James
Raymond Fisher, Jr.
©
November 22, 2021
Writers forever have been reminding us of our
self-conscious narcissism. No one more
appropriately than British novelist D.
H. Lawrence. He writes in Lady Chatterley's Lover (1929):
Never
was any age more devoid of real feeling, more exaggerated in false feeling than
our own . . . the radio and the cinema re mere counterfeit feeling all the
time, the current press and literature the same. People wallow in emotion, counterfeit emotion. They lap it up, they live in and on it . . .
and at times they get on very well with it all.
And then, more and more, they break.
We can see this is the case since what Eric
Hoffer called the “terrible 60s” when everybody seemed to jump on the same bandwagon
and call it being “politically correct”
As I have attempted to show in my writing,
everything seemed to change after WWII: two-parent families dissolved with half
ending in divorce; women had taken the place of fighting men in Europe and the
Pacific in essential defense industries across the United States manufacturing
fighting instruments of war; men were still men and women with no identity
crisis for the changing roles; most at home and in the fighting fronts were
Christians and believed in God without question, and nearly everyone attended
church on Sunday be they Protestant or Catholic; Thanksgiving, Christmas, and
Easter were not self-conscious but sacred holidays where no one had trouble
saying prayers at Thanksgiving, or to wish others a “Merry Christmas” and
“Happy Easter”; when a man and woman married, the priest or minister blessed
the marriage of this “man and wife”; men
and women were not suspect if devout or never marrying; indeed, everything
changed after the Second World War.
Readers familiar with my work know that I often
speak of intuition and instinct, masculine and feminine brain, or I dismay at
women trying to be like men, however, I never paid much mind to men wanting to
be like women, although in the broadest sense, and I have dealt with this – the
best minds are minds that use the bicameral mind or the right brain as well as
the left brain. I have also been
distrustful of critical/analytical thinking (masculine mind) at the exclusion
of creative/intuitive thinking (feminine mind) as they are complements to each
other.
Well, Christopher
Booker in GROUP THINK is far more articulate than I am on the subject. To wit:
Through
those five extraordinary years of the Second World War, men and women rose to
the challenge. Men displayed the stern
masculine values of duty, discipline, patriotism, responsibility, and respect
for authority. Men were not only
masculine they were selfless, sensitive, and compassionate using their
masculine strength to act firmly on behalf of others. As Jungians would put it their outward manly
strength was balanced by more selfless qualities of their inner feminine . . .
Masculine
and feminine qualities are not confined to one sex. Men and women have both masculine and
feminine traits in their psychological make-up . . . A softer empathetic
feeling and sensitivity towards others is seen in psychological terms as
‘feminine.’ Unless strength is balanced
by feeling for others it makes people regardless of their gender, hard,
insensitive, and self-centered . . . that part of our brain which tries to
think rationally, concerned with order, structure and facts – what is described
as ‘left-brain thinking – is in psychological terms ‘masculine.’ ‘Right-brain thinking’ is based on intuition
and creative imagination, and is psychologically ‘feminine.’ Without the life-giving balance of intuitive
understanding, the rational calculations of left-brain thinking can become so
boxed in on itself as to lose touch with practical reality . . . [in
The Rise & Fall of the Human Empire I refer to this as boxamania in today’s
Western society]
These
different aspects refer to men and women alike.
To become fully alive, mature, and responsible requires masculine and
feminine traits to be in balance. Men
may naturally be more governed by the masculine side of their psyche, but this
must be balanced by the inner feminine element which Jung called the anima,
that is, the ability to feel for others and a sense of wider intuitive
understanding. That strength of mind and
character which has typified women down through the ages enabled women to
display this part of them in the Second World War . . .
After
the ‘sexual revolution’ of the Sixties, the sexes were meant to have
converged. Men were supposed to become
softer, gentler, more ‘feminized.’ In
the new age of ‘equality and ‘women’s rights,’ those sterner masculine values
of discipline, authority and order had come to be seen as oppressive,
constricting, and life-denying instruments of domination . . . Women were
supposed to become more assertive and independent, capable of competing equally
with men on male terms . . . So many of those contradictions were to lead the
groupthink of political correctness into bitter and divisive confusion.
Booker sees other casualties of convergence being
the loss of the former harmonious balance between men and women with the
surfacing of the new dogma of political correctness. Identity and gender imbalance now find boys
wanting to be girls and girls wanting to be boys, along with the not-so-subtle
collapse of conscience and empathic understanding.
He also points out the first rule of groupthink
is that it is never properly rooted in reality; instead, equality between the
sexes extends to a significant degree to no more than collective make-believe
with positive masculinity in men and equal characteristic of women with little
qualms about the loss of women femininity.
He writes:
What
happened to society in those decades since the early Fifties was a picture of
people no longer fully developed on either the masculine or the feminine side
of their personality, caught in a state of psychological immaturity, ultimately
centered on little more than the promptings of their own egos . . . which
brings us back to the real underlying nature of political correctness . . . a
division of the world into two groups with an instinct to feel sympathy for one
of them as ‘victims’ . . . once this is taken over by groupthink, even the
‘victims’ themselves can sentimentalize about their plight, as can all those
who rally to support them . . . emotional gratification is inseparable from
groupthink: the need to express morally superior contempt for all those
unfeeling self-centered ‘others’ who don’t understand, and therefore be
dismissedly labeled as ‘sexists,’ ‘racists,’ ‘bigots,’ ‘homophobes,’
trans-phobes,’ ‘fascists,’ or whatever scornful term seems appropriate where
there is no longer a connection with reality . . . welding all those under its
spell into a kind of collective egotism . . . this is the essence of what has
come to be known as identity politics with those carried away with their own
personal egos submerged in the collective
ego of their group which is inevitably divisive . . .
In THE RISE & FALL OF THE HUMAN EMPIRE, I
attempt to show we’ve been here before letting the reader survey the many
centuries profiled to calibrate why we in the 21st century are seemingly
so unhappy, so edgy, so strained, and a great deal confused. Why do so many of us despise and hate each
other when we never had so much and so much diversity. If you question this assessment, ask yourself
with the miracle of technology and the Internet, in the age of the ‘selfie’
with Facebook and Twitter, et al, taking over our identity and our mind, why
have we allowed this? It could be argued
that the Internet has turned social media into anti-social media where huge
numbers of people have had a chance, probably for the first time, to exercise
their egos, both individually and collectively, not least with the license to
broadcast to the world their intolerance and rage with ease previously
unthinkable.
These children, by the accident of their birth,
have been born in a time of collapsing civilization and exploding technology
which they prefer to ignore comforted with their electronic devices. But the future is not controlled by osmosis as
challenges and reality disturb their situation.
With real problems with real consequences, those
of political correctness comically have no room for personal pronouns such as “he”
and “she”; “we” and “they”; “him” and “her”; indeed, no room for such nouns as “boy”
and “girl”; “good” and “evil”; “God” and “Lucifer”; but there is plenty of room
for “hate” and “despise”; and for profanity for boys and yes girls as young as
ten and twelve to sprinkle their conversation with the “f-word”; indeed, such
popular television dramas such as “Yellowstone,” see everyone, including young
ladies and young and old cowboys unable to communicate without the “f-word”
dramatically expressed in their conversation.
GROUPTHINK has been the catalyst of political
correctness from the hallow halls of our most prestigious universities to the
slums that fester gangs in the streets of our cities and towns. English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge (1903 – 1990) once remarked:
When
people cease to believe in God, they believe not in nothing but anything.
This is the power and absurdity of
GROUPTHINK. But before you node your
head in agreement, there is not one of us that is not also guilty of GROUPTHINK
and therefore susceptible to political correctness. Doctors, lawyers, and academics have their
special inside track language and special collective identity, as do priests, ministers,
rabbis, and imams; as do engineers, technologists, and people in trades. The pressure to belong to our church,
profession, community, indeed, to our ethnicity is the pressure of group
persuasion. We don’t buy a car, wash
machine, television, computer, or the dress code we observe without checking
with what is “in.” We have essentially
given up thinking for ourselves relying on what talking heads on television
tell us what is real and what is not, failing to inform us that they
promulgating specific information with a slant.
The evidence is compelling. You
can tell by talking to someone whether they listen to talking heads on CNN or
FOX. People are unlikely to read books
or newspaper or magazine articles that are not consistent with their particular
GROUPTHINK.
We see evidence of political correctness and
GROUP THINK during the Christmas season when families have discontinued
displaying Christmas trees and festive lights for fear of offending people other
than those of Christian faith, indeed, being careful not to display baby Jesus,
Mary, and Joseph in their front lawns as was common when I was a boy. The absurdity of this is that we have always
had people of other ethnicities in our community be they Jewish or Muslim, even
in my hometown of 33,000 growing up in Iowa who had no objection to these
Western traditions showing evidence instead that they quite enjoyed these
displays.
The irony is that the affluent of other
ethnicities even today do not mine the homogeneity of the community. It is the lower and more impoverished classes
of these groups that seem to take offense, groups that self-segregate themselves
in their own traditions and language failing because of lack of will or
inclination to assimilate into the wider culture.
Everything changed after the end of the Second
World War with the 1950s introducing into America and American life a place
this young country had never been before.
Americans experienced the unreality of the
affluence of the 50s, got on board the train of GROUPTHINK in the crazy 60s,
and from the 70s through the end of the 90s believed all the lies they told
themselves about America’s exceptionalism with everyone wanting to think and believe,
and value what Americans do, swiftly to move into the new century with the
shock of a pandemic to accentuate their unreality, only to wonder if they still
have the power to control their existence by getting off this GROUPTHINK train
as they see in the distance they are approaching the horizon where NOWHERE LAND
lies just beyond.
