The Hissink File - January 3, 2017

Time passes quickly these days and it seems only like yesterday that I penned the most recent instalment of the Hissink File. Yet it’s been just over two months and so much has also happened globally that our readers might e wondering why I’ve been so unproductive. Unproductive for the same reason that the world seems to be in a continuing economic recession, or if you are Caterpillar, in a mini-depression with 48 consecutive drop in sales. Unproductive because I’ve realised, as have Henry and the Raff Reporter, that no one is reading/buying our product. Got that?

Economic activity reduces or stops when the producers sense they no longer make a profit, profit being what’s left after all the costs have been accounted for. Demand may well exist, of course, but while we can indeed supply lots of words and essays and articles, if no one is buying, and thus reading as indicated by website traffic, then we are selling the wrong product. In economics 101 jargon we have misread the market and must therefore pay the price.

In case you haven’t noticed the American had a presidential election that the favourite, Hillary Clinton, did not win. The favourite according to the media and the establishment and surprise, surprise, out of right-stage, Donald J. Trump zooms in an gets elected by the deplorables and white males. Given the electoral voting irregularities, and that if Hillary’s votes were assigned to one US state, then she would have won California and Trump the rest of the US. However, the losers, the Democrats and Greens, (the Marxists in other words), haven’t accepted this result, or so we glean from the published mainstream media. Why?

Is it something intrinsic to the socialists/Marxists among us that when the facts change, as they most assuredly have, that they are unable to adapt and change their minds? No, it’s not totally intrinsic but rather the result of the education policies set in place in the US and its sycophantic West over one hundred years ago when the K12 system was implemented.

If our readers haven’t noticed by much of the news reports concern human feelings, whether an alphabet person’s feelings have been hurt or demeaned. That’s what undid conservative journalist Andrew Bolt some time back when he lost the court case due to breaching Section 18C of the Australian Human Rights Act when he questioned the aboriginality of some or other individual. What happened to the “sticks and stones may break my bones by names will never hurt me” attitude? No, it seems the millennial generation and their heirs have been trained to feel and not to think. But what has been trained then becomes the relevant question.

The human organism or the ego? If it’s the human organism then repetition of the Pavlovian regime would ensure that human individuals would respond in predictable ways to external stimulus. Dogs and rats and mice seem to do this well, but humans? No, it’s not the human organism that’s been conditioned, but the human mind, and that means the Ego that has been trained to think in certain ways. This educational philosophy is at the core of the K12 education policy, that has its origins in the policies of 19th century Germany and afterwards the Anglosphere. The goal was to create a compliant people who would behave predictably and feel no compunction in sacrificing themselves for a greater or common good. This approach to education is not new either, since a cynic might note that the Christian New Testament might also be described as the Roman Empire’s Slave Management Procedure Manual. Let the soldiers do evil in the here and now but offer them eternal salvation and forgiveness if they admit all at the confessional. Add the act of turning the other cheek, and one ends up with a pretty efficient system of people management that requires minimal resources. But we should not forget that another factor is also in play – the machinations of the ego itself and its basis in the processes of human thinking.

While it is obvious that most people have been trained what to think, very few seem to know how and why they think. Thinking is the process of ratiocination, and has to be learnt. Is it being taught at school? University? Not by the observation of the outcomes of the process in the West. Instead we seem to have created a generation or more of individuals who react via feelings, the snowflake generation as they are now called, needing safe spaces and other touchy-feely havens from reality.

There’s another point that could be made – are the ruling elite specifically educating the masses in this direction or are they, the elite, as much a product of their K12 policies as their students? I suspect so reading the responses the leading US Democrats had to Trump’s win. Instead of blaming their own policies as the cause of their electoral failure, they blame the Russians, white males, anything except themselves. And they too seem to embody the narcissistic character of cultural Marxism in which it is the Ego, the Id, the Me, me, me, me, that transcends all and becomes violent when confronted with reality. In Trump’s case the Democrats seem unable to adapt to the new political reality. I’ve noticed it in the local home-grown varieties of the cultural-Marxists, that sure, the conservatives or Tories got elected, but their election is intrinsically illegitimate and next election we will reject them out of government. This attitude is essentially dogmatic belief.

Dogmatic belief arises when thinking becomes mindlessly habitual. Habitual in the sense of physical drug addiction where absence of a drug, or fix, causes withdrawal symptoms, cold-turkey, and the addicts need, desperately, to find another fix so to return to their imaginal escape from reality. So too the political dogmatists who only see what they believe, and enter into the cold-turkey state when reality upends their imaginal world. Instances such as the election of Trump as POTUS, causing much angst and pain in them, and only to be relieved when next election their candidate regains political power.

And it might be argued that humans who become totally in thrall of their thinking patterns, who are mesmerised by the constant repetition of certain phrases in their holy books or authorities, thus becoming ‘religious’, are what Karl Marx disparaged as the intellectual opiate of the masses. Except it seems that Marx himself replaced one opiate with another, and thus continued the process to this day.

It is fairly obvious that the modern political system is wedded to the idea of a looming climatic ending time caused by human emission of CO2. In this respect, it is no different to the ending times of the various Abrahamic religions, which themselves seen to have appeared out of the mists of the Middle Dark Ages, and thus share a common origin. It is also clear that both the Judean-Christian and Islamic religions expect a future saviour, the Messiah, the Mahdi, the Second Coming, to save the devout and to lead them into a future utopia, whether here or in the afterlife. So too the modern-day climate changers – for they too seem to long for a carbon free utopia. But all of these religions and memes have their origins in human thought, and it is in this area that little to no effort is being directed to understand what thought it, how it arises, and why it arises. Here’s one possibility.

Consider that long, long ago the Earth hosted a vibrant biosphere in which humans also existed but as unthinking bipedal simians living in a veritable garden of Eden. Then out of the blue things changed, a geological-climate catastrophe forever changed things. Most of the biosphere adapted and changed to the new circumstances. Except for the humans who, in contrast, became fearful, and cowering in their caves to escape from the heavenly portents, inadvertently discovered that dreaming of the past, the utopia/paradise they suddenly lost, allowed them to escape from the awfulness of the present. Perhaps it’s that acquisition of the ability to think, that afterwards became mankind’s original sin, that created the present world we live in, with all its problems that remain intractable to this day.

Am I suggesting that it’s human thought that is the cause of all our present-day problems? Yes.

More on this next year when new thoughts enter the grey cells, and in the meantime I hope all concerned have had a very merry Christmas and let’s all look forward to a happy new year, and to cheer you all up, here’s a splendid performance of Jingle Bells.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/khQN5ylb3H0?rel=0

Louis Hissink

Henry’s Thoughtful Geologist

#LouisHissink