The Atlantic: WHY IS MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE LIKE THIS?

Elaina Plott writes:

* Forsyth County was a calm, quiet, ordered place. But it had a history. In September 1912, an 18-year-old white girl was found bloodied and barely breathing in the woods lining the Chattahoochee River; she died two weeks later. Within 24 hours of her discovery, four Black men had been arrested and charged with assault. A white mob dragged one of the suspects from his cell and hanged him from a telephone pole. Two others were tried and executed. White residents then decided to undertake nothing short of a racial cleansing. On horseback, armed with rifles and dynamite, they drove out virtually all of the county’s Black population—more than 1,000 people. So successful were their efforts that the county would experience the modern civil-rights era vicariously at best. There were no whites only signs to fuss over in Cumming, because there were no Black people to keep separate.

* All of which is to say that Marge Taylor’s worldview was shaped in a community artificially devoid of sociocultural conflict, a history scrubbed of tension.

Most of the world punishes problems collectively. It is the Anglo world, almost alone, that believes that only individual wrongdoers should be punished for their sins.

I love this sentence: “Marge Taylor’s worldview was shaped in a community artificially devoid of sociocultural conflict, a history scrubbed of tension.” So, naturally, life should be filled with tensions and conflict?

I’m writing from Tannum Sands, Australia. About 150 years ago, this area was violently cleansed of aborigines and they’ve never come back. Ever since then, there’s only been microscopic rates of violent crime, sociocultural conflict and related tension. I don’t think the residents have suffered from this lack of crime and tension.

Report:

Aborigines vigorously defended their land with killings of white settlers at the Mount Larcom Station in 1855 and Miriam Vale Station in 1857. Chinamen, who had been imported by squatters to act as shepherds, were so scared by the ferocity and hostility of the Aborigines, that they deserted “en masse”. Despite the massacres and disease which decimated the local Aboriginal population, descendents have always lived in the area and maintained contacts and links with the land.

I’ve never seen or heard of these mythical descendents. Their presence in this area has been minimal.

Elaina Plott concludes: “Whether Greene actually believes the things she says is by now almost beside the point. She has no choice but to be the person her followers think she is, because her power is contingent on theirs. The mechanics of actual leadership—diplomacy, compromise, patience—not only don’t interest her but represent everything her followers disdain. To soften, or engage in better faith, is to admit defeat.”

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Religion In A Secular Age

As the world grows more secular with every passing year, it seems that when religion hits the news, it almost always looks bad.

To more effectively compete, religious leaders need to develop secular language to describe what is going on. For example, instead of talking about God, use the word “reality.” Talk about the power of human connection, community, and hero system.

From Academy of Ideas:

“This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, and excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression – and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax. . . What kind of deity would create such complex and fancy worm food?” (The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker)

This passage comes from Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer prize-winning book The Denial of Death in which he puts forth and defends the thesis that the fear of death is the primary motivating factor behind much of human behavior. Or as Becker puts it:

“. . . the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity – activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for men.” (The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker)

Humans, unlike any other animal, are aware of their own mortality. This awareness when reflected on, according to Becker, elicits levels anxiety and fear that can be so debilitating that to properly function one must repress, or deny, their mortality.

The way that Becker suggests humans go about denying death is by striving for the heroic, or in other words taking part in activities which lead one to believe they are part of something more than their physical body, something that will live on past their physical death and so grant them a form of immortality.

It is easy to grasp how an artist or writer can achieve this type of immortality through the creation of a great work which they know will continue to effect people long after their death. But it is more difficult to see how the masses of mediocre people, incapable of personally achieving the heroic like an artist, are able to fulfill their urge to heroism. Becker’s answer is that society acts as the vehicle in which the vast majority of people act out their urge for heroism. As he put it:

“In our culture anyway, especially in modern times, the heroic seems too big for us, or we too small for it. Tell a young man that he is entitled to be a hero and he will blush. We disguise our struggle by piling up figures in a bank book to reflect privately our sense of heroic worth. Or by having only a little better home in the neighborhood, a bigger car, brighter children. But underneath throbs the ache of cosmic specialness, no matter how we mask it in concerns of smaller scope.” (The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker)

In other words, most people “deny death” by becoming fully absorbed in their social role and striving for whatever one’s society deems as most desirable; in our time this seems to be money, fame and status. As a vehicle for the masses to act out their urge for heroism, Becker went as far as to characterize society as a “codified hero system, which means that society everywhere is a living myth of the significance of human life, a defiant creation of meaning.”

In addition to explaining how humans deny death, Becker also spends time explaining why it is so essential for one to do so. In brief, Becker claims that the denial of death and associated urge for heroism is so integral to human existence because a failure to deny death through heroic achievement results in debilitating levels of stress, anxiety and depression which can potentially drive one mad.

“It was [Alfred] Adler who saw that low self-esteem was the central problem of mental illness. When does the person have the most trouble with his self-esteem? Precisely when his heroic transcendence of his fate is most in doubt, when he doubts his own immortality, the abiding value of his life; when he is not convinced that his having lived really makes any cosmic difference. From this point of view we might well say that mental illness represents styles of bogging-down in the denial of creatureliness.” (The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker)

Religious leaders should point out that the most intense atheist also subscribes to a non-rational hero system.

Ernest Becker writes in his book The Denial of Death:

The fact is that this is what society is and always has been: a symbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customs and rules of behavior, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism. Each script is somewhat unique, each culture has a different hero system. What the anthropologists call “cultural relativity” is thus really the relativity of hero-systems the world over. But each cultural system cuts out roles for earthly heroics; each system cuts out roles for performances of various degrees of heroism: from the “high” heroism of a Churchill, a Mao, or a Buddha, to the “low” heroism of the coal miner, the peasant, the simple priest, the plain, everyday, earthy heroism wrought by gnarled working hands guiding a family through hunger and disease.

It doesn’t matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. They earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a skyscraper, a family that lasts three generations. The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count. When Norman O. Brown said that Western society since Newton, no matter how scientific or secular it claims to be, is still as “religious” as any other, this is what he meant: “civilized” society is a hopeful belief and protest that science, money and goods make man count for more than any other animal. In this sense everything that man does is religious and heroic, and yet in danger of being fictitious and fallible…

You get a good feeling for what the self “looks like” in its extensions if you imagine the person to be a cylinder with a hollow inside, in which is lodged the self. Out of this cylinder the self overflows and extends into the surroundings, as a kind of huge amoeba, pushing its pseudopods to a wife, a car, a flag, a crushed flower in a secret book. The picture you get is of a huge invisible amoeba spread out over the landscape, with boundaries very far from its own center or home base. Tear and burn the flag, find and destroy the flower in the book, and the amoeba screams with soul-searing pain.

Usually we extend these pseudopods not only to things we hold dear, but also to silly things; our selves are cluttered up with things we don’t need, artificial things, debilitating ones. For example, if you extend a pseudopod to your house, as most people do, you might also extend it to the inventory of an interior decorating program. And so you get vitally upset by a piece of wallpaper that bulges, a shelf that does not join, a light fixture that “isn’t right.” Often you see the grotesque spectacle of a marvelous human organism breaking into violent arguments, or even crying, over a panel that doesn’t match. Interior decorators confide that many people have somatic symptoms or actual nervous breakdowns when they are redecorating. And I have seen a grown and silver-templed Italian crying in the street in his mother’s arms over a small dent in the bumper of his Ferrari.
We call precisely those people “strong” who can withdraw a pseudopod at will from trifling parts of their identity, or especially from important ones. Someone who can say “it is only a scratch on a Ferrari,” “the uneven wall is not me, the wood crack is not me,” and so on. They disentangle themselves easily and flexibly from the little damages and ravages to their self-extensions….

Rony Guldmann writes in Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression:

The proposition that society consists in “a symbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customs and rules of behavior” seems rather banal. And yet this banality is obscured by the subtraction account. For the latter relegates man’s need to “count,” to “earn a feeling of cosmic specialness” to a pre-modern past now transcended by strategic agents. Having been liberated from the illusory teleologies that once stimulated such aspirations, these agents simply maneuver through various coefficients of adversity toward their desired ends, dismissing any urges toward cosmic significance as illusion and vainglory. By contrast, Becker’s facially banal observations posit a certain symmetry and continuity between the pre-modern and the modern, as well as between the religious and the secular, which the subtraction account cannot acknowledge.
Becker’s observations speak to well-documented human experience. As he observes, the military leader who “after a short, whispered outline plan of attack, shouts, ‘Let’s go men!’ with proper gravity and conviction, says much more than simply that. He implies that of all times and all places, this is the situation that man should want most to be in; and that ‘to go’ into the attack is unquestionably the greatest, most meaningful act that one could hope to perform.”88 Culture, says Becker, “creates us”89 as agents. For it provides the language and symbols that allow situations to “call us to action.” Culture is what facilitates individual conviction, and therefore action, because it imbues the world with a significance that would justify action. And justification is what human beings want and need. Though attested to by common human experience, these dynamics are fundamentally incongruous with the subtraction account, and correspondingly with our sense of ourselves as disengaged strategic agents whose ends are not determined for them from without, by “forces to be reckoned with.” Strategic agents operate in a neutral environment where they determine their ends for themselves. The do not need to be somehow convinced from without that these are meaningful and justified. This may hold true of conservative “model citizens.” But liberals believe they have transcended this condition.

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Kanye West, Nick Fuentes & Hitler’s Willing Executioners (12-20-22)

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Should Elon Musk Keep Running Twitter? (12-19-22)

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Football in Sun and Shadow: An Emotional History of World Cup Football

From this classic work:

How is football like God? Each inspires devotion among believers and distrust among intellectuals.
In 1902 in London, Rudyard Kipling made fun of football and those who contented their souls with ‘the muddied oafs at the goals’. Three-quarters of a century later in Buenos Aires, Jorge Luis Borges was more subtle: he gave a lecture on the subject of immortality on the same day and at the same hour that Argentina was playing its first match in the 1978 World Cup.
The scorn of many conservative intellectuals comes from their conviction that football worship is precisely the superstition people deserve. Possessed by the ball, working stiffs think with their feet, which is entirely appropriate, and fulfil their dreams in primitive ecstasy. Animal instinct overtakes human reason, ignorance crushes culture and the riff-raff get what they want.
In contrast, many leftist intellectuals denigrate football because it castrates the masses and derails their revolutionary ardour. Bread and circus, circus without the bread: hypnotized by the ball, which exercises a perverse fascination, workers forget who they are and let themselves be led about like sheep by their class enemies.
In the River Plate, once the English and the rich lost possession of the sport, the first popular clubs were organized in railroad workshops and shipyards. Several anarchist and socialist leaders soon denounced the clubs as a manoeuvre by the bourgeoisie to forestall strikes and disguise class divisions. The spread of football across the world was an imperialist trick to keep oppressed peoples trapped in an eternal childhood.

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