Posted on 08/01/2021 7:23:42 PM PDT by Noumenon
I Don’t Know About You, but I’m Getting Nervous
Not the enemy in front but the friends behind are the men who spread despondency and alarm”
Sir Ian Hamilton, Gallipoli Diary (1920)
The word neurosis denotes what a less pretentious age called a nervous disorder, or a case of bad nerves. That was in the day when psychiatrists were called nerve doctors. Neurosis is compounded of the Greek word neuron, which means a nerve cell, and the suffix osis, which means a disorder, disease or complaint. This is why a man whose breath is cause for complaint is said to have halitosis.
A neurotic man is, therefore, overly nervous. He is fretful, excitable or disabled by a paralyzing melancholy. It is not absolutely clear how nervous a man must be in order to be classified as overly nervous, but it is generally said that a man is overly nervous when his fretting, excitement or melancholy gets in the way of his everyday life.
It should be obvious that everyone has neurotic episodes, and that most of us cure this intermittent neurosis with the home remedies of calming down, taking a deep breath, or going for a long walk. Many of us have personalities that are permanently colored by a striking excess of fear, mania or depression. In ancient and medieval psychology, these dispositions were attributed to an imbalance in a man’s “humors,” and society dealt with these foibles by accepting these maniacs with “a sense of humor.”
When a society is subjected to the extraordinary mental strain of a general calamity, such as a war, famine, or pestilence, it will often exhibit a sharp uptick in the prevalence of these neurotic foibles and maniacs. This is called “mass neurosis” or “mass hysteria” and it means that an unusually large number of people in that society are suffering some degree of “nervous breakdown.” If there is a difference between neurosis and a nervous breakdown, I am unable to see it.
Mass neurosis becomes a problem for the same reason that individual neurosis becomes a problem. Not much work gets done when much of the multitude is fretting, raving, or mired in the slough of despondency. Things begin to fall apart when the percentage of maniacs in a population rises above a certain level, and the sense that things have begun to fall apart increases the mental strain and the production of these maniacs.
* * * * *
The extreme mental strain of total war may be the most powerful means to spread mass neurosis through a population, but an early expert on psychological warfare tells us that “all measures which increase tension and spread a feeling of insecurity and discontent are valuable tools for the diffusion of mass hysteria.”* He calls insecurity and discontent “valuable tools” because modern warfare always seeks to cripple the economic and military strength of the enemy by inducing nervous breakdowns and mass neurosis in the enemy population, thereby raising its percentage of maniacs to an insupportable level.
Totalitarian regimes also view controlled mass neurosis as a valuable tool with which to control their own people. Neuroticism impairs the industry of workers, and the courage of soldiers, but stultifying the “spirit” of a people makes those people tractable and easier to rule. The effect of mass neurosis on a population is, indeed, analogous to the effect of the drug Ritalin on “spirited” boy.
It takes a deft hand to spread “nervous exhaustion” in one’s own population, since an excess of mass neurosis will cripple the economic and military strength of the totalitarian regime. But if mass neurosis is kept at the right level, the neuroticized people can perform their assigned tasks, but will be at the same time docile, suggestible and politically disorganized.
This level of mass neurosis is induced by regular alarms in a sensationalistic media that magnifies threats such as terrorism, nuclear war, violent crime, domestic revolution, or epidemic disease. The aim is to maintain a politically useful malaise of fretting, excitement and despondency, and to thereby stultify public spirit and cause the people to “lose their nerve.”
* * * * *
Spreading mass neurosis among one’s own people is sometimes described as “brainwashing,” although deliberate inducement of nervous exhaustion is better understood as spirit-washing. The aim is to break the public spirit of mental resistance to outrageous policies, propaganda and demands. If your aim is to swindle a man, you want to play the trick when he is exhausted and a “nervous wreck.”. Two experts on the Communists’ use of mass neurosis explain
“Brainwashing is not primarily a technique to make prisoners of war confess to imaginary crimes and betray their country’s secrets. It is primarily a means of transforming the character structure of an entire population and of keeping that population in a permanent condition of mental subordination to the Communist state, of unhesitating belief in all that it asserts, in chronic anxiety, neurotic tension and disintegrated personality state.”*
These same writers go on to explain that imputations of collective guilt help to spread neurosis and mental subordination. We see this at the personal level when a domineering husband controls his wife by harping on her real and imagined failures. We see it at the social level when the personalities of one segment of the population are deliberately disintegrated by public harping on their real and imagined crimes. The authors just quoted say,
“The mind is broken down by . . . the practice of requiring self-criticism and the denunciation of others, indoctrination and reindoctrination. The processes used involve arousal of guilt feelings and maintenance of a continuous atmosphere of tension and fear. Guilt is collective in the sense that the individual is made to feel responsible for his class, his community, his nation, for the class origin of his family, for the “crimes” of his nation, defining crime as anything which departs from the Communist line.”
It is hard to deny that the Covid panic has made America into a neurotic nation, and that the simultaneous amplification of racial scapegoating is aggravating the nervous breakdown in a large subset of the population. This comes directly on the heels of the Islamic terrorist panic, and in the midst of “nerve shattering” changes in technology and the national economy.
I am not saying that Covid is fictional, or that Islamic terrorism was fictional, but that both crises appear to have been deliberately magnified in order to spread neurosis and nervous exhaustion, and to thereby break the public spirit of mental resistance to outrageous policies, propaganda and demands. And this mental strain has been deliberately enhanced for a subset of the population by “requiring self-criticism and the denunciation of others,” by “indoctrination and reindoctrination,” and by repeated “arousal of guilt feelings.”
The goal is to break our spirit and, so far as I can see, it is succeeding.
*) Béla Szunyogh, Psychological Warfare: An Introduction to Ideological Propaganda and the Techniques of Psychological Warfare (New York: William-Frederick Press, 1955), p. 77.
**) Nathaniel Weyl and Stefan Thomas Possony, The Geography of Intellect (Chicago: H. Regnery Co., 1963), pp. 231, 232.
1. Humiliate
2. Subjugate
3. Alienate
4. Isolate
Theodore Dalrymple echoes this idea:
“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is...in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
And here we are.
Excellent clarity...
What is to be nervous about? President Trump is gone. The People's Choice is firmly in Power. From this point forward, only good things can happen. Cheer up! The Uniparty is back in control. Lindsey [Linda] Graham will tale care of you.
On America’s Voice, last week Steve Bannon’s guest was Clay Clark. I had never heard of him, tho he has been around and known in the field he spoke on.
Everything these days are past weird.. but this Clay Clark might be telling us what we need to know.
Everything the dims/left/media/and more... do, is not to help anyone but themselves.. so they want us to get the vaccine... they are desperate for all to be vaccinated... WHY?
The borders are wide open... no one knows who is coming on or from where.
But WE are to wear masks, shutdowns, scare tactics.. WHY?
Other things going on.. weird.. treasonous, no laws for them.. steal the election and.. hey! You get to be President!
Clay Clark says this is Biblical size and important... he names names... even ministers who are in with THEM.
Take over.. Christians are in the way.. Trump is in the way... freedom is in their way...
It’s a set up.. from day one.. take over.. control.. everything is a lie... masks... death numbers.. lock downs and lock ins... control...nothing is real.. just trap after trap.
Below is a link.. just hear and let it sink.. see if it is truth to you.
Appreciate the post, bro.
I’m a fan of JM Smith’s work on The Orthosphere. Excellent clarity and perspective.
Thanks for the info - I’ll check it out.
Ping of interest.
Bkmk
Bookmark
It is also the goal of every totalitarian state.
Excellent. Everything has been a massive lie since at least 2015. And it has become common knowledge. It’s like some ass insanity.
“In the end, the gap between reality and ideology meant that the communist parties wound up spouting meaningless slogans they themselves knew made no sense. As the philosopher Roger Scruton argues, Marxism became so cocooned in what George Orwell once called “Newspeak” that it could not be refuted: “Facts no longer made contact with the theory, which had risen above the facts on clouds of nonsense, rather like a theological system. The point was not to believe the theory, but to repeat it ritualistically and in such a way that both belief and doubt became irrelevant… In this way, the concept of truth disappeared from the intellectual landscape, and was replaced by that of power.”
Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956, pp 465-466
I have this book in hardcopy in my library. it's chilling once you understand the implications - and how it is being used against us today.
What day was he (Clay Clark) on War room?
“If there is a difference between neurosis and a nervous breakdown, I am unable to see it. “
A trifling criticism: Normally a nervous breakdown is taken to imply symptoms of psychosis, even if temporary, but overall this is a great treatise.
Yup,
CONTROLLING to Depopulation?
WELL worth the read!The government wants to disarm us after 245 yrs 'cuz they plan to do things we would shoot them for!
At no point in history has any government ever wanted its people to be defenseless for any good reason ~ nully's son
Nut-job Conspiracy Theory Ping!
To get onto The Nut-job Conspiracy Theory Ping List you must threaten to report me to the Mods if I don't add you to the list...
"Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand." ~ Putt's Law
It is chilling. And it’s why I have always appreciated your posts. They truly are “killers without conscience”.
And of course I meant mass, not ass. Oops
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