you expose the immune system to a small, benign dose of a disease in order to prime it against future exposures. And now you know why they made you read Orwell and Huxley in high school, to make you roll your eyes at these criticisms later.
Basically everyone knows Amusing Ourselves to Death, but Neil Postman's book only has thesis, antithesis. The synthesis is this: Brave New World becomes 1984 as its Ponzi-scheme economy becomes addicted to fast, meaningless liquidity and state-enforced doublethink becomes primary to quell dissent. Orwell's characters were shallow caricatures because although he understood psychlogy, psychological realism would have diluted the impact of his ideas. The critical clue that Brave New World and 1984 are the same world is this passage:
This is in contrast to the thesis advanced by O'Brien: "there will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler." To say that the culture of 1984 is motivated by a desire for totalitarian power is correct, but people like O'Brien don't exist, not in the real world. Doublethink and newspeak are not born of vice, but from the desire for virtue. Doublethink makes you feel righteous and holy. Orwell presents oppressive power as cynical, self-aware, intelligent, and cold. It is none of those things. Oppressive power is warm and welcoming, and it doesn't want to hurt you, it wants to make you into a "better person" according to its own twisted understanding.
Those who abase themselves in public do it because it makes them feel that selfsame righteousness. As Nietzsche observed, "a man who despises himself nonetheless esteems himself, as a despiser."
So as we watch our cities tear themselves apart, and our “leaders” fight to denounce each other, and our police kneel to their new lords, notice that the transition between Brave New World and 1984 is happening all around us. Notice how Newspeak is deployed to tell you how you must react. The doublethinkers are trying to hide their failures, to pretend the breakdown of civic order is righteous. Why? Because they aren’t just tyrants, they’re tyrants embarrassed by their own failures. They see the decay plain as you, and they blame it on your “racism” instead of their criminally incompetent leadership.
In light of all that, let's talk about words. We are being devoured by Orwellian lies at a rapid pace, and one reason that the lies grow so well is that they route around our linguistic defenses. Separation of church and state is not possible. It just creates a selection pressure for innovative new religions to shed the labels of "church" and "god." And this is precisely what we see today—a state religion with no church and no god. We're a theocracy, and we don't even know it. We are witnesses to the birth of a new faith and a new church, but most people still don't see it... or else they deny it—maybe because their definition of religion is too narrow, or maybe because there is no good name yet for this new faith. Of course there are plenty of names for the new religion among the dissidents, but none of them cleave reality at the joints. I've heard it called Intersectional Feminism, Black Lives Matter, the Woke, Diversity, LGBT, and so on. But they're all either too awkward to say, or don't capture the underlying unity of purpose.
This new religion has no name, and it likes it that way. No name means there is no icon to attack. Its moral premises are beyond question because they are nebulous, floating outside of any one named label or creed. If you accept them, you're simply "a decent person" and if not, you're simply "a shitty person." Do you believe in Good Things or are you a Shitty Person? In addition to being emotional blackmail (how long util that term is banned, I wonder?), this formulation is an exosemantic gang sign, a phrase that connotes tribal affiliation with plausible deniability.
The streets are full of these exosemantic gang signs, if you know what to look for. “I’m tired,” “that scares me,” “educate yourself,” “step down,” “human lives,” "black bodies," “I can’t breathe.” An armory of xosemantic gang signs, religiously charged and plausibly deniable. This is how the pagan Romans felt about Christianity, I’m sure. When empires decline, people desire radical religious conversions. The Faith With No Name offers one.
As with any religion, the Faith With No Name has its different theological schools, which even fight with each other. The major schools are Queerism, Feminism, and Blackism, the latter of which is an ecumenism in which white people literally worship black people. Blackists in this formulation are always white, but they tokenize and co-opt black people into their sick, self-centered ritual of Pharisaical atonement. And many black activists know it, but they can't resist the worshipful fawning of white sycophants. Think of the unfortunate black people in tech companies right now who are being forced to join diversity panels in the name of "inclusivity," when all they want to do is work productively. But white liberals won't even let them have that! The Blackist diversity committees in every company in America are a gaggle of white women. Orwell understood this dynamic: "It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy." Instead of learning life skills or a trade, they learned crackpot philosophies of black sacredness and read tortured social science research concluding that there's a vast conspiracy against black people in every facet of life.
Queerism, Feminism, Blackism: all of these theological branches spring from the same seed, and the only people who deny it are playing dumb so they can pick a fight. “It's not a religion, I just believe in human rights, I just...”
As always, this exact spectacular moment will pass, just like Occupy Wall Street, just like the Rodney King riots, just like the Days of Rage, but this new religion keeps winning new converts, cordycepting the old faith by shouting "judge not" to a nation of Biblical illiterates. From MLK, Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin, to Harvey Milk and Matthew Shepard, the Faith With No Name will continue to manufacture saints and martyrs. Next May 25th, no matter who is president, George Floyd Day will be our next national holiday. So many old beliefs have lost their power; "mythology" now means "fantasy" and the old myths are so hard to believe nowadays. It's because the miraculous has become mundane, and nobody has any fire left. How can anything compete with the real danger, the real ecstasy, the emotional highs and lows of the Great Awokening? No one feels anything in the old religions any more, they want something to make them feel alive, and the Faith With No Name obligingly steps up to fill the gaps.
When Christians tell you how sinful you are, you don't believe them, because Queerism has married state power and eroded the shame we felt for sexual sins. When the Faith With No Name tells you how sinful you are, it proves it with wild street theater.
Christians are persecuted by bureaucrats, tamely and passively. Blackists are persecuted by cops with rubber bullets and gas grenades. (They seek out greater and harsher persecutions, as all persecuted men do). Only one of these inspires people.
When you know the name of a spirit, you can command it. One insidious feature of the Faith With No Name is that its adherents choose names for themselves that contain a rhetorical trap—Antifa can't be fascist, Antifa mean ANTI-fascist, you conservatard! If you try to argue against Black Lives Matter you instantly lose, because to engage the assertion is to implicitly accept the underlying metaphysical premise. It’s the equivalent of trying to argue with "does your mom know you're gay?" or "have you stopped beating your wife?"
If the average person is going to oppose the Faith With No Name, the first step is naming the demon. We must find a way to force shape, form, and substance to their idols, so that we can denounce them. You can't easily oppose BLM, but you can oppose the cultic power from which it emanates. Whatever name we give them cannot sound like a slur. It must be neutral, concise, and above all, tempting. The idea is for the adherents of the Faith With No Name to be baited into choosing it as their label. Just as it became easier to rout right-wing dissidents once they foolishly clustered under the now-defunct Alt-Right banner, we must name this dark power in order to kill it. No existing name will suffice, and we know this because no existing name has sufficed. Things you can't name are things you can't understand, and things you can't understand are things you can't fight.
Basically everyone knows Amusing Ourselves to Death, but Neil Postman's book only has thesis, antithesis. The synthesis is this: Brave New World becomes 1984 as its Ponzi-scheme economy becomes addicted to fast, meaningless liquidity and state-enforced doublethink becomes primary to quell dissent. Orwell's characters were shallow caricatures because although he understood psychlogy, psychological realism would have diluted the impact of his ideas. The critical clue that Brave New World and 1984 are the same world is this passage:
This is in contrast to the thesis advanced by O'Brien: "there will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler." To say that the culture of 1984 is motivated by a desire for totalitarian power is correct, but people like O'Brien don't exist, not in the real world. Doublethink and newspeak are not born of vice, but from the desire for virtue. Doublethink makes you feel righteous and holy. Orwell presents oppressive power as cynical, self-aware, intelligent, and cold. It is none of those things. Oppressive power is warm and welcoming, and it doesn't want to hurt you, it wants to make you into a "better person" according to its own twisted understanding.
Those who abase themselves in public do it because it makes them feel that selfsame righteousness. As Nietzsche observed, "a man who despises himself nonetheless esteems himself, as a despiser."
So as we watch our cities tear themselves apart, and our “leaders” fight to denounce each other, and our police kneel to their new lords, notice that the transition between Brave New World and 1984 is happening all around us. Notice how Newspeak is deployed to tell you how you must react. The doublethinkers are trying to hide their failures, to pretend the breakdown of civic order is righteous. Why? Because they aren’t just tyrants, they’re tyrants embarrassed by their own failures. They see the decay plain as you, and they blame it on your “racism” instead of their criminally incompetent leadership.
In light of all that, let's talk about words. We are being devoured by Orwellian lies at a rapid pace, and one reason that the lies grow so well is that they route around our linguistic defenses. Separation of church and state is not possible. It just creates a selection pressure for innovative new religions to shed the labels of "church" and "god." And this is precisely what we see today—a state religion with no church and no god. We're a theocracy, and we don't even know it. We are witnesses to the birth of a new faith and a new church, but most people still don't see it... or else they deny it—maybe because their definition of religion is too narrow, or maybe because there is no good name yet for this new faith. Of course there are plenty of names for the new religion among the dissidents, but none of them cleave reality at the joints. I've heard it called Intersectional Feminism, Black Lives Matter, the Woke, Diversity, LGBT, and so on. But they're all either too awkward to say, or don't capture the underlying unity of purpose.
This new religion has no name, and it likes it that way. No name means there is no icon to attack. Its moral premises are beyond question because they are nebulous, floating outside of any one named label or creed. If you accept them, you're simply "a decent person" and if not, you're simply "a shitty person." Do you believe in Good Things or are you a Shitty Person? In addition to being emotional blackmail (how long util that term is banned, I wonder?), this formulation is an exosemantic gang sign, a phrase that connotes tribal affiliation with plausible deniability.
The streets are full of these exosemantic gang signs, if you know what to look for. “I’m tired,” “that scares me,” “educate yourself,” “step down,” “human lives,” "black bodies," “I can’t breathe.” An armory of xosemantic gang signs, religiously charged and plausibly deniable. This is how the pagan Romans felt about Christianity, I’m sure. When empires decline, people desire radical religious conversions. The Faith With No Name offers one.
As with any religion, the Faith With No Name has its different theological schools, which even fight with each other. The major schools are Queerism, Feminism, and Blackism, the latter of which is an ecumenism in which white people literally worship black people. Blackists in this formulation are always white, but they tokenize and co-opt black people into their sick, self-centered ritual of Pharisaical atonement. And many black activists know it, but they can't resist the worshipful fawning of white sycophants. Think of the unfortunate black people in tech companies right now who are being forced to join diversity panels in the name of "inclusivity," when all they want to do is work productively. But white liberals won't even let them have that! The Blackist diversity committees in every company in America are a gaggle of white women. Orwell understood this dynamic: "It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy." Instead of learning life skills or a trade, they learned crackpot philosophies of black sacredness and read tortured social science research concluding that there's a vast conspiracy against black people in every facet of life.
Queerism, Feminism, Blackism: all of these theological branches spring from the same seed, and the only people who deny it are playing dumb so they can pick a fight. “It's not a religion, I just believe in human rights, I just...”
As always, this exact spectacular moment will pass, just like Occupy Wall Street, just like the Rodney King riots, just like the Days of Rage, but this new religion keeps winning new converts, cordycepting the old faith by shouting "judge not" to a nation of Biblical illiterates. From MLK, Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin, to Harvey Milk and Matthew Shepard, the Faith With No Name will continue to manufacture saints and martyrs. Next May 25th, no matter who is president, George Floyd Day will be our next national holiday. So many old beliefs have lost their power; "mythology" now means "fantasy" and the old myths are so hard to believe nowadays. It's because the miraculous has become mundane, and nobody has any fire left. How can anything compete with the real danger, the real ecstasy, the emotional highs and lows of the Great Awokening? No one feels anything in the old religions any more, they want something to make them feel alive, and the Faith With No Name obligingly steps up to fill the gaps.
When Christians tell you how sinful you are, you don't believe them, because Queerism has married state power and eroded the shame we felt for sexual sins. When the Faith With No Name tells you how sinful you are, it proves it with wild street theater.
Christians are persecuted by bureaucrats, tamely and passively. Blackists are persecuted by cops with rubber bullets and gas grenades. (They seek out greater and harsher persecutions, as all persecuted men do). Only one of these inspires people.
When you know the name of a spirit, you can command it. One insidious feature of the Faith With No Name is that its adherents choose names for themselves that contain a rhetorical trap—Antifa can't be fascist, Antifa mean ANTI-fascist, you conservatard! If you try to argue against Black Lives Matter you instantly lose, because to engage the assertion is to implicitly accept the underlying metaphysical premise. It’s the equivalent of trying to argue with "does your mom know you're gay?" or "have you stopped beating your wife?"
If the average person is going to oppose the Faith With No Name, the first step is naming the demon. We must find a way to force shape, form, and substance to their idols, so that we can denounce them. You can't easily oppose BLM, but you can oppose the cultic power from which it emanates. Whatever name we give them cannot sound like a slur. It must be neutral, concise, and above all, tempting. The idea is for the adherents of the Faith With No Name to be baited into choosing it as their label. Just as it became easier to rout right-wing dissidents once they foolishly clustered under the now-defunct Alt-Right banner, we must name this dark power in order to kill it. No existing name will suffice, and we know this because no existing name has sufficed. Things you can't name are things you can't understand, and things you can't understand are things you can't fight.
