Re: Wow, so we didn't all actually see those planes flying into the skyscrapers?
A classical example of Mass Hallucination.... Of all people, Americans are best endowed to understand such a notion --after all, one of your former presidents (Jimmy Carter) publicly claimed to have seen UFOs. Anyway, below is an interesting paper that sheds light on what's going on in America, the Land of the Freak....
The Kidnap of Mass Mind - Fundamentalism, Spartanism and the Games Subcultures Play
Howard Bloom 30.06.1999
History of the Global Brain XVIII
Nations and their leaders battle for control over the common sense. But other contestants struggle behind the scenes - subcultures, clusters of like-minded folk who live within and ooze between societies. In the subcultural clashes of the 21st century, Sparta and Athens are vigorously alive.
"When I, or people like me, are running the country, you'd better flee, because we will find you, we will try you, and we will execute you."
Randall Terry - Operation Rescue
"I represent a Political Party (The Creator's Rights Party) that would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons...and all the potential slaughter that entails... in defense of a State's Right to secede in order to restore God's plan for government."
Neal Horsley
"the one who blows up the enemies of Allah by blowing up himself as well ...is, Allah willing, a martyr."
Br. Abu Ruqaiyah - "The Martyrdom Operations"
"We are the millennial promise. Get used to us."
Mary Matlin - American conservative activist
Today's cyber-era Spartans are bone-crushers of conformity. They are the Fundamentalists4 of both the left and right. Some are godly, some are secular. Religious extremists, ultra-nationalists, ethnic liberationists, eco-terrorists, and fascists fall on the fundamentalist side of the line. Brooking no tolerance of those who disagree, they invoke a golden past and a higher power, both of which demand submission to authority. The worst shoot, burn, and bomb to get their way. Their opposites are Athenian, Socratic, Aristotelian, diversity-generating, pluralistic, and democratic. They pay lip-service, and often a good deal more, to such slogans as "I may disagree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." The groups which follow this pattern are more diffuse than their rivals; in fact, the right to be loose-knit is part of their philosophy. They include liberals, democratic socialists, libertarians, and free-market capitalists. These champions of human rights use the word "freedom" to liberate the individual, not to hammer home the triumph of a Chosen Collectivity.
Rules of the Subculture Game
Back in 1932, a social and political psychologist named Richard Schanck carried out a field study of "Elm Hollow," a literal horse-and-buggy town in rural New York State cut off without a bus stop or a passenger railway. Nearly to a man and woman, Elm Hollow's Baptist residents spilled forth hatred of the era's godless sins: card games involving the use of the king, queen and jack, alcohol, and Satan's incense burners - the products of tobacco leaves. Strange thing was that once Shank had gained a bit of trust, he was often pulled behind closed doors and shuttered blinds by some lone figure hungry for a game of gin, a hard cider-drinking binge, and a cigarette or two. The hell-tempter sneaking off the straight-and-narrow wasn't a town hoodlum, but one of its respected citizens.
Despite a population of less than 500, Elm Hollow was riddled with subcultures: insiders versus outsiders, Baptists versus Methodists, those who lived near the freight station versus those who lived near the post office, and members of the local Lodge versus those who hadn't joined. But of the town's competing factions, one had trussed up the community. Thirty five years before Schanck showed up with his sharpened pencils, an influential Baptist minister had died. To all intents and purposes, this worthy's memory no longer should have thrived. As Schanck put it, "the church has been remodeled, every one of his parishioners, save one, is gone, and in fact, in the realistic sense, nothing except the property upon which the building rests remains the same." But the minister had left more than just a minor legacy - he had provided the platform for what the researchers called a "personality tyranny." The heritor of his stored influence was the minister's daughter, Mrs. Salt, a woman who puzzled the researchers enormously. She "was not liked," writes Schanck, yet "she dominated" the attention structure of the community. Forty two percent of Elm Hollow's Baptist parishioners declared publicly that her word demanded "extraordinary respect."
How, Schanck wondered, did Mrs. Salt manage to hold her sway? The answer was in imitative behavior and the fear which keeps us sheep from going astray. Mrs. Salt controlled what you did and did not say. Hence Elm Hollow chorused with almost unanimous piety. In private, Schanck heard the choked-off sound of heresy. Numerous Baptists secretly hankered for their nip of alcohol. But Mrs. Salt had been highly effective in scattering her enemies. Even the most vehement behind-the-scenes believers in the good of a bourbon-sip from time to time, when caught in the spotlight of neighborly attention, echoed Mrs. Salt's religious party line. And many of those who secretly felt she should be treated as no better than any other woman of the town spoke out of a different side of their mouths when they knew folks who could overhear them were around - publicly they inveighed that Mrs. Salt should be obeyed. Even the new minister, who'd only been on the scene a year, admitted privately to liberal views. Yet on the pulpit it was the fire and brimstone of Mrs. Salt's fundamentalist sanctities he spewed.
How completely the anointed had commandeered collective perception became apparent when Schanck asked the closet dissenters how other people in the community felt about face cards, a snort, a smoke, and levity. Hoodwinked by suppression, each knew without a doubt that he was the sole transgressor in a saintly sea. He and he alone could not control his demons of depravity. None had the faintest inkling that he was part of a silenced near-majority.
Here was an arch-lesson in the games subcultures play. Reality is a mass hallucination. We gauge what's real according to what others convey. And others, like us, rein in their words, caving to timidity. Thanks to conformity enforcement and to cowardice, a little power goes a long, long way.
From Open Hand to Social Fist - The Clenched Society
"In our flexible, reengineered economy...we are unmoored - from our pasts, our neighbors, and ourselves."
Patrick Smith
"Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are not sure that we are doubly sure. Fundamentalism is, therefore, inevitable in an age which has destroyed so many certainties by which faith once expressed itself and upon which it relied."
Reinhold Niebuhr
Groups under threat constrict. They do it to gain leverage and force. Toss bacteria onto a surface so hard that feeding becomes almost impossible, and they'll abandon individual freedom, pull together their members, and form a tight-knit phalanx which can, according to physicist/microbiologist Eshel Ben-Jacob, carve through the obstacles around it like a blade. Human groups in times of trouble stiffen up their unity, squelch ideas, rally 'round their leaders, and spit out those who fail to ape the top dog faithfully. Group members project their own forbidden emotions onto others, and in their ferocity become enforcers for the group's norms. They spot the smallest sin among their fellows and punish it intolerantly. In biology, emergency measures like these have a tendency to cut two ways. In short jolts they produce bursts of power. But used in the long run, they destroy. The oneness which gives society the punch of a bayonet produces over the course of time a paralyzing rigidity.
This lesson may prove critical for the 21st century. Old ways of life are crumbling, and the victims of disintegration hunger for something new around which to cohere. As I write, Russia has ceased functioning as a state. It cannot collect its taxes, pay its workers, or protect its citizens from crime. In this chaos, money is worth nothing and ordinary citizens cannot buy the food they need to survive. Siberian workers unpaid for over a year told television crews from Britain's Independent Television News that if they could get their hands on enough rubles they'd forget buying groceries, purchase a rifle, go to Moscow, and take revenge. The hungrier, angrier, and more desperate they become, the more they will be ripe adherents when some new "liberator" arrives.
[snip]
heise.de
Sounds like all of America is spellbound by Mrs Salt nowadays, huh? |
