Since I just linked an article from UnHerd a couple of days ago, I'd ordinarily lay off them for a while. But Matthew Crawford doesn't publish very often, and this one is so good.
He starts off writing about things like "No Nut November", which present no great interest to me. My attitude on self-pleasuring is do or don't, but don't keep yapping about it.
But then there's a deep dive into history, specifically choices that were made in restructuring Germany after the war and how the lessons from that were applied to domestic policy. Simply put, once fascism was defeated on the battlefield, that led to a lot of chin stroking about what fascism was and what were its root causes. Not so surprisingly, a lot of theorists got trigger happy.
More surprisingly, rather hard left academics who had escaped from Europe worked in concert with the US government, although this usually wasn't explicit. This really is quite extraordinary. America's policy arms were rabidly anticommunist and pledged to protecting station wagons and ranch houses and other gems of American prosperity. None of this stopped German Marxists from gaining prominence. The Frankfurt School must have been better salesmen than they were given credit for.
So the marriage of the security state and what in general might be called critical theory was set up some time ago. Fully consummated now, of course. Just a hop, skip, and jump to gender theory and antifa. Well, you can see the results.
2 comments:
I looked at this article a couple of days ago but, having lost interest after the first few paragraphs, I gave up. So now I've read the rest and I get the general idea. There are people who weaponize the ideas of others in order to manipulate the public, something that happened with Reich as it did with Bernays using Freud. I'm reminded of Charles Darwin's theories of natural selection being distorted to justify Social Darwinism.
However, Crawford's essay was about what happened in the West and to America in particular. The authorities needed a method to control the population in general. Marxism in the 30s was, if not quite rampant, very appealing to people who wanted a say in what was done with the products of their labor. For obvious reasons people in power didn't think this was a good idea and the psychiatric community was happy to help. They still are as are so many in the professional class.
They very likely have declared war on the family as that's the simplest way to formulate an underclass dependent on authority figures other than parents - stable families are anathema to modern bureaucracies. His description of how this evolved is fascinating. However, since most governments are incapable of doing much of anything well, I’m always a little reluctant to credit them with organising an epoch spanning psy-op. That doesn't mean they're not still trying and, yes, the examples are all around us.
Jer asked to send you this twitter thread about Edward Bernays and how propaganda works.
Social Darwinism is a good example. Darwin was never pleased that his theories had been used to justify that kind of social stratification. In fact even the term "survival of the fittest" misreads his work, since it implies a kind of upward bound progress that he didn't see in evolution. Then there was Hitler using Nietzsche to justify Nazi policy, something that Nietzsche himself would have found absurd.
The economic upheavals of the 1930s are well known. The US was hardly the worst-off country in the world in that respect, but there was enough turmoil that you can see how Marxism could have taken off. After the war the political tone of the country had changed, which gave them some new avenues for doing this...whatever the proper word is for it. "Brainwashing" sounds a little too sci fi mag.
As you hinted, the government's attitude world towards the family is notably hostile. And that comes out in policy as well as propaganda. Well, they're all really just one thing. It's probably true that they're too dim to really put on an evil psyop. But that's the direction they've been going in for some time, regardless of whether they'd answer to that effect if you went to their office to ask the plan.
"So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man's rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints."
That thread is a good find. Bernays seems to have a strange clarity regarding his background and that of other invasive species.
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