There is a famous essay, written by Richd Hofstatder in 1964, called "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." I read it years ago, and it's very much worth reading.
I don't believe in impossible conspiracies. Many people do, but I'm not one of them. I consider these people to have something wrong with their brains. Three shooters on Kennedy. The moon landings shot on a stage. Remote-controlled airplanes on 9-11. Chemtrails. The Illuminati. The Masons. British bankers. Aliens. Gold fringe on the flag. Never heard that one? Look it up.
All childish paranoid nonsense. Childish because children blame their problems on other people. It absolves them of fixing things. "These incredibly brilliant but evil geniuses....we can do nothing!!! We are but puppets!! Helpless, hopeless, brainless, dickless! But even though we are helpless, we're smarter than them because we figured out their nefarious plans!!!"
Pathetic.
This nonsense has existed for a long time. "The Nazis are going to take over the world! And the Japanese! Oops, sorry, I mean the Commies! Oops, sorry again! I mean the Japanese again! Oops, that's still not right! I mean Islam! Dammit, I'm still wrong! I mean the Chinese!"
How many people have died in wars because of this paranoid nonsense?
Since the Chinese are the du jour villains, I'm reading all kinds of nonsense. "They're smarter than us! Their IQs are higher! They're going to take over the world! It's the end of the West and the white man!!!" Blah, blah, blah.
Men don't get paranoid-hysterical and believe in fantasies. They deal with facts and they fix the problem. You can't fix problems when you're paranoid, hysterical, and blaming your problems are everyone but yourself.
Some Asians have slighter higher IQs? Whites have far more geniuses. Why did whites invent almost everything in the world and other races almost nothing? Why did liberty and the free market take root in the West only? Why are so many Asians uncreative, ant-like and conformist? Why are so many Asian males nerdy and/or effeminate? Why do their women almost always prefer white men over Asian men?
Of course, these questions are not PC. But men aren't supposed to be afraid to invent and discover.
I write about the Four Cardinal Virtues a lot. One of them is Courage. Not being afraid. Another is Prudence - choosing the right path out of many. That is, avoiding the PC path, not being paranoid-hysterical, not believing in impossible conspiracies everywhere you turn, not blaming all your problems on non-existent villains.
And standing up straight and not being pathetic. And not memorizing, imitating and conforming to nonsense.
"The paranoid spokesman, sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization... he does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated — if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes." - Richard Hofstatder
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At first it seems better to go with the flow. "Hey if all these other people vouch for this theory and claim it works, there must be truth to it! Besides, it takes too much time on my end to determine which things are true and which are not, so I'll just put my blind trust onto strangers! And hey, on the off chance it seems wrong, I was wrong with a whole lot of other people, and if it fooled them, then how couldn't it have fooled me!"
The price you pay for this kind of thinking is you never develop the sort of thinking skills that makes a man truly standout. Successful you may be, but without developing this mental muscle, what differentiates you from the million other people who are good at memorizing? Nothing, ultimately you are replaceable and will be replaced when someone memorizes slightly better than you do. You bypass the mental exercise that makes your thinking, your perspective, truly stand out from others, and leads to you being in front of the pack, instead of always copying the person in front of the pack.
Not only that, but never understand how the world truly works when you follow somebody else's opinion. When I first became a Christian, I had many questions. So much so, that I annoyed my pastor, but was answered anyways. When push came to shove, I was able to explain my faith as a 2 year Christian than some Christians who were Christians from birth. Because they inherited the faith without inheriting any of the critical thinking. So both that person can say "I believe in God" and I can say "I believe in God" but the statements are vastly different things, with different implications.
The people who follow the manospherians make the same mistake. Both the manospherians and I agree on "Most women in today's age behave abhorrently" . The manosphere then goes on to reason this is the natural state of women, and all women are like this, even secretly or subconsciously. It proceeds to say this is a game (marriage) that we cannot win so it is better not to play it at all. So then it advocates a lifestyle of either endless pumping and dumping, because that is what the majority of women are good for, or MGTOW and choosing not to establish relationships with women.
I agree with "Most women in today's age behave abhorrently." But I look at my parent's stable marriage and others as an example. I look at where these bad women aggregate, I look at where I've found good women in my life. I see some women worth making an initial investment of my time and good will, and happy emotions, and see if they return that. I seek girls with similar values to myself.
And viola! I find these invisible virgins the manosphere talks about, I see these woman who add more to my life than sex (some cook, some shop, some take care of me in different ways). Why is it that I find these sparse women? Why is it that these sparse women are attracted to me? Why is it that I can see the good in the feminine sex while they are blinded from most of it? I'll never tell. They can think that one out for themselves and they might be all the better for it.
Hey Uncle Boob,
Have you read Leo Thirteen's Humanum genus?
Oops, I forgot to mention those awful Freemasons, dastardly doers of evil for the past several hundred years.
I forgot to mention I know a family of bricklayers, and boy are they evil!!!
You did mention the Masons in your original post Mr. Smart Guy. So what your saying is the seven or so Popes who condemned Freemasonry as one of the most malevolent and subversive forces in Western society were paranoid-hysterics who believed in fantasies? I really dont think that you have the inside scoop like these Popes of venerable memory did.
And then there are most evil of all - Jewish Nazi Freemasons.
Haha. Pope Leo XIII knew nothing. Bob Wallace knows some bricklayers. Just another bad willed blind guide in the blogosphere.
Everything is a conspiracy, several hundred years, dedicated to death and destruction, pillage and rapine.
As an accomplished rifleman I can say without reservation that there is something deeply wrong with the official version of the JFK assassination. The ballistics are hinkey as hell, and Oswald was not who he appeared to be.
My scholarly opinion is that there is at least one conspiracy in play with that one - and possibly more.
Technically, a conspiracy is two or more people operating together for their own interest without disclosing everything about themselves to everybody else. Every business is a conspiracy. Every marriage is a conspiracy. The world has always been run by nests of conspiracies. The important thing is to keep track of the major ones and determine if they are criminal or not.
If this seems more or less straightforward, then check out the well-known (by graduate students in political science) concept of the Deep State. It basically says that more policy is decided on the golf course and between the sheets, by people you never heard of, than is decided in the legislature by your favorite congresscritter.
You're right: there are conspiracies. But many people can't tell the difference between the real and fantasies. The fact that three guys dumped Jimmy Hoffa in a swamp doesn't mean there are conspiracies a thousand years old starting wars, controlling the economy, committing every evil imaginable. It just amazes me there are so many deluded people out there.
I tweeted this yesterday, the etymology of "hysteria" per Merriam-Webster:
Etymology: New Latin, from English hysteric, adjective, from Latin hystericus, from Greek hysterikos, from hystera womb; from the Greek notion that hysteria was peculiar to women and caused by disturbances of the uterus
Date: 1801
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