BRAIN-DRAINING

and the Eternal Re-setting of our Moral Compass

George Orwell’s novel 1984 was published in 1949— just a couple of years after the Nazis had just about destroyed civilization, when Stalinist Russia and its Eastern European puppet regimes were in the process of using mass fear and brute force to eliminate any trace of dissent or opposition…

J. Edgar Hoover (whom the Fire-sign Theater, of blessed memory, used to call “The Hoove”) took over the Bureau of Investigation in 1924, when the height of technical surveillance was tailing suspects and opening mail. Tapping phones came later—and, of course, lucky us, we have now “progressed” to surveillance cameras and our government (FBI, NSA, et. al.) hacking everybody’s phone and computer; even to the point of identifying combinations of key-strokes or the use of certain words as anti-state behavior. Who’s that knocking on my door...? It’s either my food delivery or ICE…

What always fascinates me—in a sort of melancholy/cynical way—is the fact that it’s really only technology that’s changed; technology which has always made state fascism, bureaucratic control and police power much easier to implement and maintain. But—what had never changed—the political, cultural and mass movements that arise every couple of generations in every place on earth; those populist deep-sea eruptions which stretch all the way back to the beginning of recorded history, and which really are history— These things are always the same.
Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Delusions and The Madness of Crowds may sound like a summary of the latest headlines (picture a Trump rally), but that book was published in 1841, and it could have just as easily been written and published anytime in the last ten thousand years.

Human beings—unless we first destroy the whole planet with our petty tribal bigotries, uncontrollable selfishness and our almost religious devotion to “technical progress,”—are headed, just like a bunch of rabid lemmings, straight off the cliff…
If you get caught in the middle of this suicidal stampede, and you have second thoughts about it… Well, you can always call customer service…

I know my opinions sound cynical, but my excuse is that I’m old, and, also, that I’ve read a lot of history—and been smack dab in the middle of a lot of it, too).
When I worked as a probation officer in Brooklyn Family Court, there was a standard definition for kids who could always be persuaded—by more smarter, more aggressive kids—to do stupid, illegal things. The phrase we used to describe these poor schlubs, the ones who followed along behind a leader, was “Easily Led.”

The great mass of the earth’s human population has/is always—with the mysterious exception in every generation of a minority that can reason and judge for themselves—Easily Led. They are predictable, malleable, and controllable; almost begging to be pushed and prodded like great herds of sheep; ready for any religious or political wolf that slinks out of the trees and has the desire and the “talent” to turn this herd into a mindless, bleating collection of gloves, sweaters and lamb chops... |

The Arc of the Moral Universe has to bend anew in every generation; but that, I guess, is the eternal work of the human race. Justice and decency aren’t permanent states of existence—they are not the inevitable default positions the human race.
Such things as common decency and recognition of the essential value of each person have to be discovered and re-discovered, time and again—until we all either go up in a cloud of radio-active smoke, or, maybe, we finally learn our lesson.

The work of defending against heartless, soul-less human predators—like our current president and his crowd—is exhausting; but what other choice is there beside laying down and becoming their next meal…