Theres so much that is false, wrong, erroneous, chaotic (and its twin brother, demonic) in the world at present that its difficult to see your way as it all swirls around us. But every now and then, someone hits on an illuminating insight that pierces through, like a lighthouse in a raging storm. The great psychologist and social commentator Jordan Peterson recently found exactly the right few words for our predicament: Psychopaths are in power. Others have said as much. He added, however, that the psychopaths have been utterly brilliant in using terms like freedom, tolerance, inclusion, openness, and diversity to disguise the destruction theyre causing, making it look sane, progressive, constructive, compassionate, even Christian.
A bit of realism based on experience treating mentally disturbed people.
Its useful to trace out exactly what this means just now, because were living through something different than in the past. Weve seen psychopaths in power, via obvious lies, in historic dictatorships: left was right, down was up, murder was justice, repression brought liberation. The twentieth century was full of them: Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Fidel. More recently weve had Hugo Chavez, the Ortegas, Xi, Kim Jong Un, and countless others.
As is usual in such cases, its impossible to tell where the murderous ideology ends and the personal psychopathology begins because, in such great evils, they pretty much depend on and feed off one another.
But our current predicament is a veritable Copernican Revolution from these classic historical examples. Our psychopaths in the free societies of the West operate under a creeping and creepy indirect influence, and dictate to our political leaders now. Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau, and a host of others dont really believe the radical nonsense of, say, the trans craze or open borders or the wilder reaches of environmentalism. To do so, first of all, they would have to be capable of consistently following out a train of ideas. And like many politicians today, they arent. They indulge the craziness to maintain their share of power.
Its a safe bet, however, that if prevailing winds favored strict Christian sexual morality or sane immigration policies or more human-friendly and achievable ecological goals, they would be pushing those ideas just as hard.
This is an odd reversal of social dynamics. In The Power of the Powerless, the Czech dissident and writer Vaclav Havel Czech president after the fall of Communism described how totalitarian ideology works in everyday practice. It doesnt have to be by direct physical or social threats. As he put it in a much-quoted passage: Take an ordinary greengrocer in Communist Czechoslovakia. He puts up a sign in his window, Workers of the world, unite!, not because hes a Communist. He almost never is. He does it because its the tiny bit of incense he has to burn in submission to the regime to stay out of trouble.
Ordinary people, need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.
This is common enough even in non-Communist tyrannies. But it also underscores how different our situation is today. Social media and media in general, having now been formed by crazy ideas flowing out of the universities, engage in a kind of terrorism, including cancellation, against anyone who offends against woke pieties.
If you need the evidence, look around. To take just one example, when a much-loved figure like J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, can be savagely attacked and receive actual death and rape threats because shes a TERF Trans Excluding Radical Feminist we see that the old clunky Iron Curtain regimes had nothing on us when it comes to demanding social submission.
But theres a different pathway of threat to be noted here. A national government usually has something close to a monopoly on the use of force within its borders. Hence, the poor greengrocer or manual laborer or hairdresser have to play nice with the regime. But were seeing governments and their leaders themselves now being intimidated by the power of social media.
As a Catholic or even just as a sane human being, Joe Biden might say, for example, that the trans craze is, well, crazy, and is leading thousands of young people into self-mutilation, when all but a small percentage will outgrow gender dysphoria by the time theyre twenty. Thats the truth and easily discoverable if you want the truth. Instead, Joes told us repeatedly that trans rights are the human rights issue of our time.
I doubt that even a man with such a wobbly relationship to the truth believes that. He knows that unless he not only accepts but promotes woke madness, his party which has also been intimidated by psychopaths in academe and the media would repudiate, i.e., utterly destroy him.
It takes courage like that of Vaclav Havel and many others heroes and saints to stand up against that kind of threat. But many political leaders here and abroad, long since having sold their own souls, have now handed over the power to set or veto policies to any number of psychopaths who, as Jordan Peterson has said bluntly but rightly, have brilliantly co-opted all the older nice words of our tradition to hide what theyre doing.
In sunnier days, the Church would have had a steadying, counterbalancing public effect. Instead, much of what we see coming out of Rome wants to dialogue with or accompany the psychopaths and their enablers. Trans people meet with the pope, radically pro-abortion Catholic politicians are granted cheerful audiences, a slippery American Jesuit, whose doubletalk is intended to reverse Catholic teaching on LGBT matters, is told by the highest authority in the Church that he has the style of God.
King Lear had it right: That way madness lies.
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Psychopaths in Power - The Catholic Thing