The Mania of 2021

(Originally published August 3, 2021.)

There are times that not only try men’s souls, but warp them.

Westerners of our generations never believed that mass manias could re-appear, but we’re living through one right now, and against my wishes I feel a need to address it; not as a victim or a participant, but as an observer.

Manias – mass warpings of the human soul – are clearly not something we’ve outgrown. Granted, the mania of 2021 has required immense technological assistance, and so it may be that we have improved… that only technological abuse could give rise to such a mania in our time… but here we are all the same.

As for calling this a mania, I have no qualms using the term: Abdication of judgment is pandemic these days:

• • Naked and open racism – “We know you’re bad because of the color of your skin” – is proclaimed proudly and defiantly.

• • Group attacks on dissenters, though virtual rather than physical, occur continually, embodying a level of sadism that I’d rather not describe.

• • People lose their jobs because they espouse the “wrong” opinion, on even trivial subjects. Still worse, millions have denied their own minds in order to retain their jobs.

• • Biology is being directly attacked and denied, and reality with it.

I could go on, but decrying the moment is not my purpose. I wish rather to explain it.

The Unmooring of The West

For a long time, the people of the West have been unmoored from their traditional principles; cut away from them and left to drift in a raging storm of inputs. A book would be required to document this, and so I’ll have to simplify greatly, but it’s fair to say that this long development was horribly misdirected.

Like every civilization, Western civilization had gaps, errors and mistakes, but efforts to rip it apart over recent centuries, and especially the past half century or so, were of a terribly misguided nature. They were, in fact, vandalism on a grand scale. Civilizations are to be improved, not wantonly ripped apart.

By dismembering a civilization, you tear up not only that which is fit to be replaced but that which deserves to endure. And so the stabilizing elements of Western civilization were removed: Balance, reasonableness, self-examination, the ability to stand alone and judge fairly, and tolerance.

In their absence we see rage, envy, lust for power, malice, and their many dark mutations.

The present mania stands on this foundation. At their root, the virtues of the West were attached to seeing as individuals, acting as individuals and judging individuals. The present mania distinguishes itself by seeing groups, acting as groups, and judging groups.

The Mob

I’ve tried dancing around the word “mob,” but I really can’t find an honest replacement for it. The fact is that when human psyches are warped, people do become mobs. Again I’ll have to simplify, but such is the present necessity.

Lacking individual judgment, humans act as mobs… as flocks or herds. More than that, their directions are set by references to Satan figures. That is, they organize themselves around what they hate. And from that organizing principle, the rest follows. It’s what happened in the past and it’s what’s happening now.

It is no coincidence that two generations of intellectuals have been trained in criticism, deconstruction and their variants; they know almost nothing of building and repairing real things.

The mob, then, is focused upon shared hatreds and the power to destroy. We don’t like to say that (and for good reason), but the facts are what they are. This is not to say that the souls which are presently warped cannot come back to reason – assuredly they can – but the nature of manias is precisely that they bring humans into such states.

Why Did This Happen?

This mania is different from others because it has been driven technologically, based upon an experimentally-refined science of manipulation. And so there is a chance that it may run for an extended time. And even if it does unwind as others have, holdouts may remain for many years.

Presuming that this mania does crack and collapse, there will follow at some point a search for a cause, much as many have tried to find a cause for others.

Leaving aside the root causes such as the above and the scientific cultivation of mass manipulation by people such as Edward Bernays, the present mania has a number of notable causes. I’ll list them below, but we should remember that this is a preliminary list: The behind-the-scenes manipulations that played such a large role in this mania will not be seen clearly for some time. We may have a good idea of what they were, but we most likely don’t know precisely, and the actual facts may surprise us.

That said, the moment calls for at least a preliminary list of proximate causes, and so I’ll give you one:

The COVID response:

The response of governments to the COVID-19 mini-plague were far worse than the disease itself, which would otherwise have gone into the history books as a mundane little plague on the order of the flu of 1957.

Instead, the perpetual human vulnerability to fear was targeted with 24/7 propaganda systems, tuned moment by moment to the most resonant frequencies and blasted at top volume. Perhaps there was a purposeful element to this and perhaps it was simple power-lust, but more than likely it was both. Time will have to tell.

Covering up the errors:

As we all know, 15 days to flatten the curve has turned into well over 15 months in many places and The Science has become nothing but the variable wishes of the powerful.

The first error, of course, was to create the virus, by either hubristic or malicious “gain of function” research. Then, of course, its release.

The second error was to lock down billions of human beings. The amount of damage done by this can barely be calculated, but it very clearly includes a sickening number of deaths (epitomized by locking old people into close quarters but by no means stopping there), a horrifying number of suicides, overwhelming amounts of emotional distress, tens of thousands of “vaccine” deaths, the trampling of rights, and economic distortions whose effects may last for decades.

So, how does a power-holder cover up such misdeeds? Firstly by keeping the fear going. Frightened people don’t ask pointed questions; they hunker down and try to stay alive. Secondly by keeping one or more Satan figures as their focus. And as we all know, that role was laid upon Donald Trump. Whatever Mr. Trump’s failings, the hate focused upon his was indeed a derangement. At present, a great deal of hate for Mr. Trump endures while new embodiments of evil are presented: Trump supporters, Caucasians, masculinity, people who believe in XX and XY sexual differentiation, and so on.

Binary vision:

Humans have a weakness for binary divisions: Us-Them and so on. This has turned into a sharp divide, perhaps nowhere seen more starkly than in the US. It’s all too easy for humans too see those on the opposite side of such a divide as cartoon monsters, rather than as individuals worthy of toleration.

Defending one’s errors:

People who’ve fallen into things like sadism will avoid considering their error, for what I’m sure are obvious reasons. And so the powerful are providing a long string of excuses for doing so.

In this way human errors perpetuate themselves, until the game cannot be continued for some reason or another… after which someone to blame for the whole of their collective errors may be sought.

Social media:

I’ve previously called social media a vampire parasite, and I stand by that characterization: It has purposely and methodically addicted billions of people to itself, then abused them for power and profit.

Over the past few years social media, for whatever reasons, has whoreishly joined itself to power, in a full-blown Orwellian display of evil. I have no less vulgar way to describe such obscene actions. History, if any honest history endures, will condemn this in the strongest terms, and rightly so.

Frightened rulers:

Here we lack sufficient data for clarity, but rulers who blather on about a “Great Reset” have clearly lost confidence in what they’ve been doing. Thriving systems don’t need to be reset.

And so we can infer that the rulers of the West (and beyond) are in fear of their game collapsing, which led to a string of errors and abuses.

What Now?

What matters now is, as the Bible recommends, to “speak the truth in love.” We must call barbarity and sadism what they are, but for productive reasons and in productive ways.

Many of us have multiple and valid reasons to be angry. Acting from anger, however, is seldom helpful. At the end of the day what we need is not justice, but improvement. This is not to say that justice is meaningless; rather, it’s to say that we haven’t the ability to gain both justice and improvement, and that improvement is the more necessary of the two. However disappointing that may be, I think that it holds up as substantially correct.

And if so, our job is to speak the truth about what has happened, but with a clear goal in our minds: that of unwarping human souls.

For this reason, I recommend that we call group beatings sadistic; that we call racism evil; that we defend reality; that we call intolerance barbaric… but that we do this of necessity, not of anger. And we must always provide accessible pathways to reconciliation.

For everyone’s sake, we must do these things and persist in doing them.

Good luck to us all.

**

Paul Rosenberg

freemansperspective.com