07-08-2011, 02:46 AM
"August 5. Now that I've got some other stuff out of the way, I can comment on the massacre in Norway. The most depressing thing is, it was a good tactical move. To understand why, read this depressing article, Death Grip [ http://www.carnegieendowment.org/2007/08...uccess/olc ]: experiments show that ordinary humans, when reminded of their own mortality [at age 32?!], become authoritarian, nationalistic, and intolerant.
The difference between Anders Breivik and other right wingers is not that he's crazy, but that he's courageous: he can do political violence completely on his own initiative, instead of following a crowd or obeying orders. If one out of a thousand righties could go out independently and kill a bunch of people, soon the whole world would be wearing uniforms, waving flags, suspicious of strangers, and mindlessly submitting to the biggest bad-ass.
This raises a deeper question: where does this instinct come from? My guess is, in our ancestral world, if a tribe could shift into fascist mode, it would be much better at violent conflict than a nice tribe where everyone was tolerant and power was fully shared. So this mode of consciouness became part of the human potential, and I think it remains useful for certain emergency projects.
The danger is not that we can go there, but that we can go there for the wrong reason, and get stuck. As with so many human problems, the solution is awareness and mastery of our own mental states. Without that awareness, we can get so deep in a way of being that it feels like who we are, and shifting to a different way of being feels like dying. When an entrenched right winger sees an alien people moving into town without assimilating, or "marriage" being loosened to include same sex couples, it feels like their life is being threatened! This explains the popular saying in Nazi Germany, often attributed to Hermann Goering [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Göring#Quotations ]: "When I hear the word 'culture', I reach for my gun." "
http://www.ranprieur.com/archives/035.html#right
The difference between Anders Breivik and other right wingers is not that he's crazy, but that he's courageous: he can do political violence completely on his own initiative, instead of following a crowd or obeying orders. If one out of a thousand righties could go out independently and kill a bunch of people, soon the whole world would be wearing uniforms, waving flags, suspicious of strangers, and mindlessly submitting to the biggest bad-ass.
This raises a deeper question: where does this instinct come from? My guess is, in our ancestral world, if a tribe could shift into fascist mode, it would be much better at violent conflict than a nice tribe where everyone was tolerant and power was fully shared. So this mode of consciouness became part of the human potential, and I think it remains useful for certain emergency projects.
The danger is not that we can go there, but that we can go there for the wrong reason, and get stuck. As with so many human problems, the solution is awareness and mastery of our own mental states. Without that awareness, we can get so deep in a way of being that it feels like who we are, and shifting to a different way of being feels like dying. When an entrenched right winger sees an alien people moving into town without assimilating, or "marriage" being loosened to include same sex couples, it feels like their life is being threatened! This explains the popular saying in Nazi Germany, often attributed to Hermann Goering [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Göring#Quotations ]: "When I hear the word 'culture', I reach for my gun." "
http://www.ranprieur.com/archives/035.html#right
"Where is the intersection between the world's deep hunger and your deep gladness?"