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Destroying America by Destroying Lives by Destroying Hope
When I first started my practice in Tennessee, right out of training, I had no patients — I was starting from zero. Cash flow was a real problem initially. I worked ERs on the weekends to make enough money to pay my employees etc. while I was building up my patient base. Then I found a job opening at the Mountain City prison — 15-20 hours per week, and it paid very good money. Wow! What a deal! Why not, I figured.
Well. Mountain City is a maximum security prison, and I had never worked in an environment like that before. I learned that it took a lifetime of dedication to psychotic destruction to earn a ticket to such a horrible place and that my patients were, in most cases, criminally insane. Very scary place. I lasted less than six weeks and then stepped down. I did not like it in there. But I learned a lot in a very short time.
I once asked one of the guards to show me the living quarters of my patients. I was surprised that these guys serving multiple life sentences with no chance of parole had TVs and other relative luxuries in their cells. I asked the guard why? Why give them anything? I wasn’t being mean, I just didn’t understand the motivation of the prison administrators. Why waste money? The guard said, “If you take everything away from them, then you can’t control their behavior.”
I responded, “You have a stick. Who needs a carrot?”
He said, “You need both.”
His point was that once people have lost absolutely everything, and they have nothing left to lose, then there is no reason for them to moderate their impulses or their behavior. There’s no reason not to stab a guard or something. Why not? People in such situations become unpredictable and dangerous.
But if they worry about losing their TV privileges, then they’ll mop the floor and do as they’re told. And life in the prison becomes more predictable and safe for everyone concerned, including the prisoners.
Addiction treatment is often based on similar principles. Breaking an addiction is extremely difficult. But if you tell the patient that it is not his fault, then it becomes essentially impossible. Only when the patient takes ownership of his problem, takes responsibility for his actions, and resolves to change things, only then is there any hope of recovery.
But as long as he believes that his problems are the fault of somebody else, then he begins to believe in the ultimate lie of victimhood — that his actions really don’t matter. He is a helpless pawn in a big game, and his success or failure depends on the actions of others.
Such people become bitter and angry because they always feel that they are being cheated by the powers that be.
Marxism took this natural human tendency of individuals and applied it to groups, which quickly became mobs. The prison guard I met would have told Marx that mobs that felt they had no control over their own lives would quickly become unpredictable and dangerous.
Supporters of Marx might suggest that he would not believe such a thing. But I suspect that Marx already knew the likely outcome and that that was what he wanted. You can’t destroy society with a revolution of people who believe in personal responsibility. To get real anger, you have to make them feel helpless. Like they have nothing left to lose.
I think that whoever came up with critical race theory knew this as well.
The proponents of CRT want whites to apologize for being privileged. It doesn’t matter if that white person has ever done anything racist — his actions don’t matter.
And they want Blacks to feel oppressed and helpless. It doesn’t matter if that Black person owns her own business and earns a high salary — her hard work and her actions don’t matter.
CRT attempts to convince both whites and Blacks that their actions don’t matter and that they are helpless pawns in a big game beyond their control.
That’s the whole point of CRT. They don’t explain how this will help people improve their lives or how this will help society fix its problems. That’s not the point.
Because that’s not their goal. They have other goals: They want revolution.
And to get a revolution, you take away everybody’s TVs from their cells and convince them that they are helpless pawns and that their actions don’t matter. Which creates a mob that feels that it has nothing else to lose. That mob is unpredictable and dangerous. Which is the whole point.
I don’t think that those who promote CRT are as stupid as they sound. I really believe that they know what they are doing, and they know how it will turn out.
If you wanted to destroy American society (or, as the more deceitful leftists say, “ … fundamentally transform America … ”), you need an unpredictable, dangerous mob. One that cannot be appeased by promises of future improvement because you’ve now convinced it not to trust anyone.
They certainly can’t trust American society. They learned in school that it’s evil from its inception. Many young people today don’t have large, supportive families that they can trust. They often have very few close personal friends — most of their interaction with others takes place on Instagram. Fewer and fewer people attend church or believe in God.
Add all that up, and there is nothing in their lives that they can really trust. No wonder they can be made to feel helpless and desperate.
They don’t trust anybody. And they have been taught — whites and Blacks — that their own actions don’t matter. Which creates an army of destruction that has been built for one purpose. Whether they know it or not. They are members of a mob that has been created for destruction. Such people have no interest in fixing problems. After all, what can helpless pawns do anyway? Why not stab the guard? What do we have to lose?
CRT is not just the silly rantings of fake intellectuals. It’s a tried and true strategy for destroying a society.
Marx understood this strategy. So did Mao, and Castro, and Hitler, and Chavez, and every other revolutionary tyrant in history. So did the prison guard in Mountain City, Tennessee.
The prison guard wanted to avoid violent revolution, so he gave people hope by offering them some degree of control over their lives. The CRT proponents and other would-be tyrants want to encourage violent revolution, so they take all that away. They hope to destroy America by destroying lives by destroying hope.
And then they call Republicans heartless.
CRT is a deliberate effort to destroy America from within. It doesn’t even pretend to be an effort to improve people’s lives or to improve society. It is exactly what it appears to be.
And it should be treated as such.
Published in General
Amen, brother. Preach it.
But still they sell it and still more and more are buying what they are selling.
Corrections officers try to maintain a consistent atmosphere, and attitude. The irony of doing so is that the inmates want a structured life inside the walls. They become more dangerous to the guards, and their fellow inmates if life becomes chaotic inside prison. A guard that is inconsistent in their behavior towards inmates put themselves at risk of violence from inmates.
It’s no surprise CRT brings Marx to mind, many of BLM’s founders are Marxists and CRT is an offshoot of Marxist Critical Theory.
Would you say then, that a significant factor in recidivism is the lack of structure in life outside the prison and the lack of preparation for dealing with it?
Agreed, the Left is not trying to make things better, It’s trying to bring them down.
I think we are destined for a race / class war. The only factor is time. The big question is will I be alive and heathy when it comes time to play.
This is a brilliant summation of the dangers of a victim-centric worldview.
One of your best, Dr. Bastiat. I learned from it.
Yep. Whenever I go to a bar. Everyone wants to kill somebody of a different race. It’s not like Americans are generally nice people. It’s all race war all the time.
Humans go insane without G-d. I don’t believe in the G-d that you believe in Doc Bastiat. But I in what I can see and what I can observe. I also believe in the novel, The Brothers Karamazov, you either go Christian or you go communist.
Exactly! It’s Marxism with a patina of race as opposed to class. The end result is the same, control over every aspect of one’s life. What’s amazing is how many people fall for the same old scam.
I noticed all that niceness last year as the cities burned. Wonderful niceness. Mostly peaceful niceness. Lot more of the nice homicides going on now too. As well as a bunch of very pleasant thefts and robberies. Non whites are being taught to hate whitey. Whitey is being taught to hate themselves. The government is pushing this stuff. Eventually they will get there. Too much money not to. Not sure how long it will take to happen but we are definitely heading that way. As for Americans being nice people. Not sure on that. We are sort of known for fire bombing cities and nuking countries. That is what they are using to fuel the hatred. That and jealousy, greed, envy and settling old wrongs.
Very insightful post, Dr. B!
I once had to work with troubled youth in a detention center for the Summer. One of the first things they told us in the training sessions was that these teenagers had mostly come from chaotic and unstructured homes and the first order of business was to set a standard daily routine for them. Even simple stuff like brushing their teeth and combing their hair were incorporated into a regular regimen. This simple structure, I was told, does wonders to begin straightening out their lives without them even knowing it.
Being a self-employed person who sleeps totally irregular hours and has virtually no structure in my life (outside of accommodating my wife) I can testify that it is very difficult to maintain a level emotional balance under such circumstances.
Great article. Of course, it ends in dictatorship and poverty that most of its supporters do not want and would not knowingly support. Many kids yes, because they’re purposely kept ignorant. and pointed by evil people who think they’re superior.
At our local hospital’s psych center for adolescents, the first order of therapy was to get the kids on a schedule. They all had their days and nights mixed up, as the pediatricians say.
The new way teenagers live with their friends in 24-hour contact with them via the smartphones under their pillows can’t be good for them.
So we stopped a genocidal death cult and then rebuilt Japan into a peaceful and prosperous country. Yeah dude. We are totally known for that.
Never mistake “nice” for “pushover”.
Winsome Sears pushes back:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/11/winsome-sears-pushes-back.php
This sounds like it’s true. I think slaves were perceived as unpredictable and dangerous – hence the constant fear of slave revolts.
Well look at the Thebeans.
The beans?
I figured it was supposed to be Tibetans, but who knows?
Said every dictator ever. Their mothers also loved them.
Could be Thespians. Alec Baldwin can be unpredictable and dangerous.
And John Wilkes Booth…
People from Thebes.
It seems important whether this perception of powerlessness, or an inability to get ahead due to structural issues rather than personal deficits that can be addressed, is accurate or inaccurate.
A somewhat dated Pew Research thing from 2018:
There’s more to power than purchasing power, but would this explain some of the anomie that you say is sweeping the nation?
And would a corollary be that keeping perceptions of personal power high stabilises societies, even if that perception is inaccurate?
That would be if your only measure of personal power is through how much money you have. Money certainly helps but it is no stand-in for having a supportive family, friends, stable environment, or personal freedoms. Besides, I’m always skeptical of charts that purport to show declining wealth in America.
40 years ago we didn’t have cell phones, cheap long-distance calls, personal computers, cable TV, widespread air-conditioning, overnight package delivery, ubiquitous credit cards, low finance charges, two-car families, and so on. No matter how they make charts on narrowly focused issues, you can’t make much of an argument that overall standards of living have gone down in recent decades, either here or in most other countries.
It actually shows stagnant wages, which is a different thing. I’d be interested to see a similar graph for personal wealth.
Have they stagnated? Because if the national narrative is that everything keeps getting better and that isn’t happening for you, personally, then it might be an issue.