Note: I have a new post up behind the green door on the move Mr. Jones, which I recommend to those mulling over the current age. Learning about the realities of Soviet communism is a good palliative to those prone to optimism.
The Soviet Union, like all radical experiments, went through several phases in its roughly three generations of existence. The first phase, of course, was the revolution, in which the old order was toppled and a battle ensued to fill the void. This initial phase of revolution is always the one that attracts the most attention. This is when the great heroes of the revolution and the great villains of it are made. It is in this phase we get both Lenin and Stalin, hero and villain.
There is a phase that gets little attention and that is when the people come to terms with the irrationality of the world that has been created for them. One reason Stalin was able to send so many to their deaths or to labor camps is so many people kept thinking there was some rationality to the world being created. Some remained idealistic believers in the cause, while others became critics of the cause. They assumed the revolution would bring clarity and rationality when it brought only the opposite
In time, the people came to terms with this. The humor of the Soviet Union reflected the fact that one got along by accepting the irrational in the same way you accept that the grass is green or the sky is blue. You don’t think about it. The jokes were often about these daily contradictions and how the unfortunate were those who did not get the joke that was at the heart of those contradictions. In other words, the joke was always on the fool who was not cynical enough to anticipate the lie.
This is relevant in our current age as we may be past the revolutionary stage and into that time when the people adjust to the irrational. The legacy conservative media keeps pounding the drum about how “we’re lurching into socialism” when we have been a socialist society for generations now. There is no aspect of our economic life outside the grip of the now semi-permanent ruling class. Telling people otherwise is just part of the way the ruling class controls the population.
Of course, this reality is dawning on even the dullest people, so we are being told that the bad guys are planning a “radical revolution.” The truth is, that revolution is well past the planning stage. It has already happened. From top to bottom, despite party labels or rhetoric, the system is stacked with people committed to the great reordering of society into the egalitarian paradise. The expulsion of Trump from office like a foreign body is the proof that the organism of state is wholly alien now.
In other words, a revolution has occurred out of view from the rest of us and now we are seeing the revolutionaries step out of the shadows. This is not a lot different than how Stalin took control of the party and government. He quietly consolidated his hold on the party, while his rivals were thinking the revolution was still ongoing. By the time they realized what had happened, it was too late. This realization was probably penultimate thing that went through Trotsky’s head.
Now we are in the phase where we get used to the often-bizarre contradictions in the rules being imposed by the new rulers. Some are easy, like the fact that states have put mentally disturbed Jewish men in sundresses in charge of public health. These are ornamental positions, so putting a crazy person in the role allows the governor to display his piety at little cost. Until the Covid hysteria, no one had any reason to know their state had public health officials.
Other bits of the new normal have no explanation. For example, states are now telling people they cannot make noise in their home, as part of the alleged fight against the spread of Covid. In Europe, they are banning the sale of alcohol at certain times, claiming this is to fight Covid. Maybe they believe Covid hates loud noises and people get loud when they drink. It is insane, but it makes more sense than the official explanation, which is no explanation at all.
The lunacy of official policy will not always be humorous. The freedom loving Boris Johnson is now promoting a plan whereby Brits will be issued “freedom passes” if they comply with official edicts on Covid. For a long time, people threw around the word “Orwellian” to mean something they did not like. The English-speaking world is about to learn the real meaning of the term. Getting a freedom pass for doing exactly what the government has instructed is the very definition of Orwellian.
Another part of this phase where we come to terms with the madness of the situation is the acceptance of official silence. In a country with anything resembling an independent media, these officials would be asked to explain their polices. Boris Johnson would be asked about his Orwellian freedom pass scheme. Instead, the media is full of lectures about how we’re all in this together. You see, this is an opportunity to build back better, so you need to embrace this glorious opportunity.
Westerners have been trained for generations to think the media has an adversarial relationship with the government. This will change during this time. We will come to understand what the Soviet citizen understood. The official media is just that, official media promulgating the new lies. It’s value to the people is only in letting us know how to stay out of the camps and in providing a laugh at the absurdity of living in a society based on obvious lies. Everyone becomes a cynic.
That is something else we will learn. Pessimism is not the opposite of optimism. The man who is sure the end is near is really just another type of optimist. He believes that soon, his struggle will come to an end. The opposite of optimism is cynicism. Both the optimist and the pessimist are willing to accept the moral framework as stated. Their actions and understanding of the world are tightly bound by the orthodoxy. Both the optimist and the pessimist give up their agency to faith in the rules that govern them.
The cynic, in the context of an authoritarian society, accepts that there is no inherent logic in the system, other than to insulate those who prosper from their position. The cynic accepts that there is no truth in the system and the outcomes are random, based on the changing desires of the people you interact with in the system. The cynic knows there is no truth in a world of lies, other than his own acceptance of it. It is in this phase we are in now where we learn that you can never be cynical enough.
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Good one, I’ve banked that for a rainy day.
I’m still laughing at that line. It’s worthy of the best Soviet-era jokes.
Hmmm…apparently we’re thinking the same thought. One of us should probably be concerned.
it’s going to be a long wait before you get chance to use it 😛
I’ll tell it to you next year in Gulag.
We’re fast approaching the point where the political elite issue their virtue signaling edicts, the media slavishly hammer them home. And then everybody ignores them entirely.
In CA we have police departments across the state issuing official press releases that they will not be enforcing various aspects of the governors edicts. That’s upstream from the street level where cops know it’s all nonsense and don’t want to bother.
Interesting. I saw similar contradictions and confusions when I journeyed by train into London yesterday. Certain rail operators have signs say ‘You must wear a face mask’, and immediately under the words ‘unless you’re exempt’ appear. It is so easy to flout that nobody bothers to enforce it. The London Underground signage was slightly different, stating on individual billboards ‘Wear a face mask’. One would then see other billboards saying that ‘Some disabilities are invisible’ – a nod to those who cannot wear the mask. There are so many contradictions and loopholes that even the authorities seem not to care… Read more »
Just like the late Soviet Union, no one really believes in any of it, top or bottom, it’s all just going through the motions, at all levels. Personally, I’m rooting for the next major solar flare – then we’ll REALLY see a great reset.
I am not really up on solar flares. Would this fry our electronics or our skins? Or both?
It is the inconsistent enforcement that will become the terror. The cops looking the other way will lead someone to assume the rules are not enforced, but then some new set of cops taser the poor bastard and hauls him away to gaol. It is the never knowing that becomes the terror, by in your own mind and in practice.
I read the memoirs of a American caught up in the Soviet terror in the 30’s. The randomness of the nightly wakings from sleep, beatdowns, interrogations and then the rare kindness broke many minds. We all know the Orwellian tortures and mind control. To see it coming more into fruition now really shouldn’t shock us, but it does.
Stalin introduced an element of irrationality to his terror that made it even more terrifying. Often the most loyal lower-level party member was arrested, while a local nuisance was allowed to be free because he was “a poet.”
Someone else said it but Russians were accustomed to autocrats and being treated like peasants. It’s a different situation.
Further, if this is the demographic age who gives a crap about these weirdos and their ideology? Or one’s own ideology when you get down to it? It’s just another way of fighting and losing on their terms. Just throwing it out there.
From my experience in the bureaucracy I found that the absolute worst thing you can do is not to enforce rules for a time, and then suddenly start enforcing them. People become quite resentful and even the enforcers aren’t sure what changed.
Welcome to Kafka World.
We’re all ungeheures Ungeziefer now.
Inconsistent (or asymmetric, or dual-standard) enforcement is certainly becoming evident. But the really new thing is trying it in the most heavily-armed nation in the world. How many dead cops and politicians does it take before inconsistent enforcement becomes no enforcement? Not many, I think. Shortly after that will come a retrenchment, where cops (other than reasonable county sheriffs) work only in a few disarmed cities, and outside of that, everybody goes armed all the time.
These things, the indifference locally, the slipshod manner in which they are being imposed, are indications that COVID orders are not coming from one’s local or even national government who have some understanding of the place but from a centralized somewhere else with little understanding of the place
I doubt that will last, but if it somehow did, it would be a nice white pill.
I assume municipalities that do not enforce these edicts will be threatened to have state and federal funding withheld if they do not comply. That seems to be effective. I just read an article about Belgian police saying they will be knocking on doors over Christmas to ensure compliance Covid orders. They will not demand entry as that would violate the law. So many people are willfully complying it is pathetic.
Same here with the local sheriff (an elected office), however, seems the government has no problem hiring agents to inspect and enforce the new ordinances. They need no “police” powers as in arrest and jail, they simply observe and cite infractions. Later on businesses are punished by removing liquor or business licenses. So far no indication of agents knocking on private residence doors for a head count, but churches have voluntarily closed for the duration—except those few smallish, Christian sects that meet in private homes. And so it goes.
wherever two or more of you are gathered in His name etc–
A few sheriffs in NY state have declined to enforce the governor’s new edicts.
In response, the governor is labelling those sheriffs Nazis.
My sheriff is one of those Nazis. I wish to hell he’d get to work on the rest of his alleged Nazi agenda.
Pretty much there in my neck of the woods
The speech by Gavin Newsom resembled a evangelical preacher caught in a tryst. Then the true believers accepted his mea culpa and went right along with his rule.
Damn Zman what a way to start the day.
A cynic is a guy who no longer reads the newspaper or watches the network news and is now thinking there’s no point in voting. That’s where I’m at now and I hate it.
I rely on sober minds here to inform me of all the news I need. Thanks to Z, I now know about BlowJo’s ‘Freedom Pass’ . I don’t know if it is a bad or a good thing to be so distrusting of the UK’s media organs that I must get important info from elsewhere. The trouble is, even just browsing to The Guardian, The Independent, The Telegraph and the like means that I will definitely see some woke garbage – can’t risk it! At the moment, I guess only The Mail on Sunday is half decent and this is… Read more »
OF-
http://www.lockdownsceptics.org is a UK-based clearinghouse for sober info on the new regime over there.
http://www.off-guardian.org is good as well.
That’s me as well…I stopped watching the TV or network news a few years ago and haven’t suffered for lack of it. Last time I will vote as well.
Now if I even hear a second of the chattering cyclops I get pissed.
Combat soldiers coped with the threat of death in the meat grinder by accepting that they were already dead. Accepting that the USA is as dead as a bag of hammers makes it much easier to cope with what is coming.
From Star Trek DS9. Very fitting.
First: “I am [Rank] [Name], and I am dead. As of this moment, we are all dead. We go into battle to reclaim our lives. This, we do gladly, for we are Jem‘Hadar.
Don’t hate seeing the light. The word “cynic” has negative connotations, most of which Z-man just decimated. Most heroic lives are rooted in the cynicism of prevailing, false orthodoxies.
Now take another look at the sheep around you – they’re not living, they’re existing. Poor bastards, like hamsters on a wheel. But now you know where to invest your talents & energy, and that will make all the difference.
more like cows on a feed lot…
What I hate is that the charade makes me hate people that I don’t even know. Its easy to hate some faceless bureaucracy or the pudgy, greasy face of my gaypedo governor, but now I find myself with a level of disgust and disdain for many of my fellow citizens that I have never had before. And I lived in Caifornia. Many people deserve to be hated these days, but the problem is many is rapidly approaching most. That’s a big part of the evil in the commie “system”: it is inherently dehumanizing. The infinite rules and their arbitrary nature… Read more »
This. I find that I am hating people who I knew were not on my side, but I never had a reason think about until now. They’ve either gone full Covidian or they are gloating about the election. It is a terrible thing to have to order the world into those you hate, those you trust and those you cannot be sure if they can be trusted.
I have a visceral reaction when exposed to State media at this point. I simply have to leave the room.
In a sick way, I’m kinda looking forward to the Bidenreich’s mandate that we all sign up for Twitter and Facebook and log into our four hours of mandatory TV viewing per night. Just seeing what you guys come up with in order to sound pious but mock the Powers That Be is going to be hilarious. E.g. that “penultimate thing that went through Trotsky’s head” line. Classic.
Finally I have a retort for those who say I’m too cynical.
I still get kind of short with those who go, really?, when the latest crazy rule is issued. They still think it is going to stop and return to normal.
Exactly. Amazing to me how many Trumpsters are manic about vote fraud (and rightly so), but then put on their mask to walk down the sidewalk.
Great article, zman. Loved this. Yes, I agree that the revolution has already happened and that we are now moving into the next phase. But was it really a “socialist” revolution? Is egalitarianism really their goal? It strikes me that where were are now, and going forward, looks a lot more like feudalism, only instead of a landed aristocracy, we are ruled over by a technocratic elite who own everything, run everything and decide everything. “Wokeness” is just the moral and spiritual cement that binds them together – a new “Christianity”. For those of us not fortunate enough to belong… Read more »
There is a lot of evidence that the Black Death created a labor scarcity situation that was excellent for the lower and middle classes.
“This realization was probably penultimate thing that went through Trotsky’s head.”
“Penultimate.” You made me laugh on an otherwise bleak day.
There will be some value in the news eventually if you learn to read between the lines, just like people in communist countries did.
It’s worse. We don’t have any journalists smart enough to write between the lines, and there are no cynical infiltrators from our side. We only get truth when they get emotional and blurt it out, and it’s only emotional truth. There’s no news behind the news, no real events that give anything away, no secret that if only we knew, no consumer attitude that can help us navigate the system from out here. The class of people who make and “make” the news just viscerally desire our destruction, all in the same way, all in the same words, with the… Read more »
It’s easy to maintain contradictions in a world of hyper-specialization and compartmentalization. Very few intellectuals these days range over the whole of some particular field, much less every field. The result is the loss of the ability to see things in their most general character. Turns out, when you break things down into their atomic bits and assign different people to exclusively study their little nook of the universe, you lose the ability to make sound generalizations regarding the whole. The trick used by the ruling class is to capitalize on these divisions by convincing each person that what he… Read more »
At least once a week I get an email from some local independent restaurant that’s part of a group formed to essentially beg congress for relief money. After 8 fruitless months of pleading and half the restaurants already gone they still haven’t figured out there will be no money. Instead of organizing to say ‘FU this is BS and we aren’t letting you kill our businesses over lies’ they write open letters to our lunatic governor attempting to appeal to her non-existent sense of compassion. I’d say most people are nowhere near the cynical enough stage.
OT: Zman, if you want to do a movie review that shows how far we have fallen as a society, do “Best Years of Our Lives”: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036868/?ref_=fn_al_tt_3
All true. And like the USSR the system has to eventually die a natural death, a process far beyond the control of any group of people, even inside the system. Few people contemplate that we’ve been a socialist country since 1933, a project that was well underway even in the progressive era. When the Supreme Court defined “commerce” as anyone doing anything at any time, it was all over. We wouldn’t know freedom if it bit us in the ass and we now think it’s a TSA known traveler number.
.”..This realization was probably penultimate thing that went through Trotsky’s head….”
Very clever.
“This realization was probably penultimate thing that went through Trotsky’s head” haha too effin funny! to those who don’t get the joke, look up the means of Trotsky’s death…
have been reading about Epicureans vs Stoics, and am currently leaning towards the former. Am open to reasoned persuasion to switch…
A relative of mine borrowed something from me last week. They returned it yesterday. It was broken. They didn’t mention it to me I just discovered it when I tried to use it. When I said something they said oh sorry I figured you could fix it. far-left obviously. These are comically terrible people that are ruling over us right now.
There is one key difference between the socialist model that arose in the Soviet Union and here in the US. And that is that there are over 300 million firearms in the possess of the masses. The Soviets only needed a relatively small Jackboot Corp to subdue it’s people via extreme ruthlessness and genocide. That’s going to be difficult to duplicate here outside of urban areas. But more to your point, play the role of the passive dolt and become invisible and ignored. And then opportunistic and spontaneous.