Contagion

Beastly sent me an email this morning and it got me thinking about something.

How do you create a society that is manifestly mental ill?

Take the Nazis for example: Up until the 1930's Germany was a civilized and relatively stable culture. Oh, sure they had a military tradition and history of attempted conquest, but so did a lot of European countries in those days. Then Hitler and his band of raving psychopaths came along and in less than a decade they had infected the majority of the population with the stark staring crazies. Literally, Germany went insane. Like the movie, 28 Days Later, the insanity spread throughout the whole population. When people do what the Nazis did - that's clinical insanity, on a grand scale. And the Nazis weren't the only ones: Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, Lenin, Idi Amin, all the way back to the Inquisition. How does that happen? How does a whole society just go off the deep end?

Take the Jihadists for example: When you are willing to commit suicide by flying an airplane into a building, that's crazy. Sane people don't do things like that. When you see strapping twenty pounds of C4 to your chest as the only way to talk to your God and as a way to strike back at your perceived enemies, well, that's the clinical definition of batshit bonkers. Sane people don't commit mass murder, psychopaths commit mass murder. But the average person isn't a psychopath, so how do you turn the average person into a homicidal maniac with no sense of self preservation, and do it on commericial scale? How does this happen?

Take Timothy McVeigh for example: When a decorated combat veteran concludes that it is morally correct to murder 168 people in order to make a political statement - that's the classic definition of a psychopath. But, he managed to infect at least one other, Terry Nichols, and possibly more with his insanity. A rather large number of white supremacists and survivalists see him today as a hero, but they were already crazy. How does that happen?

And speaking of McVeigh, take the Branch Davidians and their standoff at Waco: I can understand David Koresh going insane, and he was manifestly bug-eating crazy, but how does a raving lunatic like that manage to convince hundreds of others that he is Jesus Christ reborn. When you believe that kind of thing, when you believe it so strongly that you're willing to commit murder and suicide, when you're willing to burn your own children alive, when you think that those actions are justified because one obviously crazy man says it's the right thing to do - well, you're crazy too. How does that happen? How did Charlie Manson pull it off? Or Marshal Applewhite. Or Fred Phelps? Or Jim Jones? How does this happen?

How do you create Holocaust deniers? Moon Landing Hoax and Face on Mars Conspiracy believers? How do you create people who believe that we were doing Africans a favor when we took them from their homes and put them in chains in the American South? How do you create a group, a large group, of people who truly believe that they are regularly abducted by gray skinned, bug eyed aliens? How do you take otherwise normal folks and convince them that a sick half-ass hack science fiction writer was the greatest mind in the history of the human race, and that alien ghosts live in your head because he said so? I could go on with the examples here, but you get the idea. The question I keep asking is, how does this happen? How does one one crazy bastard infect people who are otherwise normal?

You know the answer, of course - and so do I.

You start when they are children, because that's easiest. Or you find the weak minded and uneducated. The outcasts and the idiots, those with pliable minds. You do it a little at a time. You whisper in their ears, night and day. You introduce them to other crazy people. You immerse them in the crazy. You show them only what you want them to see, and destroy or deny everything else. You never, never, never let them think for themselves. Oh, you exhort them to think for themselves, but that's a lie - the biggest lie of all - because you only let them think what you want them to think and you stamp out everything else. You keep them isolated and you never let them out of your grasp.


You do it, my friends, exactly like this.


Read the story first, then watch the video. Watch the children in the video, watch how they are being indoctrinated. They are not being taught - teaching involves thinking - they're being programmed. Watch how the children are made to repeat key phrases. Watch the faces of the children, and the approving faces of their parents. Watch carefully, see the children looking to the parents first? Seeking their approval? See how they try to satisfy their folks and the guides? Watch the interviews with the tour guides and listen to what they have to say. Listen to how they say it. They don't believe it - but they want the children to believe it. Watch how they hide certain information from the children. Read the comments, if you can. Look up the definition of a cult and the criteria that defines it - then watch the video again with the criteria list in your hand.

Someday, very soon, these children will seek to remake America - and that, my friends, is how it happens.