What Lies Beneath

 

June 22, 2018

"There was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and this will always be 'the man in the street.'  Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology." 

We must ask ourselves whether we are intellectuals, or easy marks for the crude and forcible?

Propagandists in the footsteps of Josef Goebbels understand that a certain measure of any population requires an enemy, someone to hate, someone to blame. So, they give them one – understanding that when caught and spinning in their vortex of anger and resentments, people no longer seek truth.

In a nation which celebrates unpreparedness and ignorance, we are exploring new levels of revelry. In a nation so long a beacon to those yearning to breathe free, we plumb uncharted depths of antipathy and hostility. The widespread public acceptance of frequent political prevarications and contradictions has been easy to observe. It's out there in the open, right in front of us to see and to hear, yet when dissenting voices acknowledge the cognitive dissonance and abnormality, they are mercilessly pilloried with absurd whataboutism and assertions of equivalency – themselves inherent contradictions to the blanket scree of spurious moral outrage on full display just a couple of short years ago. 

What lies beneath the thin veneer of civility in men and a nation are the seeds of terror and destruction, which we have recklessly sown, and the silence and vitriol sure to follow this essay will tell the story.  We willfully and steadily chip away at the democratic norms and foundations binding us together, those same seeds wedging inside and widening the cracks, and our footings are close to failure.  

Because it’s no longer about the truth.  It's about identity.  Were it not, a dispiriting number of voters and elected officials wouldn't cravenly cite party loyalty above all to support child molesters, pimps, and self-proclaimed Nazis running for office. They wouldn’t stockpile firearms ostensibly to defend against a shadowy government one day, and the very next cite biblical passages exhorting their countrymen to obey the law and kneel before that same thuggish and nefarious government. Or demand we kneel before our God in reverence, but not the flag. Or put small children in cages while throwing up billboards displaying infants, extolling their virtue and the sanctity of life.  And ladies from church wouldn’t tell us that these aren't our kids, and anyway their parents should have known better.

We've all come out, so to speak, over the last several years in America; especially in the past two, and we now hold a remarkably clear view into the hearts of our friends, our families, our neighbors, our countrymen. More than disturbing and at times shocking, our empathy has evaporated like water cast away from a dying man. These years have been an abrupt and frightening eye-opener, a disorienting and terrible awakening.  To be Frank, these are the demons that come in the night: we now know who will refuse to hide you in their attic and will report you to the secret police.  We now know who, with tightly clutched bible and pensive glare, will point their finger at you when they come.  

And stand silent as they take you away.

Those of us less susceptible to the crude and to the forcible understand full well where this is all leading, and the cold light and dark stains on the pages of history make it clear: if we continue our path, come they will.