May 17, 2022
Dear Friends and Family,
All of the excerpts in Nihilism Epilogue 4 are from David Mamet’s book Recessional. Mamet is America’s foremost playwright who received the Pulitzer Prize for his play Glengarry Glen Ross. He opens the book with:
Dear Friends and Family,
All of the excerpts in Nihilism Epilogue 4 are from David Mamet’s book Recessional. Mamet is America’s foremost playwright who received the Pulitzer Prize for his play Glengarry Glen Ross. He opens the book with:
I am a playwright. My professional life has been dedicated to the depiction of conflict. If the drama is not conflict, it can only be a lesson. The drama’s antagonists are called characters; our knowledge of their character is limited to their actions: they made this choice, and it resulted in this or that outcome. The outcome was determined not by their “past lives,” or “race,” or social position, or sex but by their choices.
In my opinion, he does a masterful, elegant job of framing the choices that wokeness is offering. The most sacred of our choices is our vote. These excerpts provide some food for thought on that choice.
Next: English journalist Douglas Murray describes the essence of the wokeness movement, its consequences on our society and an interesting answer to the question “What do you like about being white?” This will be the last epilogue in the Nihilism epilogues.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Next: English journalist Douglas Murray describes the essence of the wokeness movement, its consequences on our society and an interesting answer to the question “What do you like about being white?” This will be the last epilogue in the Nihilism epilogues.
Happy Learning,
Harley
NIHILISM EPILOGUES – EPILOGUE 4
RECESSIONAL – EXCERPTS
NOTE: All the excerpts are from Recessional by David Mamet (2022), except the headings
INTRODUCTION: If restrooms must be redesigned to accommodate differing “genders,” how much more worthy to assert that sexes do not, in fact, exist and then that men can give birth? If speech should be limited to avoid “offense” to college students, how much more worthy to expunge the books, thoughts, and electronic footprints of any defending not only the offending matter but free speech itself? Now we are engaged in prodromal civil war, and American constitutional democracy is the contest’s prize. The universities, and the media, always diseased, have progressed from mischief into depravity. Various states are attempting to mandate that their schools teach critical race theory – that is, racism – and elected leaders on the coasts have resigned their cities to thuggery and ruin. But how may a debate (a discussion, a trial, an election) take place in which one side rejects not its opponent’s position but his right to exist?
THE SETTING: Politicians have always been a confederation of whores, now betraying, now colluding with that opponent now promising gain, both in league, finally, against the electorate. But the newspapers. What words can convey my sorrow at their transmutation into organs of state propaganda? Worse, than that, they have become unashamed merchants of hatred and panic. Now we have newspapers insisting on the infallibility of the state and calling out dissent as heresy. The media screams that the end of the world is at hand. The ancient business strategy, the incitement to fear, and thus hatred, is rediscovered. The corporations, the interests, the trusts, the special interests, the kulaks, Negroes, immigrants, Jews, the rich, the bourgeoisie, all these colorful, infinitely applicable terms have had their day, and now we find “the haters” a term so weak it suggests a culture so fatigued and dispirited it is unable even to celebrate hate with a full heart; it is waiting to die. Which is what I have seen around me in this horrible year.
The American experiment has come, in 240 years, to that fork in the road inevitable in any organism. We will either enjoy the respite of a vigorous old age or forgo that period and proceed directly and quickly to national death.
CAUSE AND EFFECT: Bullying is the unlicensed application of power. Of old, it consisted, among boys, in shoving, punching, and beating. Of late it allegedly included mocking, name-calling, slander, and rough speech and, reappearing as “microaggression,” can now be alleged by those who have affronted only by the color of their skin, or by “cultural appropriation;” these allegations, of course, are but a new sort of bullying. Or was, until the algebra of microaggressions allowed the weak to enjoy bullying the strong, and thereby court not harsh instruction but reward. Today thugs, rioters, and thieves destroy our cities. They’ve done the cost-benefit analysis, and find they risk nothing,
The COVID hysteria isolated Western citizens, under the threat not only of the virus but of government penalty. But leftist protest and riot were exempt.
There is a difference between helping immigrants acclimatize to a new environment and teaching them how to raise their children. We see the unfortunate echoes of the philosophy in the miserable wreck that the welfare had made of the inner cities.
In the 1960s “hygiene” classes became “sex education,” educators holding that because the children were not taught at home, the higher orders needed to take charge. And now we have kindergartners trained in a bizarre catechism of sexual identity politics.
How could a school be a complete community? The school should not be a complete community, and a complete community must not be a school, because a school cannot be a democracy. It must be an autocracy.
The habit of groupthink, absorbed in schools, is perpetuated in their graduates. For questioning, to the Left, is shunned as a very real psychic threat. They are infantilized by fear of exclusion, becoming like the abused infant, toddler, youngster, to whom to recognize abuse is to lose the only home he knows.
Law-abiding citizens are being dared to demand the rule of law.
Today, one after one, beloved classics of Western thought are trash canned because of the race, sex, or purported sexual preference of their creators. American culture is now dominated by envenomed pigs.
GOVERNMENT: The horror of a command economy is not that mistakes will be made but that they will not be corrected. Who, in government, will suffer from destroying our economy? No doubt, it was done in good faith, however, it is the job of the politician to amass power, and should he discover that that power may come, for example, from draconian measures in the name of health, the measures will continue until he perceives more wealth or power in their elimination.
And now we have the “science” of global warming, and news, education, and opinion warped to support an un-demonstrable opinion; dissent is indicted and, where possible, banned as the production of monsters who, by their acts, are self-confessed as the enemies of humanity.
And now we have had COVID – 19. And an epidemic or pandemic was allowed to destroy the American economy; tens of millions were driven out of work, covered their faces, and cowered in the streets in fear of their neighbors. The virus, here, is the government. Absent intervention it will, like any disease, eventually kill the host organism. The problem is not that the electorate may choose badly, but absolute power will not admit of any change at all. Parasites derive their life from the host organism, which, unchecked, they will eventually kill. This is the avowed historic mission of Marxism.
All organisms evolve, thrive, and die. The great cities have approached the problems by taxing away the productive and, in effect, paying folks to stay there – through welfare – or to come there to “open cities,” or homeless encampments. The pandemic, the shutdown, and the riots reveal, of the cities, the truth of that ancient bureaucratic adage: don’t ever take a vacation. They might realize they don’t need you.
SLAVE LESSONS: Our country is being eviscerated by the Marxist Left. Each battle they win emboldens them to escalate their activities: shaming becomes blacklisting, picketing becomes destruction; demonstrations become riots. Just as with taxes, all they want is all we got, and who could stop them? Enter Donald Trump. He looked at the Left and informed us that he knew them of old” they were the same thugs, thieves, cheats, and whores with whom he’d been doing business all his life. He was formed by the construction industry. The Left wet the bed.
Leftist identity groups now merge, now compete for power, united, finally, in a codependent submission to a lie. That is, that America is an evil land, but even the foolish Left wants to earn a living, and drive a car, and so lives in state-sponsored denial. This enervating state can be sustained only if there is no possibility of individual apostasy, which is to say freedom.
The opposite of freedom under the law is not “a rational submission to the will of the people” but slavery; and the dutifully masked citizens convinced they were acting for their own safety and the public good were learning to stand in line and do only those things and in that manner which the government allows. They were taking slave lessons.
MOB RULE: First the expression of opinion is characterized as dissent, then is calumniated, and dissent (now called aggression) is reidentified as lack of active assent. Those seeking to avoid, first, discord, then censure and the loss of income, quickly find they have nowhere to hide and must choose active endorsement of ideas repulsive to them or blacklisting.
Mob mentality deals with our self-loathing by blaming it on others: racists, Israelis, “haters.” Religion treats unwelcome self-knowledge by offering confession, consolation, and prayer. Outreach, education, diversity, and so on are tools of indoctrination. This insistence on art as indoctrination is obscenity, denying and indicting the possibility of human connections to truths superior to human understanding, that is, to the divine.
SOCIAL JUSTICE: We Jews were schooled in justice (which is to say making difficult decisions based upon divine law) before it became “social justice” (that is, “following your feelings because they, belonging to a superior being, will always be right”).
Social justice is the negation of that ideal. Here “feelings” are insisted upon as superior to process and order. Social justice means anarchy. But like Planned parenthood, it has a snappy title, and we are all a sucker for a good line.
Having abolished religion, and so sin, it was a short hop to abolish crime. Now we are emptying the prisons, opening the borders to illegal immigrants, hamstringing whatever police remain after budget cuts, and striking off the books one law after another. But if those once understood as thugs and vandals are no longer taxed with the penalties for their quondam crimes, what will those acts be called? They will be called social justice.
SOME LINGUISTIC CURIOSITIES: “Politically incorrect” is not an indictment of a rival party but a warning that to embrace (indeed to contemplate) an opposing view would prove inconvenient to the individual. Observe that every conservative who employs the preface “This may not be politically correct but” is not only acknowledging but aiding the forces of thought control. These forces do not need to be acknowledged, and whether or not they are opposed, they must not be strengthened. Napoleon said that if we want to know our opponent’s fears, we need merely observe that with which he seeks to terrify us. Leftists are terrified of exclusion from the mob and see, everywhere, the exclusion’s cost. Imprisonment, vituperation, bankruptcy of conservative opponents, the severity of their punishments fit not to the degree of their deviation but to their persistence, having been threatened and warned, in any deviation.
Over the last decade “shareholder” has been replaced by “stakeholder.” I will remind my readers that a stakeholder is an onlooker to a gambling event. The contenders in the wager trust the stakeholder to hold their respective bets (the stakes) and at the contest’s conclusion to award them to the winner. The stakeholder is one who, by definition, can have neither interest nor profit in the outcome. I believe no further comment is required.
GRIEF AND WISDOM: It seems Marx was correct, that capitalism inevitably matures into Communism. But his wisdom stopped there, as for him, it must have, for he postulated Communism as the end of history. History, however, had continued despite his pronouncement, and Communism wherever it was instituted matured into savagery, human social interaction mimicking the physical where all expense of energy (life, heat, and motion) results in entropy.
The terrified populace of the West covers their mouths to restrict speech, shies away from each other, and shouts down any who are pointed out as not of the herd. Unelected bureaucrats issue ordinances strangling the economy; vandals promise riots should a dissentient voice be heard; and a supposedly sensible electorate complies. They understand their complicity as social responsibility, but it is fear. But fear of what? Of self-direction.
The lockdown was the manipulation by those in power of the response to a natural phenomenon. In this it resembles the Left’s insistence on global warming: fear gives power to the governments, who are, as always, the tools of the plutocrats. Why would the plutocrats, the trillionaires, the controllers of our communications, want the economy shut down? So, it could be repurchased cheaply.
Why would the oligarchs of Silicon Valley, the richest individuals ever on the earth want more power? Why would you? Why would I? Does the possession of money exempt one from human vanity, acquisitiveness, arrogance, and pride? The career of the robber barons, then and now, is that of Nebuchadnezzar, who continued amassing wealth until he went mad and ate grass.
FEAR AND RELIGION: It was, it seems, inevitable that “freethinking” would lead to atheism, but who would have thought this enlightenment would devolve into savagery? Anyone who has studied the Bible. The Israelites became appalled by their freedom from slavery. And so, they cast and worshipped a golden calf. The story tells us that these apostates had actually seen God part the Red Sea and destroy their slave masters. And then they became terrified of their freedom and denied His existence. The Five Books of Moses are the tragedy of the Jews, who found the security of slavery preferable to self-direction under the will of God.
The priests of our new idolatry are the politicians and their nongovernmental like who have discovered the old secret of power gained through fear of the mob. A populace panicked by prosperity fears retribution from those forces over which it knows itself powerless: the sun and the sea. But afraid to hate the forces of nature it worships them.
EDUCATION: Of course, the Left is opposed to charter schools. They are opposed to education. Teachers are, to the Left, a protected class, which is only common sense: they are a money machine, kicking back fortunes to the party, and a purveyor of the essential service of indoctrination. In my youth this was called “socialization.” This meant, I believe, learning to sit down and shut up and pay attention. It was difficult for me, as for you, to pay attention to that which neither interested me nor offered hope of some later gain. But schools of today are vastly more dangerous than those of yore, because they offer both things.
The grotesqueries of “sex education” and the thrill of protest are irresistible to the young mind. How is their leisure spent but in fantasies of sex and power?
Some teachers are good. Some, indeed, are an inestimable gift to the student. I have met a few, and likely you have, too. Most of these had no connection with a school but were wise and enthusiastic about conveying their insights to those eager to learn. The beloved shop teacher or coach is remembered all our lives. Who recalls an English teacher?
Am I advocating, then an abolition of schools? Yes, what good do they do? Children are mobile engines of curiosity. They can learn to read with the help of a parent or older sibling. Having learned to read, they can learn whatever else they require. One might ask, “How will they get a job?” But how will they get a job selling diversity, or social justice, or flogging a film school degree? These will have to exist on some sort of subsidy. It is no wonder that the Left wants college to be free; they receive, in return, an ignorant, biddable voter.
TUG-OF-PEACE: The victims of newspeak, whether the shopkeepers bankrupted by riots or diaspora Jews forced to confront anti-Semitism, must either submit (which is to say repress their shock and outrage) or rethink their position.
In the first case, the repressed perceptions must emerge as hatred of those who have not submitted – their stalwartness, of course, an affront. This is an effortless and logical choice. The second case, however, sentences the individual to some effort and pain. It is called freedom. The truth of an existential struggle cannot “lie somewhere in the middle.” Between war and peace, there must be one outcome or the other. As there must be between freedom and slavery.
THE PURPOSE OF TERROR: The purpose of terror is to break the will not only of actual but of any potential adversaries so that they, to preserve some self-respect, must come to accept and endorse strictures as laudable, in effect, to induce the slave to love his chains.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war. The offer of freedom (American Constitutional democracy) is at issue, and the tyranny of the Left displays the carrot and the stick of to a legitimately disturbed populace. The stick is blacklisting, hounding, left actions, and will, if unchecked, mature from cultural into legal denunciation followed by imprisonment and then into licensed murder. The carrot is an acceptable explanation for submission. Such, we are told, is neither cowardice nor passivity, but a legitimate concern for human values. These values are those neither of religion nor of the Constitution: they have no proof text, and so may be alleged ad lib. Further, the individual, rewarded from compliance, sees the added honor of invention. If it is laudable to treat women and men equally, how much more laudable to treat women as superiors and, the human need for novelty being insatiable, to proclaim then that there are no women, nor men, and the, as heard on the floor of Congress, that it is reprehensible to refer to “mothers and fathers,” and so on. This progression is both the carrot and the stick of tyranny: offering safety through acceptance of heresy, and promotion for its elaboration. The progress toward slavery can end either with the defeat of the terror or with its complete mastery of the organism attacked.
REBIRTH OF ANCIENT FEARS: Are today’s Westerners more foolish that our forebears? We cover our faces with wisps of cotton, hoping to outwit a virus and ancients tied garlic around their necks to protect them from werewolves and carried clove-scented handkerchiefs to ward off bubonic plague. No, we are not less ignorant than our predecessors.
RECESSIONAL: We human beings are cunning but rather stupid. We are herd creatures, no less than our dogs. Our biddability, our desire for inclusion, and our ineradicable capacity for self-delusion lead us into error and folly, which lead us to sin and self-destruction.
Great and ordinary Americans lived and died to end the horror of slavery. Ended, the tool was taken up again as segregation and Jim Crow. Segregation resurfaced as apartheid called “diversity”: power is now usurped not through the practice but through the accusation of racism, and the possession of the hammer creates the delusion that everything is a nail.
The terrified individual in the group submerges his reason in unanimity. Having lost his mind, he is reduced to a near-animal state and will choose extinction in company over exclusion. Armed forces officers carried pistols into combat, not as an offensive weapon, but to shoot mutineers, because mutiny, in a terrified group, spreads in an instant. The Left blacklists, cancels and indicts contrary opinion, for exactly the same reason. Not in opposition to dissent, but to dissuade from mutiny – that is, to behavior that threatens the existence of the group. The Left identifies the group as Humanity, but, finally, it is just the Left. The Old Testament is, first to last, the report of mutiny, which is to say of human nature: dissatisfaction with our lot, indictment or denial of a deity who would doom us to humility, consideration, piety, and restraint.
Source: Recessional by David Mamet (2022).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
RECESSIONAL – EXCERPTS
NOTE: All the excerpts are from Recessional by David Mamet (2022), except the headings
INTRODUCTION: If restrooms must be redesigned to accommodate differing “genders,” how much more worthy to assert that sexes do not, in fact, exist and then that men can give birth? If speech should be limited to avoid “offense” to college students, how much more worthy to expunge the books, thoughts, and electronic footprints of any defending not only the offending matter but free speech itself? Now we are engaged in prodromal civil war, and American constitutional democracy is the contest’s prize. The universities, and the media, always diseased, have progressed from mischief into depravity. Various states are attempting to mandate that their schools teach critical race theory – that is, racism – and elected leaders on the coasts have resigned their cities to thuggery and ruin. But how may a debate (a discussion, a trial, an election) take place in which one side rejects not its opponent’s position but his right to exist?
THE SETTING: Politicians have always been a confederation of whores, now betraying, now colluding with that opponent now promising gain, both in league, finally, against the electorate. But the newspapers. What words can convey my sorrow at their transmutation into organs of state propaganda? Worse, than that, they have become unashamed merchants of hatred and panic. Now we have newspapers insisting on the infallibility of the state and calling out dissent as heresy. The media screams that the end of the world is at hand. The ancient business strategy, the incitement to fear, and thus hatred, is rediscovered. The corporations, the interests, the trusts, the special interests, the kulaks, Negroes, immigrants, Jews, the rich, the bourgeoisie, all these colorful, infinitely applicable terms have had their day, and now we find “the haters” a term so weak it suggests a culture so fatigued and dispirited it is unable even to celebrate hate with a full heart; it is waiting to die. Which is what I have seen around me in this horrible year.
The American experiment has come, in 240 years, to that fork in the road inevitable in any organism. We will either enjoy the respite of a vigorous old age or forgo that period and proceed directly and quickly to national death.
CAUSE AND EFFECT: Bullying is the unlicensed application of power. Of old, it consisted, among boys, in shoving, punching, and beating. Of late it allegedly included mocking, name-calling, slander, and rough speech and, reappearing as “microaggression,” can now be alleged by those who have affronted only by the color of their skin, or by “cultural appropriation;” these allegations, of course, are but a new sort of bullying. Or was, until the algebra of microaggressions allowed the weak to enjoy bullying the strong, and thereby court not harsh instruction but reward. Today thugs, rioters, and thieves destroy our cities. They’ve done the cost-benefit analysis, and find they risk nothing,
The COVID hysteria isolated Western citizens, under the threat not only of the virus but of government penalty. But leftist protest and riot were exempt.
There is a difference between helping immigrants acclimatize to a new environment and teaching them how to raise their children. We see the unfortunate echoes of the philosophy in the miserable wreck that the welfare had made of the inner cities.
In the 1960s “hygiene” classes became “sex education,” educators holding that because the children were not taught at home, the higher orders needed to take charge. And now we have kindergartners trained in a bizarre catechism of sexual identity politics.
How could a school be a complete community? The school should not be a complete community, and a complete community must not be a school, because a school cannot be a democracy. It must be an autocracy.
The habit of groupthink, absorbed in schools, is perpetuated in their graduates. For questioning, to the Left, is shunned as a very real psychic threat. They are infantilized by fear of exclusion, becoming like the abused infant, toddler, youngster, to whom to recognize abuse is to lose the only home he knows.
Law-abiding citizens are being dared to demand the rule of law.
Today, one after one, beloved classics of Western thought are trash canned because of the race, sex, or purported sexual preference of their creators. American culture is now dominated by envenomed pigs.
GOVERNMENT: The horror of a command economy is not that mistakes will be made but that they will not be corrected. Who, in government, will suffer from destroying our economy? No doubt, it was done in good faith, however, it is the job of the politician to amass power, and should he discover that that power may come, for example, from draconian measures in the name of health, the measures will continue until he perceives more wealth or power in their elimination.
And now we have the “science” of global warming, and news, education, and opinion warped to support an un-demonstrable opinion; dissent is indicted and, where possible, banned as the production of monsters who, by their acts, are self-confessed as the enemies of humanity.
And now we have had COVID – 19. And an epidemic or pandemic was allowed to destroy the American economy; tens of millions were driven out of work, covered their faces, and cowered in the streets in fear of their neighbors. The virus, here, is the government. Absent intervention it will, like any disease, eventually kill the host organism. The problem is not that the electorate may choose badly, but absolute power will not admit of any change at all. Parasites derive their life from the host organism, which, unchecked, they will eventually kill. This is the avowed historic mission of Marxism.
All organisms evolve, thrive, and die. The great cities have approached the problems by taxing away the productive and, in effect, paying folks to stay there – through welfare – or to come there to “open cities,” or homeless encampments. The pandemic, the shutdown, and the riots reveal, of the cities, the truth of that ancient bureaucratic adage: don’t ever take a vacation. They might realize they don’t need you.
SLAVE LESSONS: Our country is being eviscerated by the Marxist Left. Each battle they win emboldens them to escalate their activities: shaming becomes blacklisting, picketing becomes destruction; demonstrations become riots. Just as with taxes, all they want is all we got, and who could stop them? Enter Donald Trump. He looked at the Left and informed us that he knew them of old” they were the same thugs, thieves, cheats, and whores with whom he’d been doing business all his life. He was formed by the construction industry. The Left wet the bed.
Leftist identity groups now merge, now compete for power, united, finally, in a codependent submission to a lie. That is, that America is an evil land, but even the foolish Left wants to earn a living, and drive a car, and so lives in state-sponsored denial. This enervating state can be sustained only if there is no possibility of individual apostasy, which is to say freedom.
The opposite of freedom under the law is not “a rational submission to the will of the people” but slavery; and the dutifully masked citizens convinced they were acting for their own safety and the public good were learning to stand in line and do only those things and in that manner which the government allows. They were taking slave lessons.
MOB RULE: First the expression of opinion is characterized as dissent, then is calumniated, and dissent (now called aggression) is reidentified as lack of active assent. Those seeking to avoid, first, discord, then censure and the loss of income, quickly find they have nowhere to hide and must choose active endorsement of ideas repulsive to them or blacklisting.
Mob mentality deals with our self-loathing by blaming it on others: racists, Israelis, “haters.” Religion treats unwelcome self-knowledge by offering confession, consolation, and prayer. Outreach, education, diversity, and so on are tools of indoctrination. This insistence on art as indoctrination is obscenity, denying and indicting the possibility of human connections to truths superior to human understanding, that is, to the divine.
SOCIAL JUSTICE: We Jews were schooled in justice (which is to say making difficult decisions based upon divine law) before it became “social justice” (that is, “following your feelings because they, belonging to a superior being, will always be right”).
Social justice is the negation of that ideal. Here “feelings” are insisted upon as superior to process and order. Social justice means anarchy. But like Planned parenthood, it has a snappy title, and we are all a sucker for a good line.
Having abolished religion, and so sin, it was a short hop to abolish crime. Now we are emptying the prisons, opening the borders to illegal immigrants, hamstringing whatever police remain after budget cuts, and striking off the books one law after another. But if those once understood as thugs and vandals are no longer taxed with the penalties for their quondam crimes, what will those acts be called? They will be called social justice.
SOME LINGUISTIC CURIOSITIES: “Politically incorrect” is not an indictment of a rival party but a warning that to embrace (indeed to contemplate) an opposing view would prove inconvenient to the individual. Observe that every conservative who employs the preface “This may not be politically correct but” is not only acknowledging but aiding the forces of thought control. These forces do not need to be acknowledged, and whether or not they are opposed, they must not be strengthened. Napoleon said that if we want to know our opponent’s fears, we need merely observe that with which he seeks to terrify us. Leftists are terrified of exclusion from the mob and see, everywhere, the exclusion’s cost. Imprisonment, vituperation, bankruptcy of conservative opponents, the severity of their punishments fit not to the degree of their deviation but to their persistence, having been threatened and warned, in any deviation.
Over the last decade “shareholder” has been replaced by “stakeholder.” I will remind my readers that a stakeholder is an onlooker to a gambling event. The contenders in the wager trust the stakeholder to hold their respective bets (the stakes) and at the contest’s conclusion to award them to the winner. The stakeholder is one who, by definition, can have neither interest nor profit in the outcome. I believe no further comment is required.
GRIEF AND WISDOM: It seems Marx was correct, that capitalism inevitably matures into Communism. But his wisdom stopped there, as for him, it must have, for he postulated Communism as the end of history. History, however, had continued despite his pronouncement, and Communism wherever it was instituted matured into savagery, human social interaction mimicking the physical where all expense of energy (life, heat, and motion) results in entropy.
The terrified populace of the West covers their mouths to restrict speech, shies away from each other, and shouts down any who are pointed out as not of the herd. Unelected bureaucrats issue ordinances strangling the economy; vandals promise riots should a dissentient voice be heard; and a supposedly sensible electorate complies. They understand their complicity as social responsibility, but it is fear. But fear of what? Of self-direction.
The lockdown was the manipulation by those in power of the response to a natural phenomenon. In this it resembles the Left’s insistence on global warming: fear gives power to the governments, who are, as always, the tools of the plutocrats. Why would the plutocrats, the trillionaires, the controllers of our communications, want the economy shut down? So, it could be repurchased cheaply.
Why would the oligarchs of Silicon Valley, the richest individuals ever on the earth want more power? Why would you? Why would I? Does the possession of money exempt one from human vanity, acquisitiveness, arrogance, and pride? The career of the robber barons, then and now, is that of Nebuchadnezzar, who continued amassing wealth until he went mad and ate grass.
FEAR AND RELIGION: It was, it seems, inevitable that “freethinking” would lead to atheism, but who would have thought this enlightenment would devolve into savagery? Anyone who has studied the Bible. The Israelites became appalled by their freedom from slavery. And so, they cast and worshipped a golden calf. The story tells us that these apostates had actually seen God part the Red Sea and destroy their slave masters. And then they became terrified of their freedom and denied His existence. The Five Books of Moses are the tragedy of the Jews, who found the security of slavery preferable to self-direction under the will of God.
The priests of our new idolatry are the politicians and their nongovernmental like who have discovered the old secret of power gained through fear of the mob. A populace panicked by prosperity fears retribution from those forces over which it knows itself powerless: the sun and the sea. But afraid to hate the forces of nature it worships them.
EDUCATION: Of course, the Left is opposed to charter schools. They are opposed to education. Teachers are, to the Left, a protected class, which is only common sense: they are a money machine, kicking back fortunes to the party, and a purveyor of the essential service of indoctrination. In my youth this was called “socialization.” This meant, I believe, learning to sit down and shut up and pay attention. It was difficult for me, as for you, to pay attention to that which neither interested me nor offered hope of some later gain. But schools of today are vastly more dangerous than those of yore, because they offer both things.
The grotesqueries of “sex education” and the thrill of protest are irresistible to the young mind. How is their leisure spent but in fantasies of sex and power?
Some teachers are good. Some, indeed, are an inestimable gift to the student. I have met a few, and likely you have, too. Most of these had no connection with a school but were wise and enthusiastic about conveying their insights to those eager to learn. The beloved shop teacher or coach is remembered all our lives. Who recalls an English teacher?
Am I advocating, then an abolition of schools? Yes, what good do they do? Children are mobile engines of curiosity. They can learn to read with the help of a parent or older sibling. Having learned to read, they can learn whatever else they require. One might ask, “How will they get a job?” But how will they get a job selling diversity, or social justice, or flogging a film school degree? These will have to exist on some sort of subsidy. It is no wonder that the Left wants college to be free; they receive, in return, an ignorant, biddable voter.
TUG-OF-PEACE: The victims of newspeak, whether the shopkeepers bankrupted by riots or diaspora Jews forced to confront anti-Semitism, must either submit (which is to say repress their shock and outrage) or rethink their position.
In the first case, the repressed perceptions must emerge as hatred of those who have not submitted – their stalwartness, of course, an affront. This is an effortless and logical choice. The second case, however, sentences the individual to some effort and pain. It is called freedom. The truth of an existential struggle cannot “lie somewhere in the middle.” Between war and peace, there must be one outcome or the other. As there must be between freedom and slavery.
THE PURPOSE OF TERROR: The purpose of terror is to break the will not only of actual but of any potential adversaries so that they, to preserve some self-respect, must come to accept and endorse strictures as laudable, in effect, to induce the slave to love his chains.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war. The offer of freedom (American Constitutional democracy) is at issue, and the tyranny of the Left displays the carrot and the stick of to a legitimately disturbed populace. The stick is blacklisting, hounding, left actions, and will, if unchecked, mature from cultural into legal denunciation followed by imprisonment and then into licensed murder. The carrot is an acceptable explanation for submission. Such, we are told, is neither cowardice nor passivity, but a legitimate concern for human values. These values are those neither of religion nor of the Constitution: they have no proof text, and so may be alleged ad lib. Further, the individual, rewarded from compliance, sees the added honor of invention. If it is laudable to treat women and men equally, how much more laudable to treat women as superiors and, the human need for novelty being insatiable, to proclaim then that there are no women, nor men, and the, as heard on the floor of Congress, that it is reprehensible to refer to “mothers and fathers,” and so on. This progression is both the carrot and the stick of tyranny: offering safety through acceptance of heresy, and promotion for its elaboration. The progress toward slavery can end either with the defeat of the terror or with its complete mastery of the organism attacked.
REBIRTH OF ANCIENT FEARS: Are today’s Westerners more foolish that our forebears? We cover our faces with wisps of cotton, hoping to outwit a virus and ancients tied garlic around their necks to protect them from werewolves and carried clove-scented handkerchiefs to ward off bubonic plague. No, we are not less ignorant than our predecessors.
RECESSIONAL: We human beings are cunning but rather stupid. We are herd creatures, no less than our dogs. Our biddability, our desire for inclusion, and our ineradicable capacity for self-delusion lead us into error and folly, which lead us to sin and self-destruction.
Great and ordinary Americans lived and died to end the horror of slavery. Ended, the tool was taken up again as segregation and Jim Crow. Segregation resurfaced as apartheid called “diversity”: power is now usurped not through the practice but through the accusation of racism, and the possession of the hammer creates the delusion that everything is a nail.
The terrified individual in the group submerges his reason in unanimity. Having lost his mind, he is reduced to a near-animal state and will choose extinction in company over exclusion. Armed forces officers carried pistols into combat, not as an offensive weapon, but to shoot mutineers, because mutiny, in a terrified group, spreads in an instant. The Left blacklists, cancels and indicts contrary opinion, for exactly the same reason. Not in opposition to dissent, but to dissuade from mutiny – that is, to behavior that threatens the existence of the group. The Left identifies the group as Humanity, but, finally, it is just the Left. The Old Testament is, first to last, the report of mutiny, which is to say of human nature: dissatisfaction with our lot, indictment or denial of a deity who would doom us to humility, consideration, piety, and restraint.
Source: Recessional by David Mamet (2022).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| nihl_e4l_recessional_--_epilogue_4.pdf |