Last night I finished watching the third season of Man in the High Castle on Amazon video. The American Nazi youth were celebrating the destruction of the Statue of Liberty to launch the year of the new beginning. This public demonstration followed the meltdown of the Liberty Bell. By destroying the symbols of American history, the American Reich is pointing the way to a higher freedom, obviating the need for these tokens of a flawed past. Most people just went along.
Like Philip K Dick’s American Nazi youth, adherents of postmodernism believe that the past and present are equally malleable. The lie becomes the reality. Steve Bannon, who recently had trouble filling a room here in Staten Island, essentially encouraged the President to “burn down any structure or program that promotes the common good.” (Chris Hedges, America: the Farewell Tour, p. 11.) He called it the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”
The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
In a previous blog I wrote about Gary Lachman’s analysis of the fluidity of reality in the hands of Trump had its antecedents in the 19th century Mind Cure movements. Reality is directly malleable by thought. And now, with the planetary electronic embrace of the noosphere, manipulating this medium to perpetuate their view of reality will create it. People will believe it, and the ratings will prove it. Mass psychosis.
How far will this go? No weapon ever invented has gone unused. No presidential power has ever been given up. I hope that Mr Trump does not actually send 15,000 troops to the Southern Border. I hope he does not create a precedent of violating posse comitatus. I hope that the ending of net neutrality does not kill free speech. I hope that his judicial appointments do not result in the supremacy of corporatism. I hope that his elimination of the phrases “evidence-based” and “science-based” are not permanently banned from Environmental Protection Agency, or Centers for Disease Control documents. I hope that Betsy DeVos does not continue to turn the Education Department into an instrument for privatizing education in America.
I hope that we will soon have a government that will give up unnecessary wars, help heal the sick and the poor, and the elderly, to light the lamp of learning and make it available for all. The world is still suffering, we need a United States to be a force for good.