POLITICAL DOMINO EFFECT AND AMERICA'S INTELLECTUAL HERETICS

[Morpheal]

Aside: Keeping in mind that America's list of heretics against Americanism extends to cultural figures and intellectual giants and thinkers far beyond its own nationality and borders. Nevertheless they remain "America's heretics", on America's intellectually "unfashionable" list.)

POLITICAL DOMINO EFFECT AND AMERICA’S INTELLECTUAL HERETICS

We can expect a long delayed but now inevitable political domino effect. Many existing political regimes in the world, will fall, either peacefully or violently, due to their not having achieved any basis for real popular support. That lack of popular support has become epidemic in many parts of the distressed world. The pressures and strains of capitalist cyclical economics are a major catalyst for upheaval. The world economic crisis, an obvious failure of American economic and ethical socio-political leadership showing no foreknowledge and having no quick and immediate answers in the crisis, and rejection of a failed paternal colonialism that has dominated 20th century development, mark a turning point in world history. It is the history of the 20th centry that is being rejected. The world community has many members within it, many peoples in many nations, who want to leave those errors behind and want to move on to new attempts to achieve the failed promise that has disappointed and disillusioned multiple generations.

One cannot destroy all memory of the promises of capitalism, development, and progress, in contrast to the conditions that the average person now is being forced to say hallelujah for. The suppression of dissent is the same phenomenon that psychiatry and psychology refer to as “bottling up”. Eventually what you bottle up has to gain expression, and in terms of many a national collective psyche that expression is political change, even if that change means violent upheaval overthrow of regimes that have long put themselves forward as being the messianic answers to problems that as yet have no real solutions.

We must remember too that the less a people have to begin with, the more they tend to hold on to whatever they come to value. The more they have to suffer and strive, sacrifice and do without, the more they value whatever their gains. The popular anger in response to conditions that would take away that gain and what has come to be valued, will be far more intense than most analysts would ever have estimated it could be.

Let’s take a moment to consider what has contributed to failure in foresight, clear thinking and has led to what amounts to a massive and pervasive lack of real insight into the world situation, real and deep understanding, and truly rational and creative solutions ? Failure of political analysts to consult with other areas of expertise has created that vulnerability. Partially the compartmentalization of disciplines, so favored in an American led version of academia. Everyone kept in a little near sighted niche of specialism within a specialism, competing with every other specialist in that niche area, until no one can see the big picture. That ideology tends to promote and sustain itself, allowing little if any deviation to an ever increasing rigidity of narrow minded vision until much of what is thought and written is merely sheep shit rather than insightful and reliable analysis. American psychology, having abandoned some of its own founding fathers, as much as it has deviated from the intent of its own constitution, has placed numerous thinkers into disrepute, turning them into historical curiosities rather than acknowledging fundamental insights. We might only consider the case of Carl Jung, a European contemporary of Freud and a founder of potential oriented psychoanalysis. Instead America chose Skinner and behavioral conditioning. It is indicative. Similarly Jacques Derrida, one of the most important European philosophers ever to live has been nearly discarded as if irrelevant, and yet few could be as relevant to the understanding of political machinations. One never hears much about Edmund Husserl, or Jean Paul Sartre, in any American context and yet Husserl’s realization that we must suspend our assumptions and beliefs when thinking about the world is more essential than a Harvard doctorate in economics. We see an American outright rejection of the existentialist movement, due to its open minded consideration of communism, and its rejection of traditional Christian theologies. America’s own “beat poets” had strong existentialist leanings, and we see that genre, and its message, now largely suppressed. Bertholt Brecht, the poet and playwright, accused of communism, is difficult to obtain in America. Exra Pound, the brilliant poet, persecuted for communism, is still in disrepute. We see Jurgen Habermas, and the vital concept of “interactive communication” largely pushed aside, and relegated to merely a specialist academic consideration, when “interactive communication” is a major issue today, and speaks against the oppressive American trend to isolate, divide, and silence. The list of unamerican heretics, and their suppression, is longer than we can deal with, but a few examples suffice. Some of the suppressed and discarded are American. Some are European. Some are among the most vital and important thinkers of the western world. The trends and fads of American academia are not simply trends and fads. They are political oppression and a complete violation of intellectual freedoms and the struggle for a more universal truth. .No wonder major political and economic concepts remain so poorly considered, so ideologically defined, so ignorantly belief based, as they have become.

Development is one of those concepts. It is a word that has largely been redefined by America, according to American interests. The development of national and individual potential has in consequence long taken a back seat, or been completely discredited and discarded, to be replaced by the driving forces of servitude to what amount to being economic superpowers. America is not the only guilty player in that game, but the major players have been playing more and more consistent to American rules of the game, and allowing America to dictate the rules of the game. This is not helped by failure of inclusive representation, of many segments of society and entire nations, in major policy making groups. Similarly those groups increasingly fail to include ideological deviance. Everyone is encouraged to think and act the same. What is the standard of right, in that sameness ? It is Americanism.

There are now too many who want nothing better than to throw sand in the face of the bully, no longer even caring if the bully beats them up for it. They are already feeling beaten up, and that has destroyed their ability to care about suffering another beating. For some parts of the world this is as physical as it is psychological, even when psychological is eventually enough to trigger a massive response. America’s oppression of its own intellectuals has led to narrow minded, short sighted, failure to foresee what American policies are leading towards. They are leading towards upheavals, overthrows, and reactions, not towards stability, peace and prosperity. The more than prosperity has proven elusive the more hatred and anger America has nurtured. In many parts of the world that is all that America has nurtured in the majority of the population.

In many parts of the world there is a growing desire for governance responsive to human needs, affirming a true political morality, giving more than constitutional lip service. This is fuel to a growing political crisis. America has shown that it, itself, has far less regard for its own constitution and the fundamental principles of its Declaration and Constitution, than it superficially claims. It talks the talk, when it serves its own purpose, but it clearly cannot walk the walk. The con trick does not sustain endless and total belief. Much to the contrary. The world is full of people who are smarter than they seem, and who eventually see through the illusion. They see through it partly because those fundamental principles are not upheld in America’s interactions with others, even more so than in its internal affairs. Those same principles are a promise to others, that never becomes fulfilled, and eventually those others look away to other horizons for their political salvation. While America might mockingly repeat what Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher, said in Der Spiegel, more than fifty years ago, “only a god can save us now”,

While America can put its own people in unconstitutional intellectual chains, severely restricting their intellectual curiosity and explorations, by controlling what is allowed as being intellectually fashionable, as opposed to the quest for intellectual truth, it cannot chain the whole world. If America’s people are willing to live in chains, then that is their own choice, but otherwise they must join the wold community, and cut off those chains, overthrowing their own despotic and tyrannical regimes, coming into the new millenium, delayed as it is for 8 years, and into a new world order where intellectual freedom, intellectual curiosity, intellectual exploration, and real and true insights into the world condition, are a real possibility, not simply constitutional lip service covering up the persecution and destroying of what are considered its heretics.

Blaming others, and pointing their long American finger at others, particularly communism for its
suppression and oppression of intellectuals, has long been an effective cover for America's own
failings in that same regard. The oppression, and suppression, must end. It must end everywhere, and that includes America. America has a constitution that demands that ending.

Robert Morpheal

Permission is given to copy, reproduce, distribute this article in any form, by any means, anywhere, and in fact anyone is encouraged to do so.

[Lilith Velkor]

1. Good essay, but one small quibble

The last sentence of the seventh paragraph is incomplete. If you are unable to edit, what was at the end of that sentence?