“..The worst difficulties from which we suffer
...come from within. They do not come from
the cottages of the wage earners, they come
from a peculiar type of brainy people always
found in our country, who, if they add something
to its culture, take much from its strength…”
—Winston Churchill
“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is. It doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”
—-Richard Feynman
What follows are the observations of 3 psychoanalysts with a combined 150+ years of experience observing human nature up close.
Western Civilization and Reality
The Hebrew Bible is a cornerstone in the foundation of Western Civilization. Its opening words are “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God Said Let there be light; and there was light. God saw that the light was good and he Separated the light from the darkness…” Finally creation culminates in the formation of human beings.
These words are an attempt, at the dawn of civilization by pre civilizational humans to explain reality. They attempted to answer the existential questions: Who are we? What is the meaning of the world around us? How was reality created. The Biblical paragraphs that follow provide answers for believers and non believers. Reality is created through a process of separation, differentiation, definition and classification. Out of the primeval void God created two separate realms: heaven and earth. Earth is described in the original Hebrew as consisting of “Tohoo vavohoo”-a state of total chaos, without shape or form, enclosed in darkness. The next act of creation brought light and the separation of light from darkness. The power of light enabled the further elaboration of the principle of separation, differentiation, and definition. Water is separated from land, day from night, land yielding grass from fruit yielding seed, etc. Finally then creation culminates in the biological differentiation of the sexes: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he them; male and female created he them.” And God endowed Adam with the gift of language. “God brought every beast of the field and every fowl of the air unto Adam and whatsoever Adam called every living creature that was the name thereof.” Thus is Adam given God’s power to bring reality out of chaos by naming and differentiating with words.
The Hebrew bible’s story of creation is an attempted explanation for the existence of a shared human reality. Reality rests on division, separation, definition, classification and individuation. Furthermore all of these elements of reality require language. Language however is a double edged sword. On the one hand it allows us to articulate our observations and to know we live in a shared reality. On the other hand it can also be used to falsify or destroy reality. George Orwell knew this and tried to counter the revolutionary dogmas of his time by highlighting their assaults on language, not only in his novels but in his great essay Politics And The English Language. Try reading an essay by Professor of English! Judith Butler, side by side with Orwell.
“The Question is,” said Alice whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,”said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
Humpty Dumpty would be a welcome addition to the Postmodernist faculty in English departments of our elite universities.
Central to woke dogma is erasure of the distinction between male and female. This requires dismissal of the primacy of biology in favor of the invented word ‘gender.’ When a well educated Supreme Court justice cannot answer the question, “What is a woman” we can be sure biological reality is under assault by ideology. Wokism, a pagan religious political ideology, uses language to undermine reality. Thus a male can decide he is female, and what was once thought to be delusional is now regarded as a civil right to be applauded for its authenticity and truth. How many among the sane could have anticipated that our Supreme Court would be asked to adjudicate the question of whether men in the grip of a delusion that they are women are being denied by bigots their civil right to be whatever they wish to be?
As we have indicated, because reality as distinction and difference comes from the God of the old Testament, the Woke assault on reality must of necessity target the Jews who brought it as the people chosen by God to spread His word to the world. So it should not surprise that antisemitism is on the rise amongst the educated class whose teachers are true believers of the new pagan ideology.
The “brainy people” Churchill was referring to were wordsmith intellectuals. The philosopher Robert Nozick offered an explanation for why wordsmith intellectuals had and still have such animus towards the free societies in which they live. The school systems in which they flourished gave authoritarian power to the teachers who rewarded verbal prowess with praise and approval. Such verbally skilled children became the teachers’ pets, comfortable in an authoritarian world, the winners of awards and naturally they came to regard themselves as superior. They flourished in an undemocratic world, the classroom.
Nozick pointed out that the larger society beyond the school room doesn’t necessarily reward wordsmiths for the theories they construct. In the school yard, verbal gifts count for little. Rewards go to the best basketball scorer. Character is important. Authority accrues to the more physically accomplished, the bold, not to the verbally adept. The leaders are not chosen by an authority figure, but emerge democratically on merit. Adult society also gives its greatest rewards in money and recognition to the doers, the builders the creators, the free thinkers, the athletes, not necessarily the best test takers and the most verbally gifted. There are more poor poets than poor plumbers.
Verbally gifted children often go on to elite colleges where they learn to write papers that will ingratiate them to their wordsmith teachers who also construct theories to explain how unjust their societies are. These theories praise the hapless victims of the ‘entitlement’ they themselves embrace.
We would however argue that there are deeper reasons connected to the assault on reality. Orwell said that “there are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them..” He added: “No ordinary man could be such a fool.” We tend to think of academic wordsmiths as intelligent. Let us suppose this is measurably true. Still, it’s a burden to have ones intelligence be core to ones sense of self. People tend to expect that intelligent people will add to the culture and our general understanding of life. Have they actually done so? That would require real work, not just displaying grievance. It would require a willingness to understand flawed human nature, including one’s own. How much easier to shed intelligence for a wider, broader identity with the foolish, while retaining the childhood sense of superiority. Articulate ignorance is still ignorance. One can be mind numbingly dumb in our universities and advance up the ladder of success, even become a university President. That is so much easier than adding to the sum total of human knowledge and being criticized for doing so. This is confirmed as we see professors praised and taken seriously for such astonishingly childish ideas as arguing the world is made up of oppressors and oppressed, or settler colonialists and hapless indigenous victims. Meanwhile many in the elite professoriate seem to embrace the notion that reasoned knowledge is itself oppressive. Let’s stop teaching calculus; after all Mathematics has been developed by racist oppressors. What could be dumber than embracing the ideology of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion? It has taken over our elite universities because a receptive professoriate embraces infantile thinking. After all aren’t children the victims of parents who want them to adapt to a world run by oppressors and racists?
There is a deep psychological reason for the PostModernist and Woke embrace of irrationality and ignorance. The late French psychoanalyst Janine Chasseguet Smirgel first connected the assault on reality with the pleasures of perversion. Perversion does not just refer to kinky sexual practices; it includes the pleasure gained from the destruction of reality, the erasure of difference and the embrace of chaos. The Marquis de Sade made clear that all of his celebrated perversions were rejections of the Hebrew God’s reality. They obliterate the differences between the sexes and the generations, between humans and animals, parents and children, animate and inanimate. The erasure of difference and a return to undifferentiated fecal sameness is intensely “sadistically” pleasurable. The GoPro videos taken by Hamas of their rapes, of their child murders, of their murdering parents in front of their children, provided masturbatory sado-masochistic pleasure to millions around the world. It should not surprise that professors who expressed joy and happiness about the rapist, child murders of October 7 were the same who celebrate transsexual lunatics as heroic civil rights fighters.
Our contemporary wordsmiths have turned their attention to the perceived unfairness of capitalist societies. Despite the trail of death and destruction in leftist utopias our own society’s inequalities of outcome are cited as proof that unfairness is widespread under capitalism. The obvious reality that human nature is built on difference is dismissed. Racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, the whole woke agenda explain our failure to reach utopia. The various social utopias that wordsmiths construct have failed to alter the realities of human nature: some are more talented with words; they write the histories that overvalue wordsmiths themselves. Some are better at science, math, engineering, music, art, sports, etc., etc. How unfair that I could not grow up to play center field for the Yankees, just because I was nearsighted, slow and couldn’t get my bat on a curve ball. Please let’s change society so that I get what I am entitled to. After all I put in many hours of my childhood, throwing a ‘spaldeen’ against my front steps. Thus is merit tossed on the ash heap of history in favor of an egalitarian utopia.
Wokeism and anti-semitism vs. Reality
With the failure of utopian ideologies like Nazism and Communism to change human nature, our contemporary utopian intellectuals have produced a new version of the old utopian vision, Wokeism. This is a new religion, a variant on old ones. The new one might be called a Satanic or perverse religion since, like Satan in Paradise Lost, it rejects and scorns the G-d of the Old testament. That G-d created reality out of formlessness and chaos by naming and differentiating: light from dark, dry land from waters, animals different from one another, every kind of fruit and vegetable. Words were the vehicle for creating reality. Thus the perversion of words, corrupting their meaning is an attack on reality. Out of sameness came difference. The effort to erase difference, rather than embrace it, is a perverse assault on reality. Perversion is an attempt to erase crucial differences—between male and female, between parents and children, between human and non-human, between life and death, between meaning and words. The Marquis de Sade described not just the pleasures of sexual perversion, violence and destruction, but described the pleasures of overturning G-d’s laws, the moral laws that differentiate between good and evil. The followers of Sade abound. The pleasures of sexual murder are now available on videos taken by Sade’s followers and celebrated by the woke followers around the world. Thus the pleasures of wokeness arise through vicarious participation in events like the October 7 sadistic rape, torture and murder by the followers of Satan, the foremost enemy of reality.
When utopia fails to arrive its pursuers never easily let go. It can’t possibly be their own rejection of reality. Instead they search for scapegoats—sexism, racism, homophobia are current favorites. However the oldest and most readily available scapegoat is the Jews. Why? Because the Old Testament brought difference and distinction, reality out of chaos. The newest branch of Wokeism, transsexualism directly assaults the fundamental difference between male and female. Like its predecessor religions, Communism and Nazism, it wants to transform human nature, but goes further than its predecessors. Nazism claimed it would produce a perfected human nature, Aryan Man. Communism argued that when its pure form arrived there would no longer be need for government for all would be content and cooperation would be universal. Wokeism goes further; it will simply do away with the biological differences between men and women. X and Y chromosomal difference is erased by a word: ‘gender.’ This is an illustration of what the great novelist Joseph Conrad said: “A word travels far, very far, deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.” Destruction of reality is the final aim of the practitioners of transsexual Wokeism. It invents terms like “Gender affirming care” in order to medicalize sado masochistic mutilation of “patients”. The Nazis called such bodily mutilations ‘experiments’, now we call them ‘cures’.
Wordsmiths, skilled at using language to convey meaning have turned on language itself. In doing so they continue the assault on reality. Orwell again made this clear. Words like Genocide are drained of specific meaning and defenders against and victims of genocide become perpetrators against the real practitioners of it. When words cease to convey reality then reality itself can be destroyed.
Many pundits seem puzzled by the slippage of support for the Democratic Party among traditionally Democratic constituencies. Was it because of the economy? After all, the economy, according to leading economists was doing very well. Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman told us so. Was it the border? Again, the experts tell the less schooled it’s completely under control. Believe us, we’re experts. Was it crime? No it can’t be that programs like ‘defund the police’ endorsed by Ivy League academics actually incentivize crime. Well, we have the statisticians and political scientists to explain why everything is getting so much better. Woke critical race theory, embraced by the Democratic Party, says that the high levels of imprisoned black males is due to racism, not to high rates of criminality in that demographic. And then there’s language: if you don’t submit to the new rules imposed by the woke, you are a bigot. And the antisemitism spreading through the Democratic Party? That we are told is a manifestation of “resistance” to the depredations of Israel’s Prime Minister. As usual, Jews become the scapegoat for the inevitable failures of utopia to arrive. It’s surely the lack of intelligence and fine education that explains why Israel has overwhelming support outside the precincts of the Ivy League and its fellow elite institutions of higher learning. Could it possibly be that the un-woke understand that Israel is defending reality vs. the barbaric assaults threatening all of us?
None of the pundits seem to recognize that reality is not so easily overturned. Yes there is a real explanation for the election results: The assault on reality crafted by the “brainy people” Churchill spoke of, was rejected by the common sense assertion of reality by those who had not been brainwashed at our elite universities or their graduates in the media. Will yet another failure of the utopian fantasists be met with a turn toward reality in the Democratic Party? Probably not; there are still those who insist that the Soviet Union under Stalin, and China under Mao were not failures of Communism but rather of its implementation. There is however some hope in the persons of John Fetterman and Ritchie Torres. They understand that pursuit of a far left woke utopianism inevitably turns to Jew hatred to explain and excuse its failures. And most Americans don’t like mobs of antisemites taking over campuses and expressing hatred for the little Satan, Israel and the big Satan, America. It is time for the lovers of Western civilization to fight back intellectually as our Israeli defenders of civilization have fought back militarily against the barbarians. Reality depends on it.