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Psychopathy and the Origins of Totalitarianism
New Discourses ^ | 25 Dec, 2020 | JAMES LINDSAY

Posted on 12/31/2020 12:06:00 PM PST by MtnClimber

Many of the greatest horrors of the history of humanity owe their occurrence solely to the establishment and social enforcement of a false reality. With gratitude to the Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper and his important 1970 essay “Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power” for the term and idea, we can refer to these alternative realities as ideological pseudo-realities.

Pseudo-realities, being false and unreal, will always generate tragedy and evil on a scale that is at least proportional to the reach of their grip on power—which is their chief interest—whether social, cultural, economic, political, or (particularly) a combination of several or all of these. So important to the development and tragedies of societies are these pseudo-realities when they arise and take root that it is worth outlining their basic properties and structure so that they can be identified and properly resisted before they result in sociopolitical calamities—up to and including war, genocide, and even civilizational collapse, all of which can take many millions of lives and can ruin many millions more in the vain pursuit of a fiction whose believers are, or are made, sufficiently intolerant.

The Nature of Pseudo-realities Pseudo-realities are, simply put, false constructions of reality. It is hopefully obvious that among the features of pseudo-realities is that they must present a plausible but deliberately wrong understanding of reality. They are cult “realities” in the sense that they are the way that members of cults experience and interpret the world—both social and material—around them. We should immediately recognize that these deliberately incorrect interpretations of reality serve two related functions. First, they are meant to mold the world to accommodate small proportions of people who suffer pathological limitations on their abilities to cope with reality as it is. Second, they are designed to replace all other analyses and motivations with power, which these essentially or functionally psychopathic individuals will contort and deform to their permanent advantage so long as their pseudo-real regime can last.

Pseudo-realities are always social fictions, which, in light of the above, means political fictions. That is, they are maintained not because they are true, in the sense that they correspond to reality, either material or human, but because a sufficient quantity of people in the society they attack either believe them or refuse to challenge them. This implies that pseudo-realities are linguistic phenomena above all else, and where power-granting linguistic distortions are present, it is likely that they are there to create and prop up some pseudo-reality. This also means that they require power, coercion, manipulation, and eventually force to keep them in place.


TOPICS: History; Society
KEYWORDS: communism; leftism; reference
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To: MtnClimber

BRILLIANT article!!! Thanks for posting! Bookmarked, slowly plowing through it. Looking up some terms finding more gold. This explains so much! I knew something was really amiss, just couldn’t state it well. This nails it!!!

Everyone on FR should read this thoroughly.


21 posted on 12/31/2020 5:47:33 PM PST by Basket_of_Deplorables (This is all a Soros funded communist insurrection! )
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To: Whenifhow; null and void; aragorn; EnigmaticAnomaly; kalee; Kale; AZ .44 MAG; Baynative; bgill; ...

p


22 posted on 12/31/2020 6:28:11 PM PST by bitt (Anton Chekov: “Any idiot can face a crisis; it's this day-to-day living that wears you out.”)
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To: aquila48
Gods of the Copybook Headings

Yes, a very insightful piece by Kipling. Very appropriate!

23 posted on 12/31/2020 7:10:16 PM PST by MtnClimber (For photos of Colorado scenery and wildlife, click on my screen name for my FR home page.)
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To: MtnClimber
... the very assertion of pseudo-reality demoralizes all who are pressed into engaging with it by the mere fact of being something false that must be treated as true. We should never underestimate how psychologically weakening and damaging it is to be forced to treat as true something that is not true...

Interesting piece... thanks for posting.

24 posted on 01/01/2021 8:08:06 AM PST by GOPJ (Our culture is starting to push thugs to the top - it's the kiss of death for an advanced culture.)
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To: MtnClimber

James Lindsey’s stuff, and his site, are great.

We need a revolutionary right-wing movement and probably need a revolutionary government for at least a while.

And the first, the VERY FIRST necessary thing is for those clinging to the sad “GOP good, Dems bad” delusion taht has cost us Trump’s Presidency and so much more.

Thank you for posting.


25 posted on 01/01/2021 8:11:06 AM PST by Jim Noble (Lo there do I see the line of my people, back to the beginning)
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To: MtnClimber
Pseudo Realities kept in place by force. 52 genders, BLM, Antifa, democRAT political persecutions,...

You forgot the biggest pseudo-reality: "If only the GOP wins..."

People who still believe that after the demise of the Trump presidency are like the poor Zeks in the GULAG, whose last words were so often, "If only Stalin knew..."

26 posted on 01/01/2021 8:13:20 AM PST by Jim Noble (Lo there do I see the line of my people, back to the beginning)
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To: dp0622
And if biden gets in and we do nothing...

What’s that make us?

Dead.

27 posted on 01/01/2021 8:17:57 AM PST by null and void (When the press doesn’t report something, it’s because the narrative would reflect badly on the Left)
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To: null and void

If Biden gets in we’ll play the hand that’s dealt...


28 posted on 01/01/2021 9:07:35 AM PST by GOPJ (Our culture is starting to push thugs to the top - it's the kiss of death for an advanced culture.)
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To: MtnClimber

29 posted on 01/01/2021 9:27:37 AM PST by Albion Wilde ("The more righteous your fight, the more opposition you will face." --Donald J. Trump)
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To: Travis McGee
Thanks for the link to the American Partisan article. It was right on the mark.

I posted this yesterday. I think it captures the "Jim Jones" cult-like thought of the progressive left today. It is very long, but the excerpt captures the gist of it.

30 posted on 01/01/2021 9:56:39 AM PST by MtnClimber (For photos of Colorado scenery and wildlife, click on my screen name for my FR home page.)
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To: MtnClimber; All

I’ve been here 22 years, and I think this is the most important article I’ve ever seen. I wish I could ping everyone to it.

We often say that leftism is a mental disorder. This article explains the exact mechanism by which that comes about.

“The pseudo-reality is a construction that misunderstands actual reality as compared against the imagined Utopia that resides at the end of the ideological rainbow. It is constructed to force as many people as possible to live within the Utopian daydream of the people who find reality less tolerable than a fictional alternative that cannot be believed without nearly universal compliance. That is, the pseudo-reality that is constructed in service to an ideology is a fantastic vision of society made perfect for certain intolerant misfits, that is then turned backwards upon itself. In other words, as we shall see, Utopian ideologies are psychopathic and arise from an inability to inhabit reality (at least without treatment).”


31 posted on 01/01/2021 5:59:04 PM PST by dsc (Do not pray for easy lives; pray to be stronger men.)
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To: MtnClimber

I can’t deal with this article.

I have to go smoke some medicine.


32 posted on 01/01/2021 6:03:16 PM PST by blueunicorn6 ("A crack shot and a good dancer”)
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To: dsc

I have been rereading sections a little bit at a time. It is a lot to grasp in a single reading. It helps you see these tyrant governors differently. The normal people give them credit for being normal too, but they are not acting normally. They are living in their pseudo-reality.


33 posted on 01/01/2021 7:31:50 PM PST by MtnClimber (For photos of Colorado scenery and wildlife, click on my screen name for my FR home page.)
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To: MtnClimber
"the Great Reset plans"

When the streets are renamed en masse, and the statues are declared illegal and destroyed, our fellow American citizens might finally understand.

The Great Reset = Year Zero.

34 posted on 01/03/2021 12:51:32 AM PST by Jeepers43
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To: MtnClimber

“The Emperor’s New Clothes”

;D

At some point in time, that’s how everyone will react to the words of linguistic activism. If we were really smart, that moment would be planned and carried out very suddenly and universally.

There’s no gender in human beings. There are only the two sexes. Feminism is “for women” (word roots and real use, baby)—not for “equality,” blah, blah, blah. It’s homosexual, not “gay,” QUILT or ALBJSDFDVLKSLSCX.

And the idiotic new language of vagueness and over-generalization in academia? LOL!

Not to mention beginning an answer to a question in an interview with “So...”


35 posted on 01/08/2021 9:34:12 PM PST by familyop
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To: MtnClimber

bkmk


36 posted on 01/11/2021 5:55:37 AM PST by spankalib
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To: MtnClimber

And “free and fair elections, government is delivering the will of the people.”

Pseudo-reality.


37 posted on 01/11/2021 5:57:16 AM PST by Cboldt
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To: Jim Noble
-- ... whose last words were so often, "If only Stalin knew..." --

People are gullible, that's for sure. Not many independent grounded thinkers out here.

38 posted on 01/11/2021 6:00:02 AM PST by Cboldt
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To: BenLurkin

You might want to add a few picture there...


39 posted on 01/11/2021 7:49:18 AM PST by Kommodor (Make America Detroit Again - Vote Democrat! :P)
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To: MtnClimber

PFL


40 posted on 01/11/2021 7:59:46 AM PST by KevinB (''... and to the Banana Republic for which it stands ...")
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