The Progressive movement has always known the importance of the scream. Conservatives have, for the most part, been identified as the base of the “Silent Majority.” Indeed, we’ve had it beaten into us as a matter of pride that “we are not like them” by high minded voices such as William F. Buckley Jr.
Well, maybe, just maybe, Buckley was a major Prog mole. Sure, we enjoyed him talking down to the smug Left; but maybe not so much when he did so to those he declared too far right, effectively giving license to MSM to help shut them down. (Given that Buckley’s baby, National Review, has become a major employer of Conservative Inc, he himself may have been the seed that made NR another victim of Conquest’s 2nd Law.)
Whatever the reason, and however the Progs achieved it, keeping the right more silent than their allies allowed the Progs to use their most effective weapon — the scream (being why “there are no enemies to the left”) — while the right kept their screamers muffled.
For reasons that escape me, the scream has never been identified as the Left’s primary tool to implement Critical Theory. A definition of Critical Theory, stripped of all its camouflage, is the criticizing of anything and everything in a culture under attack so that idealized Marxism — an ideology implicitly designed to exploit envy — provides opportunities for power seekers to seize control. Example: declaring those who fix up derelict homes as engaging in “gentrification.” Object, don’t bother learning skills so you can afford a home. Better you rent in block housing and own and learn nothing.
Have you ever pondered what is meant by “social engineering?” I did many years ago, and wrote about what I discovered in a humorous fashion. I sincerely regret my stupidity for not taking my analogy seriously. That is despite every hardware engineering colleague I shared it with agreeing with the validity of the analogy I came up with.
Essentially social engineering is a discipline that seeks to alter the nature of society by whatever means that might be at hand. The social engineer gets tasked with overcoming the resistance people have to any number of things. One of these things would be change. Convincing them that they are not getting what they were promised is another. Getting them to acquiesce to what they detest or find harmful is a third. Authorities learned from history that when resistance to actions are lowest, it is easiest to act.
Put into words, the rate or speed or ease of action will be proportional to the pressures applied and inversely proportional to the resistance to the pressures and/or actions.
Action ∝ Pressure/Resistance (1)
What is a scream? Starting with the very basics: when an infant wails it wants to be fed, warmed, chilled, comforted or have its diaper changed. We are pressured into action. Take two examples: coming to its aid; shouting “take your baby home to a sitter” followed by applause from the theater audience. A scream (a cry, a shout, etc.) represents the desire or drive — arising from some stimulus — for change from one state to another. In physics, this is known as potential difference.
Whereas the hard sciences of fluid dynamics, heat transfer, electricity and material diffusion are all driven by the potential differences of pressure, temperature, voltage and concentration, respectively, the soft science of social engineering is driven by the scream.
The best known form of modeling hard science networks is found in the design of electrical circuitry. Although electrical theory can take one deep into advanced calculus, a linear approximation known as Ohm’s Law is most often used to design networks of circuits. Ohm’s Law may be represented in the form suggested by equation 1 above as current = voltage/resistance.
I = V/R. (2)
And from that one gets Power = V²/R. (3)
Designing heat transfer systems (where I made my living) is often done via what we call the electrical analogy. It uses a generalized form of Fourier’s law of conduction, heat flow = temperature difference/resistance.
q = ΔT/R (4)
And because for some jobs I needed to design plenum chambers that passed through heat exchangers so as to remove heat from cooling streams, I once again found it useful to employ a linearized electrical analogy: mass flow squared = pressure difference/impedance.
w² = ΔP/Z (5)
With all the above hard sciences lining up as they do, this ought to explain to the lay reader why my colleagues immediately recognized the validity of an equation for social engineering: Political action = Screams/Resistance.
A = S/R (6)
and from that one gets Power = S²/R (7)
“So what Pascal?” you may ask. We know propaganda works. We don’t control the powers that be’s enormous number of platforms to overwhelm us. And we will never have anything like Ayn Rand’s Deus ex machina wherein John Galt took all of them over. And even that didn’t solve the problems affecting the minds of the ultimate victims — the little common man of her novel.
Well, there’s more. Terrifyingly more. We must all come to grips with the fact that our enemies have almost completely removed the cloak over their horrible intentions and gloat by gaslighting their most obvious assaults. They are showing off for the very purpose to overwhelm us with their awesomeness.
Do you see any circuit breakers in this version of the electrical analogy?
Well, electrical circuits have them. Without them, you can draw too much current through the circuits and you burn down the house beginning at the location that is weakest.
Civilized societies have them. For disputes between neighbors we have:
- Civil discussions
- Debates
- Mediators
- Arbitrators
- Courts with juries
- Courts without jury
For criminal behavior there are police to keep the incidents lower. And then prosecutors and criminal courts and prisons to deal with that element.
And what has the radical Left and SKUNCs been doing lately? Doing all they can to eliminate every one of those circuit breakers. Soros prosecutors are much more prominent today than when I began this essay 18 months ago.
And long before this, there is another element of electrical analogy the psychos have been using to help them destroy our peaceful order. Let me make an analogy of the power of induction.
Just as we can build up a magnet by winding any ferro-magnetic material with wires and run a current through it, our enemy has been using media and education institutions to induce depravities in every human being. Our surroundings are soaking with every weird idea from minor aberrations to the vilest of cruelties.
But not every human being is attracted to every depraved suggestion, just as aluminum and wood and glass won’t become magnets as iron does. But provide enough different aberrant suggestions, and the destroyers reap a huge build-up of outliers. Each one provides the insatiably power-mad wokesters an excuse to shout down even those who wish to protect the targets of the latest depravity. Do I really have to provide examples? (Well, please see the footnotes for a wide variety of examples.)
Here is something I feel certain about. Every man who finds the strength to deny himself the compulsion to succumb to the one of those pornographic displays that attracts him most is repaying God by doing the right thing. Furthermore, each of us who overcomes the huge effort by the enemy to shrug off our natural resistance to their attacks is doing the same.
Let me end this with what I believe to be an improvement on the observation by Aristotle that “virtue is its own reward.” He came to that conclusion before his most renown pupil, Alexander the Great, came in contact with the Jewish concept of God and its ethical monotheism. Let me suggest to you that your virtues, despite your failures, are your repayment to God for your very life. In that sense, our virtue is His reward.
As I concluded at A Minor Insight That Could Inspire A Solution, the few among the-powers-that-be who are psychopaths know that many of the others still retain a portion of their truly good inclinations. These latter still think well of themselves, have a sense of leaving a good legacy, and so they would respond to our pleas for reform. The psychos and less virulent sociopaths are counting on us to remain silent.
So please add your loud and clear countering voice to your virtues. There are risks and the psychos will fight back, but it will restore your battered soul.
[Beginning on 2/21/24: Other supporting words:
- https://tomklingenstein.com/how-censorship-drives-the-woke-revolution/ because silencing voices countering the screams of the radicals helps reduce the public’s resistance to their demands. This man has long recognized the war being raged against citizens.]
- James Lindsay SHATTERS Woke Ideology: EU Parliament Speech what he says on the development of Critical theory (@22:50) fully supports my paragraph on it]
- 2/26/24 Provides examples of censorship PragerU by Philip Hamburger, Professor of Law at Columbia U
- 2/27/24 Provides examples of Conquest’s 3rd. Consequence of long term due to Conquest’s 2nd where as decent folk said little their resistance was gradually diminished. Regarding today’s museum curators, we hear a bit after 12:32 one conclusion: “I think that trustees obviously always have to reinvigorate and renew collections what I think is strange is that they should hate the collections which they are in charge of. “ Throughout this piece we learn of one museum (institutions of art and history) after another behaving this way.
- 2/28 Whittle & Co laugh at cannibalism while ignoring its twin. My Comment: As if organ transplantation hasn’t become common in the last 60 years. Cannibalization of body parts IS cannibalism in disguise. It’s so widely accepted, unquestioned, that I’d bet big money that all 3 of you would engage in the practice without concern that the donor might be some victimized Chinese slave or disappeared child.
- E.g., Were Canadians not conditioned into silence by statist media agit-prop, more than half of them would resist. MAID would be known as MAIM: D for dying replaced by M for murder.
- 3/12/24 Paraphrasing Dr Phil interviewed by JPPeterson: ‘individual consciousness can’t contribute to the collective consciousness when one is fearful to speak up’
- 3/22/24 Universalizing FWP “almost all decent people have good intentions themselves, and therefore extend that presumption to others”
- 4/6/24 Mobilizing screamers to achieve concessions Radical Implementation by Cloward-Piven Model — MNN org, episode 345 of “The Radical Imagination”