WE Are Experiencing a Collective Descent Into Madness

[Orwellian_Ghost]

We face an enormous challenge.

"...our language sculpts the way we think about the world, and that without a word for something, we can't think of it."

Our problem is that we can no longer communicate effectively with each other. This is not because we lack the words, but rather because we are being victimized by the corruption of our language - the hijacking of the words in our language—so that we are not free to use them without trapping ourselves in a frustrating and unworkable set of ideas and implied contexts.

"This is the premise of Orwell's Newspeak: to greatly reduce the vocabulary by stripping it of words and constructs which could describe rebellion and even an alternative to Big Brother, in order that it become impossible to even think of such things."

Recently-Always there was a discussion here, where someone was advocating supporting a certain candidate for the presidency - ___________ - as the best we could do at this time to address and solve our problems. "Not perfect, but better than the alternatives." Any expression of dissent from that assertion by anyone was immediately categorized as one who was advocating violent revolution, and furthermore, violent revolution was defined by this person as "suicidal actions, obsolete and old-fashioned, that could never work" and further it was insinuated that persons so advocating such a course had "covert agendas" and were trying to control people's minds. No other alternatives - no other alternative ways of thinking or communicating about social or political problems - were imaginable or to be listened to or considered for even a moment.

If that is not precisely what Orwell described, nothing is.

This breakdown in our ability to think and to communicate - a collective descent into madness, really- has been so gradual and is so pervasive that one is tempted to think it is only imagined. But when you are old enough to remember when people were able to communicate, or if you get out of the "winners" circle - educated, upscale, striving, and achieving white Americans - or if you read history - not the official histories, not the "alternative" histories, but rather the everyday people in their own words - the contrast between modern thinking and speaking and the way people speak and think and spoke and thought outside of that narrow circle in place and time that we call "reality" is stunning.

Relatively uneducated and unsophisticated privates in the Union army, in their letters home, expressed themselves with more clarity and precision and exhibited vastly superior reasoning abilities than educated people do today. It is not that we can't, it is that we are being trained not to and are being punished when we do - by the threat of being made a social outcast and the omnipresent threat of economic hardship, mainly.

[liberal N proud]

1. What is happening now makes Orwell look like an amateur

[Warpy]

2. Is he supporting plaster or papier mache?

[drthais]

4. armature????

would that be 'amateur'??

[liberal N proud]

7. Yeah

It's getting late, I guess I should knock off.

[ColbertWatcher]

5. I thought Orwell was an ottoman. n/t

[liberal N proud]

9. Good one, that's about how my mind thinks sometimes

I fixed it, I think

[villager]

3. I happen to be a published author, who happens to get to visit lots of schools

And yes, the ability to communicate --outside of texting "LOL" to someone -- is being taken away from us.

And yes, when you think of the "letters home" used by Ken Burns in "The Civil War," compared to how our, er, "journalists" and "elected leaders" "speak" today, well...

It is indeed pretty damning...

[Occulus]

18. It's intentional, and it's one reason why public education is in such dire straits.

Republicans have, for a very long time, heaped scorn upon the concept of the public school. Once in power, they went on to prove public schooling cannot function as advertised by defunding it, and inflicting expensive unfunded mandates (NCLB, anyone?), and insisting upon 'accountability testing'. That last leads to 'teaching to the test', student disinterest in learning anything not related to 'what's on the test', and ultimately, an undereducated and thus easily-led and easily lied to populace.

The political analogy is, don't elect someone who doesn't believe in the concept of representative government, because, if elected, they will set out to prove their thesis, by their own actions, if necessary.

We cannot underfund education in the same sense that we cannot underfund public health. To be honest, education and health care ought to be considered to be very fundamental issues of national security, because, well, they are.

[Warpy]

6. We're actually starting to exit collective madness

The descent into madness happened 28 years ago, in 1980, when Reagan won by lying to everybody about the economy and doing a dirty deal with the Iranians behind Carter's back. Because Reagan was an experienced pitchman, people fell for the idea that abolishing the New Deal would somehow lift a boat they didn't own along with all the yachts owned by the rich.

We are still under the spell of that particular brand of madness but we are, as a people, slowly starting to pull ourselves out of that hypnotic trance induced by that VOICE that made people feel so gosh darned good while he was robbing them blind.

Nothing breaks through national madness but an avalanche of hideous experience arising from it. That's what we're getting right now and will continue to get for some time to come.

[SpiralHawk]

10. Well said, Warpy

Hear, hear.

[Ichingcarpenter]

11. I'm afraid that

only when things get worse, and they will, shall Americans awaken from their
slumber, meanwhile they are being led off the cliff.

[bdamomma]

27. sadly, I hope people will wake up before they fall over that cliff

and the only ones who should fall that cliff are those who lead us there.

[ladjf]

32. I agree with your basic logic Warpy. But, I don't share your optimistic

belief that we are emerging from the "madness". Yet, I would be pleased to discover that you are correct.

[lovuian]

8. I also think its Materialism we are spiritually bankrupt

I agree there is a madness that has infected everybody

and I have no words to explain it.

[FirstLight]

12. One of my favorite forms of "literature" is old letters...

...nobody mails anymore.. and I love the period films when the letter takes weeks to arrive...etc Great weavings of words are no longer valued. And cheap abreviations have taken the place of any real vocabulary.
Email to me is so cursory. I enjoy typing, but I miss the true feeling that can be communicated with handwriting and well thought out words...and the feeling & sound of crumpling the paper when the draft is not acceptable...

*sigh* I guess being a writer can be somewhat of a curse, language is romantic to me! :blush:

[sam sarrha]

13. 30% of Americans are Religious Fundies, anti-science, anti-intellectual.. a greater % of people in

Turkey believe in Evolution.

the Thugs have been carefully re-crafting the Definition of words for decades, Right wing Corporations even started buying up publishing houses and printers since the Reagan Daze.

NCLB is a scheme to destroy the intelligence level of the nation, 40 to 52% high school dropout rates, from the Day it was first a pilot study when Bu$h was Governor of Texas.. they hid the fact over $0% 0f students were driven out of the schools by that program in Texas and very year since it was imposed nationally on out children.. it is purely child abuse, child neglect on a national level

[ColbertWatcher]

14. I blame talk radio.

At least with TV there were pictures to give some context to the words being said, but with radio, who the hell knows what's going on?

Let me give an example...

I remember a long time ago, I was reading a thread in which someone posted a list of misheard words that could be attributed to duh ignants listening to talk radio. My favorite was: "paper view".

I forget what the conversation was about, but the person brought up cable TV and pay-per-view. But, instead of posting the words "pay-per-view" (with or without the hyphens), this person posted "paper view". A discussion ensued, and it as decided that the person who posted "paper view" but meant "pay-per-view" had never seen the phrase in writing and perhaps had only heard it. Previous political leanings were recalled and it was determined that the person had heard it on talk radio. The "paper view" poster never admitted to an intentional misspelling, but everyone kinda knew that was the case.

Now that that story is done, maybe along with talk radio, you might be able to blame avoiding people who might disagree or have a slight variation of one's own opinion?

I have seen some threads where some very intelligent conversations took place, even with the LOLs and IMHO's (etc.) thrown about. But how likely is it to hear rational and cogent arguments if people avoid them?

[orleans]

20. i blame the aspartame. it has eaten holes in our brains. n/t

[gordianot]

15. Jimmy Carter was right it is a "Malaise".

[Echo In Light]

24. Hunter Thompson called post 9/11 a "national nervous breakdown," and was convinced...

That the Bush regime would bring about nuclear war/apocalypse.

[undergroundpanther]

16. every abuser

seeks to silence the voice of those they victimize to take away their way of communicating and therefore relating to others.
Our system the way we are socialized is abusive and it requires mass denial just to cope with it, if you cannot play make believe you get called names crazy a threat stupid paranoid ..on and on,so the truth of a person's experience is not believed..because the popular and socially sanctioned beliefs of the listeners and the sub contexts of the language meanings get in the way of hearing a person speak who feels acutely what is wrong. A monopoly of injustice masquerading as just....

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

....The individual’s, decision is mostly due to (other) causes:
beyond the language – game
it is due to his “life-environment”.

In our (Western, capitalist) society
It is the market, the participation in it
(together with the associated “cultural“ meanings)
Which supplies the causes for accepting the proposition of power (Brückner)
“the material gratification for the acceptance of the system”

On the other hand:
In case these material gratifications are not supplied
once the market pulls back from the “life-environment”,
when the crisis becomes visible
when parts of the population become superfluous, unnecessary,
without being able to secure their means of living
then the consent and acceptance of the system becomes diminished
The reasons (offered by the discourse of power)
are rationalizations (for the population’s consent)
to the discourse of power, to power itself
given by participation in consuming


...It is a consent to the discourse of power
which creates the feeling of being powerless
which should be overcome by consenting to power.


...Therefore, the “main task of culture” should not be
the “taming of the aggressive drives/instincts”
(as Freud suggests 1930)
but the “taming” of (the feelings of) powerlessness.
Nothing seems more obvious than holding power responsible
for creating such feelings (of powerlessness).
The fact of power ( with one person)
creating powerlessness (in another person)
as well as instigating the (compensatory) striving for power
Power offers the Ideal
For overcoming feelings of powerlessness
(in the feeling of- having - power)
http://www.radpsynet.org/journal/vol6-1/bruder.html


"When the victim is already devalued (a woman, a child), she may find the most traumatic events of her life take place outside the realm of socially validated reality." My behavior allowed me to outwardly maintain social connections with my family that would otherwise have been lost. I had forced myself into a position where I had to carry on my life as if nothing had happened, even if only because I saw it as the lesser of two evils.
http://www.radpsynet.org/journal/vol6-1/spina.htm

[L. Coyote]

17. Have you seen the film "Stupidity"?

[BeHereNow]

40. No, but I will confess to watching "Idiocracy"

Seen that one?

I thought it to be a fairly accurate futuristic documentary...

BHN

[canetoad]

19. Excellent thread and topic

As a small child I read. Everything I could lay hands and eyes on from Dickens, Bronte to lurid adventure stories, the Famous Five. If it was in print and handy, I would read it. My father showed me how to use a dictionary and encyclopaedia to look up terms and words I did not know. It was second nature to use words that other kids my age had never heard and I became used to thinking twice about using an uncommon or 'big' word in case I was told to stop showing off.

Skip to now and consider the reading material that is presented to young people. Yes, I know those classic books are still available, but far easier to access is the internet where uninformed and badly expressed opinion passes as great writing. Where the construction of words, sentences and paragraphs to convey a coherent, literate message is less important than a quick bite and shock value.

If it is true that your vocabulary is formed by the material you read, I fear that future generations will end up unable to express themselves at all.

[lostnfound]

21. "Saturation schooling", intentionally dumbed down; and an absence of personal myth

Unique, real-life experiences are now rarities in childhood, replaced by a system of 'saturation schooling' for 12 years that leaves little time for reflection or digestion of one's own experience. The "culture" on TV displaces the stories of Our Town at an early age.

Many people in their early teens were living an adventure in the 1800s -- although some were also immersed in the drudgery and horror of being coal miners or slaves. Perhaps they were better at weaving personal myths out of their lives, accustomed to seeing their lives as myth or as struggle, and the world around them as both enchanted and horrific.

Writing about one's days at the desk or in the cubicle is a little different than writing about the encounter with the bear, the journey on horseback across the countryside, etc. The struggle for survival was everpresent in most people's lives.

The spiritual reality of everyday life has been displaced by a material reality. A book called "The Reenchantment of Everyday Life" speaks to the need for mythmaking in our own personal lives. Where once upon a time, each carried the burden of creating a personal self from humble raw materials of the era -- growing or painting or shaping a myth of one's own, related to one's family -- today, a facsimile of a personal self can be built from preassembled parts -- adopted from the TV, purchased and downloaded to an IPOD, stuffed into one's overstuffed closets. "You ARE somebody when you consume."

The television today is filling the spaces in the mind that used to be devoted to the construction of a personal myth. Entertainment -- sports, TV -- has expanded to substitute for political or philosophical discourse. Few have been taught "rhetoric".

[villager]

33. great points, Lostnfound. Yes, no one has a "narrative" to their own lives...

...only one that is spoonfed to them, through corporations, and thus manipulable by puppet-drunks like Bush, and those pulling his strings...

[Hannah Bell]

37. I think there's a great deal to that. People used to be more the

"stars of their own lives". Now, the "stars" are on TV, & our own lives look small in comparison. Money & what it buys is the only universal measure of worth, we can see that based on how the world works & what recieves attention & who has power over us - no matter what we're taught in Sunday school.

[Echo In Light]

22. This quote from Justice William O Douglas, in Naomi Wolfe's book, End of America...

"As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such a twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air—however slight—lest we become unwilling victims of the darkness." ~ Justice William O. Douglas

[Perry Logan]

23. The elections of 2006 suggest you might be wrong. I sure hope so.

[TaffyMoon]

25. And you're taking us with you (sigh)

Canadians I mean.

[Echo In Light]

26. We're not far from you, and I used to suppose that when the shit hit the fan, we'd head north

That notion has since gone by the wayside.

[bdamomma]

28. exactly, do we all have TO pay for *'ies mistakes.

[Jennicut]

29. I love television but Al Gore is right about it in his book, "Assault on Reason", it thinks for us

We no longer use reason to think about things. We react emotionally by watching images on youtube or t.v. I love television but I will admit I just react to it most of the time. Luckily, I love to read books as well. The dumbing down of society begins when no one thinks for themselves anymore. It reminds me of the book Farenheit 451 about a future socety where firemen burn books and mind control happens through the t.v. Of ocurse in today's world we have so much technology we think less and less on our own.

[Ichingcarpenter]

30. Mass Mind Control Through Network Television: Are Your Thoughts Your Own?

Why do countless American people go along with the War on Iraq? Why do so many people call for a police state control grid? A major component to a full understanding of why this kind of governmental and corporate corruption is to discover the modern science of mind control and social engineering. It's baffling to merely glance at the stacks of documentation that this world government isn't being constructed for the greater good of humanity. Although there are a growing number of people waking up the reality of our growing transparent soft cage, there seems to be just enough citizens who are choosing to remain asleep. Worse yet, there are even those who were at least partially awake at one time but found it necessary to return to the slumber of dreamland.

Turn on your local newscast. You have a few minutes of blue-collar crime, hardly any white collar crime, a few minutes of sports, misc. chit chat, random political jibber-jabber, and a look at the weather that no one is forecasting correctly. Is that what happened in your town? And we're supposed to own the airwaves! The mainstream media openly supports the interests of the prison industrial complex. The stories focus on minority criminal groups, and exploit the real threat to appear much more dangerous than they are. Think about the growing per capita number of prisoners in the country. Then remember that this is happening at the same time that our prison boom began. The police on our streets have created criminals. The focus is to keep us in a state of fear, that way the elitists can attack any group they want to without fear of consequence. This is why the media is continuing to craft the timeless art of dehumanization.

Since the 1996 Telco act, television and radio stations all across the nation were bought out by major international media outlets. Clear Channel and Infinity are the two largest corporations in radio today. This has centralized the distribution of information and has threatened our free society ever since. The media drums to the heartbeat of its owners, whose interests are not of the general public. Instead they are interested in their other financial endeavors like defense contracting, oil business, political parties, prison industry. The conflicts of interest are monumental with the deregulation of the corporations. The lines are now blurred between one network's coverage of the war and the other.

Once we come to the conclusion that the media is intentionally deceiving us, we can apply the principles of problem-reaction-solution. This formula takes a problem by either creating it or allowing it to happen and presenting that to the population. It could be terrorism, molestation, extra terrestrials. These topics create fear and no one in their right mind would support terrorism or crime. It's therefore OK to blast the television, the papers, and radio with 'the problem.' The natural reaction from the people is a request for more control to ensure more safety. Most let their fear and emotional side control their decisions and usually translated into something like, "The government needs more power over our lives to make us safer and freer from tyranny. I believe what the media tells me so I will support whatever decisions they make." Today's mainstream corporate news program discourages dissent of the war and paints activists with a negative brush that hints of treason. At the same time, the so-called journalists are cogs in a much larger machine who know that if they report a story that paints the government in a dark light, is likely to remain on 'the wire' and off the front page.

The most disturbing thing about spending a single hour examining network cable news and modern Hollywood films are the reoccurring themes in the backdrop. The central ideas of countless "investigative reports" or "Friday night special" features are about a threat of some type over the horizon. The end of the world as we know it is being sold. If the news isn't feeding it to you, then the History Channel or Discover Channel are either talking about the crusades, asteroids, UFOs, earthquakes, terrorism, or exposes about serial killers. They are crafted a message that our world is unstable, and the threat is always an invisible and dangerous one that only our military can fix. When you record and log all the messages, you end up with a script, a screen write produced through the movie studios of Hollywood hell.


http://www.illuminati-news.com/Articles/166.html

[Locrian]

34. Century of the Self

I cant emphasize enough - please watch these videos put out by BBC Four:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8953172273825999151

There are four parts, about 50 min long each. It is REQUIRED viewing if you want to know what has been happening to the world for the last 100 years.

quote from WikiPedia:
Along these general themes, The Century of the Self asks deeper questions about the roots and methods of modern consumerism, representative democracy and its implications. It also questions the modern way we see ourselves, the attitude to fashion and superficiality.

The business and, increasingly, the political world uses PR to read and fulfill our desires, to make their products or speeches as pleasing as possible to us. Curtis raises the question of the intentions and roots of this fact. Where once the political process was about engaging people's rational, conscious minds, as well as facilitating their needs as a society, the documentary shows how by employing the tactics of psychoanalysis, politicians appeal to irrational, primitive impulses that have little apparent bearing on issues outside of the narrow self-interest of a consumer population. He cites a Wall Street banker as saying "We must shift America from a needs- to a desires-culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. <...> Man's desires must overshadow his needs."

[Ichingcarpenter]

35. Excellent video

By the BBC.

[BeHereNow]

41. My daughter turned me on to that last summer...

I posted a link to it here on DU some months ago-
I don't think many people watched it though.
Too bad.
It explains SO much.
Thanks for bringing it up again- it is highly overlooked
and under valued.
BHN

[Hydra]

31. Newspeak isn't as efficient as you think

Fear is, though. They have carefully cultivated the fear of "something worse."

advocating supporting a certain candidate for the presidency - ___________ - as the best we could do at this time to address and solve our problems. "Not perfect, but better than the alternatives."

Almost everyone reflexively backs off from "alternatives" simply because they are alternatives.

We are being led into hell on the excuse that anything else could be worse...and most people are buying it.

[Orwellian_Ghost]

36. Kicking

[nadinbrzezinski]

38. Maslow comes to mind

and you are right... the only thing that will break the stranglehold is real hunger across the world.

And that is coming... HARD AND FAST.

I fear that we are entering a new revolutionary age, due to the food crisis that the UN is now warning is here.... not that this headline is anywhere in the MSM...

[femrap]

39. I'm so glad you wrote of this....

I've noticed that responses to what I've written/said are 'weird.' Alien, in fact. As if the responder only took bits and pieces from what I wrote/said and went off on some self-important tangent.

There is no conversation anymore.

Thx.