Cultural change on steroids, in a time of COVID-19

As do most of us in the upper age bracket, I’m sure, I tend to be a restless, light sleeper with frequent wake-ups in the wee, small hours of the night. At such moments, abruptly awakening from my usual, florid, Technicolor dreams, I then find myself wandering groggily through a darkened hall of brooding, semi-conscious thoughts that hang from the reluctant walls of my conscious mind with a grim determination to wrest the last vestiges of blissful unconsciousness from me in a death-struggle of remarkable tenaciousness.

At such moments, that darker aspect of my libido that coexists within me takes over and as I gain wakefulness I sink into a sort of masochistic miasma of severely critical self-deprecations that usually grows exponential in intensity, the more I try to resist its forceful onslaught. Self-loathing quickly settles in as I begin to review everything in my life and basic nature that’s worthy of censure and disapprobation, ticking off and refuting traits and aspects of what I regard myself as being in an unrelenting litany of criticism.

It’s almost as if a pre-recorded magnetic tape of eyewitness testimony, detailing failings, missed opportunities, bad decisions and less-than-perfect attributes, begins to auto-play in my mind, while another part of me, knowing all too well apparently that I am subjecting myself to a sort of Vincent Price inquisition, tries valiantly to disrupt this process and release me to the welcome folds of blissful, deep sleep once more. Most of the time this ‘self-rescue’ is largely unsuccessful and I continue to depress myself with the automatic recitation of my many faults, working myself into a greater and greater fit of depression until some sort of emergency relief value cuts in and dumps me back into Somnus’s murky caverns of generalized unconsciousness. Somnus, if you will recall your by-now nearly completely forgotten Roman history, was their god of sleep, the Roman counterpart to ancient Greece’s Hypnos.

This process seems to be a repetitive one, occurring night after night, and fortunately I eventually return to a healthy (if guarded) optimistic belief in the rectitude of my conscious mind’s daily thoughts, but I often wonder why I harbor this apparent need to denigrate myself in this manner so frequently and so mercilessly. Is it part of a psychological pattern I don’t fully understand with conscious alacrity? Or is it an indication of some catastrophic fissure of incomplete development that lurks menacingly just below the reasonably smooth surface of my daily life? Whatever the mechanism is, it usually leaves a little bit of still-not-completely dissipated depression buried within me that I occasionally find myself wondering about. How much influence does it have on my habitually optimistic pessimism (something I share with A.A. Milne’s little, perpetually depressed donkey character, Eeyore, hence another of my several nicknames acquired over a lifetime of social interactions with others)?

Recently, after enduring several months of the psychically oppressive constraints imposed upon us by observing the CDC SARs-CoV-2 (COVID-19’s more accurate designation) safeguards (handwashing, mask-wearing and social-distancing chief among them) and finishing several chapters in the two or three books I am currently reading (among them 1. The Breakdown of Higher Education, by Prof. John M. Ellis, 2020, 2. The case Against Education, by Prof. Bryan Caplan, 2028, and 3. Human Diversity, by Prof. Charles Murray, 2020), I found myself reflecting on a number of socio-political dynamics that are currently tearing America apart at the seams.

One of them is somewhat subtle and hardly at all mentioned anywhere, either by our leftist-biased media or by (hopefully a bit more sober) academics. I refer to something I’ve noticed here in my local Sacramento area of California (the ostensible ‘state capitol’ although it more clearly reflects a sort of ‘grown-up hick town’ mentality, in actuality), involving driving patterns and the observance of laws and civic regulations intended to govern our day-to-day social interactions in a highly urbanized environment.

I’ve noticed that from all the indications I’ve observed, people seem to be paying less and less attention to basic constraints such as speed laws, noise restrictions and traffic safety rules. Since we frequently sleep with our bedroom window open on our typically hot Sacramento summer nights, and owing to our living only a few blocks from a major and heavily-used interstate freeway, ambient traffic background noise reaches us rather unimpeded at night.

Based upon previous periods of reflection on traffic noise (at night) in comparison with current late night/very early morning noise levels, it seems to me that people are considerably less concerned with compliance with regulations concerned with both speed limits and the noise their cars may legally generate. Late at night sounds tend to travel farther in the cooler air, of course, and it seems like there are a great number of ‘unmuffled’ (read: highly performance modified) cars using the freeway between 1 and 3 AM…a time when you would normally expect traffic noise to be markedly lessened, rather than increased.

That is, there are more cars operating with what are probably illegal engine muffling systems (read: performance enhancing, which are generally far louder than so-called OEM ‘stock’ systems). Not only that but it’s pretty obvious that many of these cars (and motorcycles, as well, with their distinctively much higher RPM screech than that generated by ordinary automobiles) are engaging in, if not actual races on the freeway, then dangerously higher rates of speed than the laws permit. Each night witnesses a series of recurrent incidents of this sort, wherein my decades of familiarity with ‘California car culture’ inform me that the hopped-up cars in reference are probably reaching speeds well in excess of 90-110 miles per hour (or more, as a Highway Patrol officer friend recently confirmed). The screams of high-performance, highly modified engines hitting outrageous RPMs at a time of the day when most are fast asleep are unmistakable and this suggest to me that they are only being so emboldened because they feel their chances of being detected and stopped by Highway Patrol officers are far less than they were just a few years ago. Or that they fear the consequences far less than they used to (which amounts to the same thing).

Whether that obvious sense of lessened concern for obeying highway speed laws is the result of a spirit of false self-confidence inspired by the present social trend of deference to minority excesses by law enforcement, or perhaps results from staff reductions and constraints being experienced by local law agencies, is anyone’s guess, but it’s pretty obvious that being stopped by cops is now feared far less than it previously was…for whatever reason.

I say this partly due to the fact that in less highly educated social/economic classes, the ‘muscle-car’ culture is far more embraced by minority groups that now find themselves financially able to afford expensive toys like muscle cars and high-performance sportsbike motorcycles, and it seems also to be the case that driving these powerful machines outrageously on otherwise congested freeways and city streets at night poses significantly less (legal) risk to these low-lifers than it would during the day. It’s merely logical deduction being used here, and yet it’s Occam’s Razor-like in its compelling inference, since other explanations are far too complex to withstand more exacting scrutiny and analysis.

Regardless, it’s pretty clear that ‘messing around (illegally) with way-too-hot (highly modified) cars’ is one of the most easily accessed boredom & stress relievers available to those at the bottom end of the ‘life not reflectively lived’ spectrum. While a few at the top end of the same social class pyramid may spend their nighttime hours scanning the heavens with an expensive telescope (to seize upon a simple ‘for instance’ example), the brain-cell deficit bottom-dwellers warm up their loud, noisy and way too powerful wheels and head for the local freeway to get their (low-octane) kicks.

Statistically, it has been suggested in more than a few studies that fast driving and red-light running have a direct association, furthermore, and I would venture to go so far as to say that today even further inferences can be extrapolated from the extant data: that as socio-economic ‘under-groups’ become more and more formidably empowered by the current wave of Black Lives Matter protests and other wide-spread, related, popular social protest demonstrations, this has in effect augmented an increased disregard for the basic rules, regulations and obligatory courtesies we must all observe in order to get along amicably with each other in a typically dense urban environment. After all, when you are officially being told not to work, congregate, associate and/or fraternize, what better and easier way to rebel against these ‘unfair’ constraints and kill a few more hours of boredom than grabbing a sign and protesting (recall, if you will, that famous scene from Brando's 'The Wild One' in which Mildred asks Johnny "What are you rebelling against?" Johnny responds, "What have ya got?") And from a certain standpoint, illegal racing on the freeways late at night IS arguably a distinct form of crudely expiated frustration and social protest, after all.

Thus, assuming this to be a verifiable and/or documentable hypothesis by statistical or other standard methods of quantification, the present assaults by ‘identity-socialist’ progressives on any social harmony we might have formerly had are having a dangerously corrosive collateral effect on our collective efforts to harmoniously integrate social interactions amidst extremely adverse societal circumstances.

After all, if one agrees that a strong sense of social order, lawfulness and responsibility are all critically important components of any system of organised social interaction in a community (or larger grouping of peoples, such as a nation), since the alternative is out-and-out anarchy when the distorted concept of ‘diversity’ assumes bizarre dimensions, then any society lacking that sort of unifying animus falls further on the spectrum towards anarchy and chronic chaos.

‘Diversity’ in its broadest sense, and as its original definition has become increasingly prostituted in leftist progressive jargon, does anything but help stabilize and promote healthy social order. As a person from that ‘hated and oppressive’ group known as white culture, I look to the example of Germany (where I have relatives), with its near-obsessive dedication to social and legal order, for the starkest contrast imaginable to contemporary America, with its over-the-top focus on what we now call ‘identity politics’.

Journalist Heather MacDonald, distinguished Thomas W. Smith Fellow of the Manhattan Institute, and one of the few contemporary socio-political journalists these days whose work does not fall waaaay to the left of center suggests (without stating it directly) that this increasing embrace of low-key lawlessness (such as the freeway racing mentioned earlier) may well be attributable to the popularity of the black-sympathising leftist liberal progressive identity-socialists sentiment, which holds that ALL law enforcement is somehow oppressive (implying ipso facto that law enforcement should be emasculated at least and severely restrained at best). It is easy, after all, for a non-critical thinker to mistake populist ‘wisdom’ for gospel writ and that certainly appears to be the case with far too many ‘simple thinkers’, these days anyway.

Examining the reality that underlies that suggestion reveals that as the anarchistic, radical provocateurs (associated with, or perhaps hiding behind the) BLM protestors find they can commit acts of public destruction and violence with increasing impunity, an immediately broader and more diffusive result is lessened respect for the ‘enforcers’ of public order (e.g. the police) and a sense that because ‘popular’ sentiment favors the law enforcement opposers, they can get away with just about anything without fear of remonstrance.

After all, if blacks (and their misguided white liberal cohorts) can run wild in urban areas, pillaging, stealing and ransacking commercial business establishments at will (while the police stand back and not take immediate action against them…examples wherein this is the case are plentiful, the best likely instance being the ‘taking over of Portland in the name of the people’), the feeling arises that they are somehow impervious to and protected from the otherwise strong ‘arm of the law’ that was the immediately prior enforcing ethic.

In his 2020 book, ‘The Breakdown of Higher Education’, Professor John M. Ellis points to the deplorable decline of America’s erstwhile higher education infrastructure as being one of the chief catalytic augmenters of these sweeping social changes (best exemplified by the above populist ‘love affair’ with progressive identity-socialists), a sentiment also echoed in Heather MacDonald’s writing, and points to the deliberate over-simplification of complex social issues into blocks of radical leftist, cast-iron dogma that may be driven into gullible students’ heads by purpose-bent, radical leftist (progressive socialist) college and university instructors. Students, intellectually immature and already quite easily impressed and swayed by strongly and skillfully wrought opinions (read: biases) are, in simpler words, purposefully ‘dumbed down’ by their mentors and encouraged to be unquestioning acceptors of their professors’ ideologically distorted ideas, concepts and opinions.

Encouraging students to NOT think reflectively prepares them quite effectively to unquestioningly swallow whatever ‘party-line’ their pedagogues choose to force-feed them before turning them loose into today’s highly complex and intellectually convoluted social setting. This is, not unironically, the exact reverse of the traditional aim of higher educational institutions to help college-level students develop their critical thinking capabilities!

Interestingly, this model of ‘deliberate dumbing-down’ that Ellis has spent much time and care in researching has spread far beyond the socially detached and sterilely isolated confines of the university to be embraced (in the words of fictional frontier hedonist Ben Rumson, in the well-known 70s broadway musical titled ‘Paint Your Wagon’) ‘ankle, thigh and upper half!’, by America’s commercial marketing industry.

Whenever I make the mistake of watching just about any American television programming these days, and despite my near-fanatical efforts to switch off the sound (it helps to emasculate and disembody the message) during the frequent ‘commercial breaks’ (of which there are far too many), I can’t help but observe that American commercial media advertising kata common today are only a hair’s breadth removed from the old fashioned, traditional hard-sell, drum-thumping sales techniques of past decades. Radio was instrumental in helping reshape this typically American commercial pitch formula of ‘simplification and repetition’ that used to be the norm for all advertising huckstering, whether on TV or elsewhere. But when television came along and its full potential for story-telling was understood, an unholy alliance developed between advertisers and the fantasy-appeal potentials of ‘stories’ or brief video vignettes told to sell material things (read: consumer goods). [Yessir! Step right up and getcher gen-u-wine Indian Kickapoo Cure-all!]

In order for these stories (read: commercial ‘massages’) to be successful (that is, to be capable of 1. being told in intervals varying from one minute to about 5 minutes, and 2. to have intended productive impact) they had to be direct, extremely simple, uncomplicated and not require any critical thought on the part of the viewer. The nearest analogue that comes to mind are the Christian (bible) parables, a short story told to impress the listener with the need to act a certain way (virtuously). Advertising took this new video medium of television and tweaked it wity state-of-the-art sci-tech, substituting a commercial product for virtuous Christian (moral) behavior.

In no time at all, a multi-billion-dollar industry built up almost overnight, entirely dedicated to the process of telling these commercial parables to viewers for the purpose of getting them to behave ‘virtuously’ (that is, act in a manner benefitting them economically). It was, to use an extremely unfortunate and grossly transmogrified pop-culture phrase, ‘awesome, dude!’ And of course, the key to having television viewers comply with the ‘messages’ inserted so annoyingly in regular television programming content was to dumb-down the consumer audience so as to eliminate the need on their part to think critically about what was being pitched at them. It was pure genius, from a marketing outlook, and America’s wretchedly ‘dumb’ commercials too form and instantly became institutionalized ever after.

For a glimmer of exactly how ‘dumb’ these American advertising commercials actually are, just compare any of them to a comparable European television advertisement. Any comparison is both appalling and dramatic. Most European television advertising ‘messages’ have at least some level of sophistication underlying them, some reasoned appeal to the viewer to use his or her powers of discernment to evaluate a product, assess it’s advantages and determine whether or not it is actually worth purchasing. Not so in America, where the viewer is struck, one-two, right in the bread-basket by a ‘cutesy’ little ‘story’ that entertains, amuses and titillates (a rather stupid, low-level person, that is), followed by a rapidly-delivered, hard sales pitch that discourages rational analysis. (I like to think, in this context, of those annoyingly cute little blue or pink cartoon bears that Kimberly-Clarke uses to sell Charmin Toilet Paper Tissue…ugh!).

This widespread commercial marketing/advertising philosophy (also known as ‘applied infotainment content’ for low-order thinkers) quickly became standard across the entire nation and the benefits of pitching this absolutely execrable drivel to a sufficiently dumbed-down, low-expectation, consumer audience immediately became holy writ for all commercial business advertising in America. It, along with the equally abysmal and deplorably poor-quality programming that floods the commercial broadcast media these days, is greatly facilitated by keeping the consumer audience ‘fat, dumb and happy’. Put another way, a reflectively critical, thinking viewer is a commercial advertiser’s worst nightmare.

Only in America, folks. It typically makes me feel barely able to repress an unconscious urge to run screaming for the nearest, most culturally isolated refuge away from the sappy excesses of our…yuk…unrelentingly trivial pop-culture that I can find.

And that, gentile (sic) reader, is exactly what the radical leftist-liberal progressive ‘identity-socialists’ wish to make a firm and inflexible component of all contemporary American education at the higher levels of our teaching institutions. I chuckle when I recall another euphemism for the process that stems from a hoary old joke used to amusingly (but aptly) describe how people often feel when they are being regarded and treated like absolute idiots: as mushrooms (that is, they’re kept in the dark and fed shit), LoL.

The answers to this perplexing and depressing dilemma, such as they are in contemporaneous, politically correct America, are out there but they require that we switch off the treacly, miasmic allure of connection with immature minds everywhere (e.g. ‘social media’), put the instruments of our impending cultural doom (‘smart-phones’ and all similar devices intended to reduce complex ideas to the level of Chimpanzee faeces-throwing) away and start reading books again. I’ve listed one or two good ones in this lengthy imprecation directed to our dumbed-down nation, but there are many, many more equally cogent, intelligent and well-thought-out cohorts to chose from the current reference shelf with which to start shaking off the devastating shackles of ‘dumb-think’ that have so effectively ensnared a goodly portion of our nation’s population. All it requires is a willingness to 1. recognise that America is rapidly sliding down the rabbit-hole to utter dysfunction and social disintegration, 2. accept the fact that this model has now pandemically infected our colleges and university campuses, and 3. assume personal responsibility to help fend off the disingenuous and catastrophic waves of purpose-driven social change that we find ourselves so hopelessly mired in!

Fortunately for me, as I’d said over and over in the past, in another 10 years or so all this will no longer matter to me personally, since I’ll soon be pushing up daisies on this world (and hopefully entering an entirely new level of consciousness in another dimension beyond my wildest imagining). But meanwhile, it does disturb me grievously to see what could otherwise be a very smoothly integrated and reasonably peaceful world so dangerously primed to self-destruct as we progressively (pun intended) continue to slide towards the absolute brink…

A helpful start towards reversing course would be to start utterly rejecting our captivity to materialistic enslavement (intended, after all, to make a small percentage of us obscenely wealthy and the rest of us about as wealthy as the contents of a full-to-the-brim Irish chamber pot!). That means: Start using your brain to think rationally again, urge corporate businesses to stop treating this poor old planet as if it were a personal bank account designed to be utterly drained, and DARE to stand up and denounce those misguided and grossly deluded egomaniacs (the radical, anarchistically inclined identity-socialists, drunk as they are with the need for personal power and self-aggrandisement) who want us to abnegate our sworn duty, to be responsible American upholders of the great democratic dream, and turn our nation into an identity-socialistic lala-land, full of fantasy-saturated, detached-falsehoods and half-baked ideologues!

I think I’ll close this edition of the rant with a selection or two from Dr. John Ellis’s excellent book (‘The Breakdown of Higher Education’), mentioned above in the body of this missive. Ellis’ book (released in 2020), which is a modest (and very readable) 209 pages, has received many favorable comments from a wide range of both journalists and scholars, who all agree that the present abysmal quality of learning that exists on our college and University campuses is unacceptable and MUST change, if we’re not to regarded by the many ‘other’ serious universities in other nations as a highly dismissible joke.

To wit:

“On this subject, Dennis Praeger quotes Steen Pinker, a professor at Harvard (and a liberal atheist) saying that American Universities ‘are becoming laughing stocks of intolerance’, aside from a few disciplines—mathematics, natural science and business. Praeger goes on to emphasise how destructive this all is:

“If you send your children to a university, you are endangering both their mind and their character. There is a real chance they will be more intolerant and more foolish after college than they were when they began it. When you attend an American university, you are taught to have contempt for America and its founders, to prefer socialism to capitalism, to divide human beings by race and ethnicity. You are taught to shut down those who differ with you, to not debate them. And you are taught to place feelings over reason—which is a guaranteed route to eventual evil.’

“To add even further insult to injury, this precipitous decline in the quality of a university education has happened at exactly the same time it has become much more expensive. Over the past two decades, David Rathmanner points out, ‘tuition at all types of colleges has more than doubled and in some cases more than tripled.’ This rate of increase ‘has greatly outpaced the inflation rate—by at least three times for all school types.’ We now make it relatively easy for students to meet the immediate cash outlay of attending college with readily available loans, but this has the effect of diminishing the consumer’s natural tendency to scrutinise the real value of what he is paying for. The result is that students are starting out their work lives shouldering large debts that will take them many years to repay, while in many cases what they are getting for it is little more than a piece of paper—a diploma, certainly, but without the skill and knowledge that such a diploma used to certify!”

And finally:

“It was once universally acknowledged that political influence will completely corrupt higher education and make it worthless. We now have undeniable proof that it does. We should not have needed to learn so obvious a lesson, but we have, to our great cost. Another lesson that we have learned, again needlessly, is that identity-politics is always an enemy of truth and integrity. Identity-politics puts tribal allegiance above considerations of merit and truth; it is incompatible with universities properly understood. Integrity in thought and inquiry always demand that tribalism be put aside. “We should always have understood that when the academic world accepted ‘diversity’ as a core value, it was in effect taking on a political purpose. Had anyone grasped that fact, a loud warning would have sounded: politics was in the process of corrupting academia. Whenever the diversity regime was claimed to be necessary for social justice, the counter-argument should have been made: a first-rate educational system in itself does more for social justice and upward mobility than anything else could possibly do. But education can only do this when it stays away from the corrupting effect of direct involvement in political or social causes.”

[As a final kicker, I recently suggested that a retired university professor friend of mine (with a PhD) read John M. Ellis' book, thinking it might resonate w/him. He responded by telling me, and I quote: "I don't read books." GAAK?! The defense rests, yer honner.]

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A few good books to further stoke the above fires of reason:

1) The Breakdown of Higher Education, John M. Ellis, Encounter Books, 2020.

2) Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind, Tim Grossenclose, St. Martin's Press, 2011.

3) The Case Against Education: Why the Education System is a Waste of Time & Money, Bryan Caplan, Priceton University Press, 2018.

4) The Burden of Bad Ideas: How Modern Intellectuals Misshape our Society, Ivan R. Dee Publishers, 2000.

5) Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, Charles Murray, Crown Forum, 2012.

6) Human Diversity, Charles Murray, 12 Publishing, 2020.

7) The Diversity Delusion, Heather MacDonald, St. Martin's Press, 2018.

8) Political Tribes, Amy Chua, Penguin Press, 2018.

9) The United States of Socialism, Dinesh D'Souza, St. Martin's Press, 2020.

10) The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby, Pantheon Books, 2008.

11) The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Norton Books, 1991-98.

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Note: No young, idealistic leftist liberal progressive identity-socialists were physically harmed during the the formulation of the above opinions, except perhaps for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is offended by ANY arguments to the contrary of her extraordinarily narrow outlooks.