A perhaps subtle point

An awful lot of my posts begin with me laying in bed, just pondering. They usually begin with feelings that I flesh into words in various ways, and then forget. So today.

The sense I had this morning is that Leftists are not TRYING to eradicate their own freedom. What they are doing is trying to eradicate THREATS. The loss of freedom is a natural outcome of ganging together in mobs in organized aggression and hate.

The more I consider it, the more I think all totalitarianism really stems from disregulated limbic systems.

We all naturally try to move away from shame.

We all naturally try to move away from fear, or more accurately, from the object of the fear, but of course you cannot physically move away from abstract fears.

We move TOWARD anger, which is to say, neurologically, defensive aggression. The fight of “fight or flight”. If you fight what you fear, you can at best conquer it, and at worst still move away from fear.

So what a “political movement” provides is a sense of feeling safe in a herd, which is instinctive. We are social, which is in many respects to say herd, animals. We feel in our bones we are safer in a group because out in the wild that is unquestionably true. It is also true in conflicts with other humans.

The herd is called into being by a shared threat. In fact, I had not thought this before, but I will say it: the war manias we have often had before wars, in which everyone gets positively HAPPY because “we are finally going to go get those bastards” is really not different in kind from the class warfare of Communism, or the racial warfare of the Nazis, other than that nations sometimes do present threats, whereas the artificial and essentially arbitrary distinctions of the modern Collectivists did not describe actual threats, even though they were acted on as such. The Jews were never any threat to the Nazis. The Kulaks were never a threat to Lenin. Trump is not a threat to America.

So we could call Collectivism a fabricated herd based on shared aggression. I think this is close to the truth. And of course, this is pure triangulation. It is an organized method for generating emotional calm through a group membership based on outwardly directed violence that is rationalized as defensive.

So to return to my original point, it is not that Communists are TRYING to destroy all individual liberty, as that liberty disappears within the generalized violence they feel they need to perpetrate to protect themselves.

And as I said in a recent post, power is an anxiolytic narcotic. Membership in a fabricated herd is also. What you lose if you choose to leave is the profound calming power of sharing answers and objectives with a large mass of other people. What you lose is a primal simplicity, felt sense of naturalness, and the only place you can go is into what no doubt appears to be a dark, confusing and dangerous place.

I suppose we should not be surprised how strong and even fanatical leftwing delusions are. The realities are not hard to perceive, but they are hard to ACCEPT. It is not just an idea you lose, but a felt sense of Life at a deep level.

And in this vein, I was pondering traditional societies. I feel like, say, the Plains Indians had a loose culture. You could be free there to adopt a fair amount of individual ideosyncracies, even though there remained certain things your society held sacred. You could go pretty far out, and still be accepted in the tribe. This is my little brain experiment, that may or may not bear any relation to the actual facts.

But what is obvious is that in large scale, citified, complex societies, notions of the sacred and profane became absolute, such that profaning something sacred—for example by behaving in a way not suitable for your class or gender—would elicit latent violence. The mass hysteria was embedded into the system, but implicitly. Behavioral diversity would bring out the violence, and you could and would become the enemy. Just as one concrete example, imagine the reactions in much of the world were a woman to wear a man’s clothes in public and be discovered. In some places it would not be too bad; in some places she would be killed. The difference is the tension within the society and thus the latent aggression.

I probably need to read Hannah Arendt’s book on Totalitarianism. She probably doesn’t talk about the limbic system, since she probably didn’t know about it, since I don’t think that research had been done at that point, but no doubt she reliably describes its workings as manifested in social activity.

It’s certainly likely I CAN say this too much, but being willing to take the risk, I will say that maturity at root is the ability to manage anxiety. The wisdom of old folks in no small measure is manifested in calm when others are anxious, and in patience when people want to REACT—immediate motion being the core output of the limbic system—without reflection.

Mature SOCIETIES contain very little, or I suppose zero, latent violence, and are filled with calm, thoughtful people slow to anger, and empathetic with one another.

It’s kind of a sleight of hand, or fake magic trick that “hate” has been made to seem to vanish while it is waxing by the pretense that it is the unique province of the ENEMIES of the people most filled with hate. The Left is a Mass Formation dedicated to the idea that the world is filled with villains, and that they are the fantastic heroes destined to eradicate those villains. They are animated by violence, but violence directed towards people they have been made genuinely to believe are violent.

The Nazis had no choice but to kill the Jews, they honestly believed.

Communists have no choice but to kill class criminals, they honestly believe.

And Democrats have no choice but to cheat in elections, jail their political opponents, and suppress dissenting viewpoints, they honestly believe.

And so it goes.