Removing the truth from our consciousness

The censors are losing patience. They have stopped pitying the existence of free speech and exploiting the system as best they can and are now fantasizing about ending it through criminal sanctions.

This change in temperament – from frustration to anger to calls for violent solutions – has been evident in recent weeks. And it reminds us: censorship was never the goal. It was always about controlling society’s “cognitive infrastructure”, that is, our way of thinking. And for what? To gain a secure monopoly on political power.

Recently, Fox reporter Peter Doocy argued with the White House spokesman about whether FEMA is funding migrants, while it does not help American storm survivors. She immediately shot back, calling it “disinformation.” Peter wanted to know what part of his question was qualified. Jean-Pierre said it was the entire context of the question and nothing else was ever said.

It was clear to anyone watching that to them the term “disinformation” means nothing more than a premise or fact that is undesirable and should be suppressed.

This exchange came just days after Hillary Clinton proposed criminal penalties for misinformation because otherwise she would “lose total control.” It’s an odd plural pronoun, because presumably she’s not in control, unless she sees herself as a proxy for an entire class of rulers.

Meanwhile, former presidential candidate John Kerry said the existence of free speech makes government impossible. Kamala Harris herself has vowed to hold virtual communication networks accountable for the hate that infiltrates their platforms. And well-connected doctor Peter Hotez is calling on Homeland Security and NATO to end debates over vaccines.

You can hear the anger in all of their voices, almost as if every post on X or video on Rumble is driving them insane to the point where they just say it out loud: “Make them stop.”

Hurricane Milton seems to have sent censors into a violent rage, as people questioned whether and to what extent the government might have something to do with manipulating the weather for political reasons. One writer at the Atlantic exploded: “I’m running out of words to explain how bad this is. What’s going on in America today is something darker than a disinformation crisis,” while denouncing “outright conspiracy theories and utter nonsense that are racking up millions of views on the internet.”

Do you understand? The problem is watching itself, as if people are not capable of thinking for themselves.

The old meme of the guy typing late into the night because “someone on the internet is wrong” now applies to a whole section of the ruling class. They want freedom and interest group control, somehow forcing the entire digital age into a version of 1970s television with three channels and 1-800 numbers. The Biden administration has even refounded the internet, replacing the Declaration of Freedom with a new Declaration of the Future.

We are reminded of Katherine Hepburn’s portrayal of Violet Venable in Tennessee Williams’ play Suddenly Last Summer.

Violet is an heiress and widow with a son named Sebastian, whom she loved dearly and with whom she travelled the world for many years. One summer, her niece Catherine (played by Elizabeth Taylor) makes the trip instead and the son dies.

Catherine was clearly traumatized by something, but she doesn’t know what. But something stuck in her consciousness: Sebastian was not a good person. Instead, he used the women who accompanied him as bait to procure boys for his sick sexual pleasure.

Violet was so angry about this observation – all she could remember about Sebastian’s death – that she had Catherine committed to a psychiatric hospital. She also intends to found a local hospital specializing in lobotomies on the condition that they give Catherine a lobotomy.

Violet wants Catherine to stop “babbling” and instead “just be peaceful.” Catherine realizes that they just want to cut the truth out of her head before she remembers the whole situation, which is more horrifying than one can imagine.

Doctor: “There is still a big risk.”

Violet: “But it calms her down, I read that. It calms her down. It suddenly makes her peaceful.”

Doctor: “Yes, it does, but ….…”

Her goal was an invasive surgery on her sister’s daughter, which she was willing to finance, ensuring it would be done through a large donation in the form of philanthropy. It was all in the interest of psychological self-protection.

Violet simply didn’t want to know the truth. Instead, she wanted her own “truth” to be the constructed narrative: her son was a wonderful and pious gentleman and her niece was a crazy person, a deplorable, a spreader of misinformation and disinformation.

To protect Violet’s own self-perception and her own delusion, she was willing to use a knife to penetrate her own niece’s brain to prevent her from thinking and speaking clearly.

Catherine: “Cut the truth out of my brain. Is that what you want? You can’t do that. Not even God can change the truth.”

As with all of Tennessee Williams’ works and all of great literature, the story is about far more than what meets the eye. It is really about how far a wealthy ruling class is willing to go to prevent their own illusions about the world from being breached.

Back then, lobotomies were more common, even accepted, and were often performed by those who could afford to have them forced on relatives. The stories are legendary, so there was nothing unrealistic about Williams’ story. Psychosurgery had been used for decades to cut the truth out of people’s brains.

So far, we’ve only seen a relatively benign version of this compared to what they really want. YouTube accounts have been suspended and deleted. Facebook posts have been throttled and blocked. LinkedIn’s algorithms penalize posts that challenge the regime’s narratives. This hasn’t slowed down in the face of litigation, but has continued and intensified.

The goal is to shut down the internet. They would have done it by now if it weren’t for the First Amendment standing in their way. For now, they will continue to work through university clippings, third-party vendors, fake fact-checkers, pressure on tech companies that offer government services for a price, and other mechanisms to accomplish indirectly what they can’t yet do directly.

One of the strategies is the political persecution of dissenters. Alex Jones is a pioneer here and his company is on the verge of bankruptcy. Steve Bannon, the philosophical king of MAGA, was in jail for the entire election season for ignoring a congressional subpoena on the advice of his lawyer. The January 6 protesters were in jail not for causing damage or trespassing, but for ending up on the wrong side of the regime.

Most of us had an inkling that covid vaccine mandates were not about health, but a tactic to exclude those who did not fully trust the authorities. This was quite obvious in the military and medical fields, but less obvious in academia, where unwilling students and professors were effectively punished for refusing to risk their lives for the pharmaceutical industry.

There was also something malicious about the mask mandate. Although there was no scientific evidence whatsoever that a Chinese-made synthetic cloth worn on the face could change epidemiological dynamics, it served well as a visible sign to separate believers from non-believers, and also as a sadistic means of reminding people who is really in charge.

The last resort of censorship is violence against persons and property, while the goal is to gain control of your thoughts in the service of one-party rule. Big tech companies and media are fully complicit in making this take place. Only a handful of services stop it, and they are all targeted by the regime through countless forms of lawfare.

In the final scenes of Suddenly Last Summer, Catherine is finally made to remember the horrific details of her cousin’s death and tell the family members the whole truth. Aunt Violet cannot handle this and falls into denial and psychopathology, spouting her own litany of disinformation.

In it, the viewer is presented with the greatest irony of all: every claim Violet made against Catherine ends up being true of Violet herself. The person who tried to forcibly cut out the truth-teller’s brain was simply protecting herself from a terrible truth that she could not handle.

And there it is: it is the liar more than anyone else who has reason to fear free speech.

Author: Jeffrey A. Tucker

 

yogaesoteric
October 18, 2024