The Big Business of Fabricating Threats
All the major crises that have disturbed the peace since 2001 were deliberately produced by our evil and rapacious ruling class.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
—H. L. Mencken
As we approach the 250th anniversary (Semiquincentennial) of the United States, it is worth reflecting on the remarks of John Adams in a letter dated October 11, 1798:
Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
Our Constitution is indeed wholly inadequate for constraining unbridled avarice, ambition, revenge, or “gallantry” — a polite 18th century euphemism for lust. If Adams were to review the last twenty-five years of American history, he would likely conclude that the troubles with which we we have contended did not originate in the great mass of ordinary citizens, but in our ruling class.
It’s the ruling class in the United States that has imperiled our Constitutional Republic with its unbridled avarice, ambition, revenge, and lust. In plain language, we are governed by monstrously selfish degenerates. “We the People” don’t get rid of our pestilential ruling class because we are constantly distracted and divided by purported threats and crises that are fabricated by our ruling class.
James Madison understood that the greatest challenge confronting a free people is learning to recognize when their minds are being seduced and manipulated by the ruling class. Historically, the ruling class has frequently used war as a pretext for distracting the people from domestic problems and diverting their attention to the purported threat of attack by foreign tribes or pirates or domestic gangs or terrorists. As he put it at the Constitutional Convention:
Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt [in the homeland] was apprehended.
As I argue in my forthcoming book, Mind Viruses: America’s Irrational Obsessions, the declaration that we must wage war against an enemy—real, perceived, exaggerated, or fabricated—is the essential psychological drama out of which all mind viruses emerge, while fear of the enemy is the primary emotional driver. As I state in the Preface:
This book is a brief history and exposition of how the American Republic went from being a strong, unified, and confident nation in 1999 to the basket case that it is today. Like other great powers in history, the United States has declined not from the depredations of foreign adversar- ies—as much as our politicians like to rail about them—but from our internal divisions that are incited and stoked by various interests. Divisions are created through the interplay of three essential elements:
Propagating fear and loathing of a purported threat to public health and safety
Presenting a purported solution whose implementation is characterized as a sacred mission.
Scapegoating the purported enemies or opponents of this mission.
Recent missions have included reducing greenhouse gas emissions and getting all humanity vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, the causative agent of COVID-19. Here at the outset, it should be noted that, in each of these missions, the threat is grossly overstated and oversimplified, and the efficacy of the championed solution cannot be measured, tested, or falsified. The rational observer eventually suspects that the point of the sacred mission is to keep it going, because the interested parties would be out of business as soon as the problem is solved.
Millions of people may become preoccupied with a mission and develop burning hostility to its purported enemies. Fear and loathing of the threat disable critical reasoning and trigger extreme and even violent behavior. Because of man’s imitative nature and his strong inclination to exert peer pressure and to engage in groupthink, false beliefs and irrational behavior may spread like a viral contagion. Preoccupation with the mission is there- fore aptly (albeit metaphorically) characterized as a mind virus.
The evidence that mind viruses are largely the fabrications of powerful interest groups is not difficult to find or understand. Most of it is hidden in plain sight. People struggle to recognize and comprehend it because they believe that the US government is acting in their interest, because they are bombarded with propaganda, and because of their mistaken belief that largescale fraud must be concealed in a subtle and sophisticated way. Once the mind fully realizes that our “scientific-technological elite” (as President Dwight D. Eisenhower called it) and mainstream media are captured by interests, it becomes easy to spot the clear pattern of their manipulation of the public.
The objective of this book is to show how mind viruses are produced and transmitted to the public, and to illuminate the qualities that make some people susceptible to them while others are resistant to their spell. I hope that revealing the anatomy of this diabolical phenomenon will immunize readers against the next mind virus that is unleashed on us.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: If you or someone you know works in the media or in the production of a newsletter or podcast, please let me know if you would like to review the book or discuss it with me in an interview, and I will send you a review copy. I can be reached by email at johnleake@yahoo.com
Many thanks, David. Much obliged.
The mistake the Founding Fathers made was not putting term limits in the Constitution. They never imagined a permanent political class. They expected congressmen and senators to go home and tend to their businesses and farms and law practices after they had served their country. If two terms were the norm there would be much less opportunity for graft.