Originally I wrote this for our 240th Independence Day. It seemed appropriate to wish America a very happy birthday and all the best for us and the world in all our joint and separate, future endeavors.
It's been almost fifteen years since the 9/11 attack. An attack by foreigners. Enough of the conspiracy theories already. Enough of diluting reality to support conservative agendas. Supporting ignorance, fear, stupidity, greed, self absorption and now with Pres. Trump, self aggrandizement.
It seems appropriate at this time to discuss this, our national, and international, conservative diseases.
That means Trump is merely symptomatic of this social disease, along with other authoritarians worldwide and, modern conservatism in general. Original conservatism from previous centuries wasn't such a bad thing. But today, it most certainly is. It has become the internal slayer of nations.
Newt Gingrich was in many ways our most recent conservative patient zero. Our national case of herpes. Does hearing that annoy you? Yes? Are you a conservative? Does hearing that annoy you but you're not a conservative? Yes? Are you slamming liberals or the democratic party?
Ask yourself if you find you are expounding conservative beliefs... and really don't know it. Or won't, or perhaps simply can't admit it.
Just for a focal point, are you purely anti-Hillary? Do you know why? Exactly why? Have you vetted your beliefs and reasons? Or do you just read memes on Facebook? One thing America has way too much of right now is the armchair political quarterback. People who "know" what's best, but best on very suspect information.
However this is not just the common "Joe" at home with a beer anymore. Now it's professional pundits and news presenters too. For profit news has ruined our country and world in many ways. You don't feed the public news they want, you feed them what they need. You certainly don't lead with what they want, you lead with what is most important on that day with a consideration for the long term. Otherwise, what in the hell do you think you are doing? And, why?
Anyway, we cannot just solely blame the little guys anymore. Although the information is out there. But when you have such bad information and web sites, it's hard for some people to know what is what anymore.
How many of your reasons against Hillary were from decades of building and reinforcing the conservative bubble? Are you only seeing her down sides? Because everyone has them as all their opponents have pointed out. And then, there's the Russians. Now an officially acknowledged fact and no longer conjecture.
Well we're all human, after all. Though considering Trump. maybe not so much, I really donno.
Hillary was originally against gay marriage, but she was not against gays. Considering what she went through and her background, that she ever changed on that is something to consider. I don't care if it seems someone changes just for political expediency, as long as they do and stay the course. How does it matter? At issue is whether she chooses a position and leaves it once as President. Just as it is with any candidate. Just as Trump has failed to do now.
If someone makes bad choices and then they start making better choices, who cares why the reason, as long as they start onto that better path? Trump is a special case however because he cut himself off at the knees over all that during his campaign. But other than with him, that is the American way. For some of you that is the Christian way.
So if you are a Christian, get with your own program.
If you're not, then just try being rational.
Do you feel that feeling of revulsion against her in explaining why you're anti Hillary? Do you feel it possible you could be wrong about her? No? You know what that feeling is? It's self righteousness.
The core of the conservative movement, and of the Republican party anymore ever since it was taken over by foolishness, by divisiveness, by extremism. This is really all about extremism masked as conservatism. Either way it's here to stay. For now, anyway.
It's addictive, it's pleasurable and it comes out of the religious right. The NRA has used it to boost their agenda. Republicans have picked up on it and used it to boost theirs and the NRA's agenda and they dovetail it nicely into the Christian right's agenda.
Are you self righteous? Because if you think you are a left wing liberal and yet you are pushing these right wing bubble points, well, there's your sign. You're now a cloaked conservative.
Don't get me wrong. Self righteousness can be fun. But it's masturbatory. It's stroking one's own ego. It feels like it's right all through you, and through your understanding of things. Even, if you like, up through religion to God. So how can you NOT like that, love it, immerse yourself in it?
Even if you're not religious. Even if you're an atheist, or just a so called atheist.
This is why we're in this situation today in America, and around the world. WE have allowed untruths to propagate because of self-righteousness, because of...religion. People talk about all the good religion has done in the history of the world, which is really kind of countered by all the bad it has done. All in order to be "Truthful".
There is one truth however that we have failed to notice and that we are now seeing run rampant around the country, both in our politics and around the entire world. Believers are following false beliefs. Many are now using those beliefs against others for their own benefit and to our great comparative detriment both indirectly and directly, and of perfectly innocent people. Many who simply do not know any better.
Be careful the environment you find yourself in, it can seep into your consciousness and you can start to view things differently. If not from "
Stockholm Syndrome" then at least from the old adage, "we are what we eat". Or more directly, you can start to view things in the ways that are basic to your normal environment.
This is the reason why we need to push back against religion in general as a force to be reckoned with, to be dealt with. Otherwise we will have this insanity just continue on and on. The sooner we all start to believe in reality and not beliefs from ancient times, the sooner we will start to get a handle on world problems. The sooner we will begin to put down and disallow these sociopathic abusers to take advantage of society and our resources for their own and only their own benefit.
I don't have a problem with anyone being a believer. IF it is kept in perspective. Not just with reality, where especially in America all are welcome to choose a favorite delusion. But we really need to if not keep it to ourselves, just not to force it onto others. Especially not at the end of a knife, a rifle or that of a bomb's destructive sphere.
It's dense information sharing time....
Check out atheist AmonRa's video in part about this: AronRa's
Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb's questions for "evolutionists".
Merrian-Webster defines self-righteous as:
: convinced of one's own righteousness especially in contrast with the actions and beliefs of others : narrow-minded moralistic
It is a component of the addicted brain, and there is a chemistry to it.
One researcher in
Psychology Today labeled it
The Goody Two Shoes Syndrome.
"As much as we loathe hypocrites, we may dislike the self-righteous even more. Any person who presents himself as morally unimpeachable is making an "implicit indictment" of everyone else that is "irksome to the mainstream," finds a recent study in Social Psychological and Personality Science."
Which is also to say, not just that we don't like them, but they find and revel in their "implicit indictments". We internally object to their narrow self justifications, which frequently aren't based on reality. Ever talked to a staunch conservative about guns?
The thing here is that we tend to severely dislike those who are self righteous and obviously wrong with the added issue of knowing that they are foolish and ignorant. Even in the face many times of easily attainable and actual facts. They make conclusions without enough information out of a frustration typically due to a lack of that information, and of control over their lives. Sometimes, merely over a false sense of their lack of control over their own life. I get that. But we have to be careful.
For those others however it is also seriously dislikable in experiencing the self righteous in those who are absolutely right and correct in their beliefs and contentions. The issue there especially when you actually are right, is a degree of intensity. IF you are correct, you do not need to force excessive amounts of emotion or disdain into it. If you're right, you're right. Truth usually does win out in the end. The trouble comes where and when that will finally happen.
An article in
Huffington Post pushes further into the self-righteous syndrome:
"We often engage in internal dialogues with ourselves, some of which we never evaluate or examine. They keep going on and on, driving us to judge and react to situations and people without even being aware of why. We all do these self-talks, but we mess up when we let these have power over us rather than the other way around. There are many irrational thoughts that have no basis in reality. Here are a few of the irrational thoughts that bring about a state of self-righteousness (i.e., “I am right and you are wrong”):"
1. All-or-nothing thinking: When one sees things in black-and-white terms and has very limited vision. If something, someone, or some belief falls short of what this individual sees as perfect, he or she sees it as worthless or a total failure.
2. Overgeneralizations: People who over generalize take a single negative incident and exaggerate it. These individuals have a lot of use for words like “always,” “never,” “all” and “no one,” extreme words that by themselves can create radical thinking.
3. Mental filters: This is when a person picks one or a few negative events and dwells on them to make them look much bigger, darkening his or her vision of reality. It is as if you drop one droplet of ink into a whole bucket of water.
4. Discounting the positive: This is when the person rejects anything positive related to a situation, thinking that they “don’t really matter.”
5. Jumping to conclusions: This is when a person comes up with conclusions when there are no logical, scientific, or unbiased facts to support those conclusions.
6. “Should” statements: This is when a person tells herself that everyone and everything “should” be the way she thinks, functions and is comfortable with. People who make a lot of personal “should” statements usually experience a lot of negative emotions like guilt and frustration, or even anxiety. Should statements that are directed at other people, or at the world in general, lead to anger and frustration (e.g., “He shouldn’t think like this”)? This way of thinking is counterproductive, because it creates feelings of rebelliousness and separates you from those who don’t think the same way.
Then there is this article from
Psychology Today:
"The specter of mental illness does indeed loom large over creationists, but they are not alone. Signs of psychopathology can also be seen among their political bedfellows, conservative politicians, especially when you consider a wide range of illness indicators. In his award-winning 2005 book, Dr. James Whitney Hicks discusses 50 signs of mental illness including denial, delusion, hallucination, disordered thinking, anger, anti-social behavior, sexual preoccupation, grandiosity, general oddness, and paranoia. Now I'm no clinician, but in my (admittedly biased brown) eyes it seems that prominent Republicans have evidenced each of these ten telltale signs of mental illness over the past year:"
1) Denial: humans did not evolve; Obama is not a native-born American Christian
2) Delusion: climate is not changing
3) Hallucination: God ordained me to be President
4) Disordered Thinking: being for small government that's huge in the bedroom; being anti-contraception and anti-abortion
5) Anger: Newt Gingrich’s perpetual scowl
6) Anti-social Behavior: toward women, gays, minorities, anyone without an umbilical cord or trust fund
7) Sexual Preoccupation: a fervent compulsion to control when we can mate, with whom we can mate, and precisely how we are allowed to mate (which I lampoon in Why Do Politicians Want to Police Dick and Jane's Private Parts?)
8) Grandiosity: even Rick Santorum recognizes Gingrich’s “over the moon” grandiosity
9) General Oddness: Ron Paul
10) Paranoia: pretty much all of them, all of the time
Even (the not necessarily dumb) Pope Francis appears to recognize that “it is a serious illness, this of ideological [conservative] Christians. It is an illness, but it is not new, eh?”
Back now to less dense information....
Conservatism and self-righteousness, these are just other flavors of a few knuckle draggers who exist in our country and the world over. Those who drag along with them the masses who do not see what is being done to them. It is a disease that has long been coming out of the woodworks of the world. Like mold on food in the back of a fridge that has not been managed well or often enough.
We let this happen to us in not standing up to the nonsense from conservatives and religious nutcases, their nutgroups and their nutbelief systems. But be careful, they will mix in just enough truth and reality to poison choosing not to believe once you are assimilated into their mindset. It's like quitting smoking to a smoker, for some, it's impossible to quit, even when you know better. For those who do smoke, they can be overly aggressive against their old addiction. Which is offputting to many and counterproductive to the "anti" activist, the anti smoker, anti drinker, or anti conservative or theist.
We have really kind of asked for this and now we are reaping the detrimental misfortunes of it.
And so we can also rectify it by doing what manages it correctly and by paying attention, standing up to it, speaking out against it and shouting down idiocy whenever it crops up. But it has to be done in such a way as to allow those types to save face and find it in their hearts and minds to alter their addictions. Even then, just as in how long this has taken to get here, it will take time to rid ourselves of it.
I'm talking about pushing reality on people who purposely avoid it, who fear it, because of either defective belief systems, selfishness, or outright greed.
It will happen, not to worry. Remember when I said that truth always wins out?
More so, reality always wins out. I just hope it's before we destroy ourselves and not through this planet reclaiming its original natural beauty... without humankind.
We have to be careful about delving into the skewed psyche of these new kinds of "news" entities and the conservative mindset or numbset itself as it exists today. The question is, does information coming from sites like those count, is it accurate? Specifically and potentially at times perhaps, but in the general and long term, typically no. And that is what you have to be aware of, every second.
Now that being said, and you won't hear conservatives saying this, we also have to be careful of our own beliefs and our greater political leanings. But that does not mean you should abandon your own beliefs for a skew that makes things merely appear real. I noticed this in someone once years ago.
Listening to this person I too was upset at what they were telling me until...I left them that day. It took about fifteen minutes after I left them before reality started to seep back into my consciousness. I just (luckily) happened to have some relevant facts at my fingertips. When I compared the reality I knew to be true against what this person had told me, the world they had been weaving for me fell quickly away.
I was stunned and realized that I had been sucked into their delusions, their negative delusions about people we both knew, and the world at large. But while I was with that person listening, I fully was taken in. They were being disingenuous, and negative but I also knew they didn't know what they were doing. I realized two things at that moment. 1) they were delusional, seemed authentic but 2) they were exhibiting evil in a pure, nearly autonomous sense.
It was that day I realized that true evil existed in the world and it wasn't just murderous warlords or terrorists, but was also simply when someone or some entity professed something to be true for their own devices (or not, though in that case they too are their own victim) while it was not. People then go and act on that incorrect belief and all the bad that comes of it affects many, not just the one.
Thus it is the basis of conspiracy theory to weave truths with lies (misinformation), and to skew reality (disinformation) in such a way as to be indistinguishable from the truth, while performing some directed intention away from its original course.
Enter the world of the insane, while you to them are the ones who are insane.
The conservative model of political monitoring as we've seen repeatedly (though apparently only of their opponents as you may (should) have noticed) is that there seems to be a ghost around every corner. Or a commie or a gay or ethic whomever the latest flavor of disdain might happen to be.
Trouble is, odds of there being a ghost around most of those corners is niil to zero for most of the time.
How does one get to a point of distrusting literally everything they disagree with? And one's self? Broken childhood obviously. Which most of us have had in one way or another.
Or a disillusion of some sort. also possibly from childhood. Something deep seated, some unfilled hole in your logic when one day you find a "logic" that fits and seals up that hole. Even if it couldn't be more inaccurate, more incorrect.
So why did just some of them choose to not trust anything, anywhere? A perceived lack of control in childhood? Raised in a family too religious or strict? Thing is, once we become adults we need to own it. Shrug off the fears, the distrust, the scary monsters and face reality. To think. Not to overthink, but to accurately think. Not finding "truth" through a lack of information, but truth through and when you have enough information.
Study conspiracy theory and those personality types who adhere to it. It's interesting reading. The trouble with most conspiracy theory types is that they never study conspiracy theory itself. They just dive in thinking they have the skills to survive it. Those who don't are typically the ones we hear from the most and the loudest.
If someone says something they agree with, even if it's nonsense, then it must be true. Why bother checking into it when there are so many they disagree with, so many they can simply push all their fears and distrust upon, their anger and bigotry into?
Just makes sense, right? And who cares. It just feels good!
Besides if you never see the world as shades of grey rather than black and white, only right against wrong, you are always right half of the time. Right? Or no? Like the stopped clock, always right twice a day. It's safe. It's too safe. It's defective.
The most concerning element now a days are these current forms of extremism (see,
How extreme beliefs, not mental illness, may fuel mass shooters), which are the brainchildren of instant media, and of for-profit news, of the internet in general, but not of bipartisanship as it should be taken to its natural conclusion.
Now that anyone can speak out to the masses, we are seeing a great deal of ignorance being sold online as knowledge and insight. When really it is just the lowest level of intellect mixed with a lot of negativity, being sold as correct and proper information. Even though it is the antithesis of the definition of real information and just comes off as insane to anyone with a valid sense of what was once called, common sense. What is taken now for common sense is simply that, common. Lacking much if any sense at all.
So. In just being negative, sooner or later you'll probably be right. Besides, most of those liberals are retards and corrupt, unlike good Christian conservatives and Republicans. Right? Those types never do bad things. Right? Name one Republican governor or congressman who has done anything bad, ever. Right?
Best of all? You only need two brain cells to rub together in order to make that model of self-righteousness work. Even if you ARE wrong most of the time, it lights up your inner self-importance and who doesn't just love that? Self conflation is the order of the day, it would seem.
Kind of brilliant if you think about it. And what a form of energy conservation!
