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Dictatorships are dictatorships of the mind to the degree they can be. Infgormation is guarded and secreted away, doled out according to the needs of the elite, changed for the convenience of the elite, made up and made to go away according to whims of the privilged.
We in the West live in ostensible democracies. We have almost unlimited access to information. That's to the good because the elite would lie to us as they do and we would not have the option of disproving them almost instantly if we so choose. With the Internet we can challenge the intelligentsia's versions of the truth and show that they lie to us. But it's not enough to show the negative. We must come up with the positive to make this miracle worth the paper it's printed on.
We can start our postive quest for metaphors by casting out the daemons of anti-Modernity, of our idiocies of sentimantalism, our lies that we pretend are values. We can begin by ceasing the lies that our intelligentsia perpetrate daily in the media, in the schools, in the laws, in the schools and universities, in the cafes and on subways and on the sidewalks. We are living in a self-created dictatorship of bullshit. We can save ourselves from grief if we start to think clearly and think for ourselves honestly. We can communicate plainly.
"Doing violence to the language" is metaphorical. Butchering the language, and so on, none of that is real in any meaningful sense; and yet it is essential that we understand that though language is metaphor itself it is also how we communicate our higher ideas, and that if we do so in mangled and violently assaulted metaphors we will suffer for it. We will physically suffer in real detail. Sentimentalist language leads us to evil deeds. We will continue here to post pieces on my latest favorite book, Faking It: The Sentimentalisation of Modern Society. I'm going to continue also to comment on the texts themselves. And as part of this series on sentimentalisation of the West I'll post often on Orwell's Politics and the English Language and 1984. It's time to take back the language from the weasels. It's time to write plainly for intelligent people all the time regardless of who we are and what our public images might require of us. Otherwise we are doomed to Islam and dhimmitude if we don't weep ourselves to death first.
One of our most important aspects of life is that of the metaphor of meaning, the moral of the story, as it were. That moral comes to us from religion, for the most part, and to argue that most Westerners are today aheists is simply inaccurate, they being not atheists but confused and demoralized by the bullshit moral of the establishment churches. Religion is seen as a sham, a bullshit narrative that does nothing but rewrite the moral in new and stupider ways, less poetically, less vibrantly, in fact, in a style more suitable for an income tax form. Religion becomes just one more lie among many. We enslave ourselves by allowing the bullshit to run freely over us. We lose when we allow the sentimentalisation of society to rot the meaning of our lives. People don't so much disbelieve in God as they distrust the bullshit version of God as it is in our establishment churches. Rightly so. Our establishment churches and our normative religions are urned to crap before our eyes, and it's too disgusting to swallow. Many people are sick of faking it. Life in the modern West sucks. That, not the suffering of the Palestinian people, is our fault. Let's see what it's about so we can address the problem like adults for a change.
Below is a third review of this, our favorite book.
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Faking It — The Sentimentalisation of Modern Society
Digby Anderson and Peter Mullen (Editors)
The Social Affairs Unit 1998
"Faking It" claims to chart what it calls "the march of the fraudulent through modern society": government policies " obsessed with spin, image and gesture rather than substance", "sentimental environmental obsessions", "narcissistic, Godless religion", "a school system with no education in it, a welfare system which actually promoted dependency not welfare...elevation of fake feeling in novels and music"
The book gained notoriety for its reference to Princess Diana's funeral "in which sentimentality — mob grief — was personified and canonised and feeling exalted above reason, reality and restraint".
The Study sees the "woes of society — crime, broken families, failing school standards, confusion about morality and manners" as less attributable to "bad ideas or perverted interests" but through the rise of sentimentality in modern society.