{"id":2487,"date":"2018-03-27T19:40:17","date_gmt":"2018-03-27T19:40:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.loydfueston.com\/?p=2487"},"modified":"2018-03-27T19:40:17","modified_gmt":"2018-03-27T19:40:17","slug":"whom-the-gods-would-destroy-they-first-make-mad-and-then-stupid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.loydfueston.com\/?p=2487","title":{"rendered":"Whom the Gods Would Destroy, They First Make Mad and Then Stupid"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote stories depicting a moral sickness found
\n deep inside the souls of New England Puritans, fearing he himself
\n was infected by this strange malady which turned warm blood into
\n ice-water. Great historians, such as John K. Fairbank (who
\n mentioned in The Great Chinese Revolution, 1800-1985<\/em> that
\n American opium-smugglers in China, all from the Northeastern
\n states so far as I know, weren’t devoted to crime but rather to
\n good rates-of-return whether from criminal or legal activities)
\n and David Herbert Donald (who wrote in Lincoln<\/em> of
\n Lincoln’s knowledge of the role played by Northeasterners in the
\n slave-trade and how it led him to consider his intended `kindly’
\n treatment of the South after the war to be simple justice). More
\n recently Alfred McCoy in authoritative books about or touching
\n upon the crimes of the American national security agencies, Peter
\n Dale Scott in a number of books on similar matters, and James
\n Bradley in some books on the delusions and crimes behind the
\n American Empire—which never really took coherent shape, have
\n dealt with the role which drug-smuggling,arms-smuggling, aggressive
\n war, regime-changes, and other crimes have played in this strangest
\n of all Empires, tied together only by an American ruling-class which
\n exploits its fellow-citizens as much as it betrays friends and foes
\n throughout the world.<\/p>\n

Here is the confession of Captain Ahab from Melville’s great
\n novel, Moby Dick<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\n

All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This quote from Captain Ahab inspired my essay: My Ends
\n are Mad and Now I’m Also Stupid<\/em><\/a>, which I published in
\n 2006\/12 near the dawn of my blogging activities. The title tells
\n the truth about the American leaders and their lapdogs in Europe
\n and other parts of the world.<\/p>\n

It’s perhaps still worse than that. The leaders, and citizens, of
\n the Western countries are not only mad and stupid but also
\n shallow. From inside their heads, they view reality as modern
\n children view a movie about worlds of which they have no
\n experience or knowledge, including the world in which their
\n parents grew up only a few decades ago; that is, their minds glide
\n over reality as do their hearts and hands. This is why so many
\n find it easy to break their deepest relationships, such as those
\n with family-members and others we saw often when growing up.<\/p>\n

Something had gone terribly wrong in the West during and after the
\n Enlightenment and that wrongness had ripened in Puritan New
\n England and a few other states in which Calvinism had some major
\n influence on feelings and thoughts and modes of behavior: New
\n York, New Jersey, Delaware, and even Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n

The Americans of past generations and of this generation should
\n have paid attention to Nathaniel Hawthorne and other insightful
\n thinkers who saw the same problems in the New England Puritan
\n moral character as he. Alexis de Tocqueville even predicted that
\n Americans would form a sort of society never before seen, a
\n benevolent totalitarianism in our modern terms, because of their
\n ability to avoid seeing even the bluntest of facts if those facts
\n conflicted with their existing view of things; Solzhenitsyn called
\n Americans a “uniquely evil people” because of his realization of
\n the same when he learned of the large-scale round-ups of civilian
\n refugees (3.5 million or so) by the American and British armies in
\n Europe during 1946-7, which refugees were turned over to the
\n Soviets to be used as slave labor.<\/p>\n

The more recent American problems have developed because of
\n serious problems in our ruling class, children of privilege and
\n students—if that be the right word—of the Ivy Leagues.
\n Writing of the problems in American human being rather than of the
\n resulting crimes and suicidal programs, these were the problems
\n Hawthorne saw in his own Puritan ancestors and also in the
\n Americans of his day whether they retained the Calvinist faith or
\n had become some sort of Deist or even a variety of atheist. As
\n our goals and motives have become even more insane than those of
\n Captain Ahab, we have held them all the more to be holy and
\n righteous. Even attacks on American soldiers who are part of a
\n criminal invasion are taken as signs of evil on the part of the
\n residents of the victim country; We dig even deeper into our own
\n minds as we, or our soldiers or our leaders or our corporations,
\n come under verbal or physical attack in countries where we have no
\n business being since we weren’t invited and those countries were
\n no danger to us. Let me try again: the fact those countries
\n resist our invasions are proof of their evil. Or so goes the
\n story.<\/p>\n

Oh, well, what is to be done with a people who are so decent in
\n their own communities and so ignorant of history and so willfully
\n selective of the knowledge they take in of ongoing events?<\/p>\n

That erratically great Founding Father John Adams tried to warn
\n his fellow-citizens that a ruling class would inevitably develop
\n as men who had gained great wealth and power—by fair means or
\n foul—would do their best to pass that wealth and power on to
\n their descendants. As President and as a private citizen, Adams
\n tried to get his fellow-citizens to support the development of an
\n explicit aristocracy to establish peace and order by drawing those
\n powerholders and wealth-holders into the open where they would
\n receive public honor in return for constraints on their behavior.
\n Adams knew strange things would happen if those powerholders and
\n wealth-holders remained in the shadows. That background
\n `conspiracy’ described as “They go to the same schools, marry each
\n other’s sisters, etc.” would operate in either case, but—in
\n modern terms—if they remained in the shadows, there would also
\n be a variety of crimes by means of which members of the ruling
\n class protect what is theirs or increase what is theirs in ways
\n that hide their very existence as a class.<\/p>\n

So it is that the peoples of Vietnam and Iraq and Pakistan and so
\n many other countries including the United States itself are seen
\n as existing only to provide wealth and power to the leaders of the
\n United States, who have developed a genteel and coldblooded
\n version of the hotblooded greed and lust of the many conquering
\n barbarians of history. So it was that the rational exploitation
\n of the peoples of Africa and China and Hawaii was seen as only the
\n sane means to the insane ends of the ancestors of the dominant
\n group of our leaders, the so-called blue-bloods and their
\n proteges. `Sane’ is of course defined in terms of the rational
\n calculation of rates-of-return.<\/p>\n

The interested reader might wish to read two other essays:
\n Dualism: JFK and the Quite Speakable and Quite
\n Historical<\/em><\/a> where I discuss these aspects of the American
\n ruling class (power-elite or whatever) in a little more detail.
\n For still another look at this sad situation, see It’s
\n Not Hypocrisy, It’s Brainwashing Deeper than Orwell
\n Foresaw<\/em><\/a>. Again, the American people have never called
\n their allegedly great families to account for their activities and
\n have learned to consider some truly brutal men as being genial and
\n friendly because of their gentle public personas—there seem to
\n be few Americans who can detect the presence of brutality verging
\n on outright evil. Some perspective from a detached viewpoint can
\n be found in the articles
\n Opium Wars<\/em><\/a> and First Opium War<\/em><\/a>. Americans were
\n the beneficiaries of the first war more than the later two; in
\n fact, some great New England families (and benefactors of some
\n great hospitals and public libraries in New England and New York)
\n were smuggling opium in Asia even before the American Revolution,
\n before the British navy pulverized several Chinese port cities in
\n response to the Chinese request (addressed to that alleged
\n Christian, Queen Victoria) to stop the opium-smuggling operations
\n run by British (and some American) companies and getting their
\n opium from what were essentially slave-plantations in
\n India—before and after the British had outlawed the West African
\n slave-trade.<\/p>\n

Alasdair MacIntyre wrote a powerfully insightful book about human
\n beings titled Dependent Rational Animals<\/em>. We Americans
\n have withdrawn inside our heads for our understanding of reality
\n rather than learning from tradition or learning by responding to
\n that reality or learning by studying the experiences of those who
\n have so responded or by learning from those who have analyzed what
\n we know about reality to make some sense of it all. During that
\n retreat into our necessarily inadequate selves, we of the
\n West—with Americans leading the way and New Englanders leading
\n their fellow-Americans from the shadows—have separated our minds
\n from our dependency upon each other and upon any God we might
\n pretend to worship. (That dependency takes various forms: social,
\n economic, moral, etc.) We Americans, individuals in many cases
\n but certainly we as a people, have learned to coldbloodedly treat
\n others (and increasingly each other) as means to our ends.<\/p>\n

But who needs Christ or His Father or their Spirit? We can do it
\n all on our own. Look at all we’ve accomplished. We’ve
\n established a New World Order, extending it even to such backward
\n nations as Iraq and Libya and Pakistan. If only we’d not lost our
\n godly nerves and had dropped more napalm and more explosives, we
\n could have extended our benevolent rule to Vietnam and North Korea
\n and to more of Latin America. If killing 2 million Vietnamese and
\n another 2 million Cambodians, 2 million Koreans in the north, we
\n should have killed 4 million of each of those peoples. Then they
\n would have learned to love us and appreciate us for our moral
\n superiority.<\/p>\n

We’re working our divine will, even as I write, in so many
\n countries and have even turned inward toward the regions of the
\n United States and Europe where human being isn’t so subservient to
\n the American ruling class as it is in, for example, the city and
\n suburbs of New York.<\/p>\n

This is a summary of my view of these matters:<\/p>\n

\n

Human being in the West lives inside of its individual and
\n communal minds. The outside world is an annoyance at best, a
\n Satanic Realm, a Flyover Realm, or a chaos needing to be organized
\n to the purposes of Wall St and that swamp on the Potomac River.
\n Choose a description from the viewpoint of your favorite
\n ideologue, whether Gramscian snowflake or Free-Marketer destroying
\n human communities to enrich humans of the right sort or
\n drug-smuggling\/arms-smuggling National Security gangster. The
\n world, the mere world, doesn’t correspond to the truth inside
\n their heads. The world must be either reshaped to be true or
\n destroyed.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote stories depicting a moral sickness found deep inside the souls of New England Puritans, fearing he himself was infected by this strange malady which turned warm blood into ice-water. Great historians, such as John K. Fairbank (who mentioned in The Great Chinese Revolution, 1800-1985 that American opium-smugglers in China, all from the … [Read more…]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[133,137,162],"tags":[56,77,207,184,181,206],"class_list":["entry","post","publish","author-loydf","post-2487","format-standard","category-decay-of-civilization","category-freedom-and-structure-in-human-life","category-moral-nature-3","post_tag-christian-worldview","post_tag-decay-of-civilizations","post_tag-freedom-and-structure-in-human-life","post_tag-mind","post_tag-moral-issues","post_tag-narratives-and-truth"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4Vq7-E7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.loydfueston.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.loydfueston.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.loydfueston.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.loydfueston.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.loydfueston.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2487"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.loydfueston.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2491,"href":"https:\/\/www.loydfueston.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2487\/revisions\/2491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.loydfueston.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.loydfueston.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.loydfueston.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}