The Mental State of the Political Elites: Part I :: Posted by Edward Cline
http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-mental-state-of-political-elites.html
This column is about the epistemological epilepsy of our political elite. And the elite’s unreal metaphysics.
Or do they also suffer from schizophrenia? A collective neurosis? Group paranoia? Multiple personalities? Anxiety disorders? Bipolar mania? A potpourri of psychoses? Asperger’s syndrome?
A reader, whom I shall call Bridget, offered this comment on my Pax Germania vs. Pax Islamia column:
I don’t understand why the elites just don’t pay attention or understand that Muslim values are different from ours, as is their Shariah law. Crazy, because it’s so simple….People are so ignorant.
It isn’t so simple to the elites. The elites regard simplicity as a mark of insanity, of brutishness, of arrested epistemological development, or of retardation. They don’t think they need to pay attention or understand Islam except to claim that it’s a “beautiful religion” and that Westerners should not be judgmental of it. The elitists need nuances, and complexities, and shades of gray. Without them, they’d be just like everyone else, and no one would be willing to pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars or Euros to sit at fancy desks and lord it over everyone else, as though they were the guardians of Plato’s cave of the ignorant.
What follows is an elaboration of my original answer to the reader.
You see, Bridget, reality for you, me, and for other thinking people, is a pretty straightforward affair, not ever to be questioned or subjected to a mental tennis match. European and American political elites, however, and for the most part, refuse to grant reality any reality, because they’ve been taught that mind creates reality. They reject the primacy of existence. They reject an Aristotelian approach to reality. Reality must conform to their imaginings of what it should be, but isn’t, and can’t be, ever. They have never questioned their received wisdom, received, by the way, from a long line of philosophers like Kant and Schopenhauer and Hume, among others, a wisdom which claims that metaphysics is malleable, that it can be whatever one wants it to be, if one wants it badly enough, or if it displeases one.
I think the European elites understand Islam and Shariah and the perils they pose to Western civilization, but their minds are in the grip of political correctness. It’s a tight, vise-like hold, tenacious, and ultimately suicidal. It’s not an arm-lock. It’s a mind-lock. They believe that Western culture isn’t superior to any other, that it’s unfair to compare Islam with Western culture, which they regard as too “materialistic” and not “spiritual” enough, as they think Islam is.
Islam, they’ll say, may not have given the world much of value in terms of material advantages, as Western culture has. Its value lies in the imperative that everyone must submit to it, body and soul, which, according to their lights, is more important than higher standards of living, or technological advances to improve and extend man’s life and enjoyment, because it’s “spiritual” and will make you a better person. Islam has offered man none of those things – only submission and physical death or slavery, or spiritual death if one submits to it. Spiritual death is raising one’s derriere in the air five times a day and reciting some mystical chant and pleading to a ghost to please be nice to you because you’ve been a loyal and unswerving maquette.
And so I think once you understand that, you’ll understand the conflict and why the political elite is vested in “multiculturalism” and “diversity” and surrendering to (or accommodating) Islam, and expects everyone else to surrender to it, too.
Or at least defer to Islam from a decent multicultural, diversity-minded, submissive state of dhimmitude.
In one sense, the elites, in dealing with Islam, are like Snoopy pretending to be a World War One Ace flying a Sopwith Camel, sitting atop his doghouse. But sooner or later the rabid pit bull next door is going to charge over and have him for lunch.
Why would the elite be ashamed of Western culture? Why would they say it isn’t superior to Islamic culture, whatever that stagnant, 7th century culture might be? Is it the Christian “sin” of pride that moves them to refuse to acknowledge that Western culture is superior? Are they afraid to defend and uphold values? What values do they hold? Daniel Greenfield, writing as Sultan Knish, wrote a seminal essay on just that very subject, “The Death of Europe.” They hold “European” values that Muslims disdain, and even condemn.
It is politically incorrect to point out that Western culture and values make possible, for example, open-heart surgery, while Islamic culture does not, and has not ever done so, and in fact glories in wholesale butchery. This is an inconvenient truth to liberals and all Islamophiles. They avert not only their eyes, but their minds.
For example, the anthropological global warming bloc wants everyone to believe that global warming (it was once global cooling, now it’s just “climate change”) can be reduced or controlled, and rejects the idea that earth’s climate is continually changing and has been for billions of years, that the behavior of sun has no effect on climate, that there are dynamics governing climate change that are barely understood. This is an example of pretending that something is that actually isn’t, even though the evidence is available in Internet abundance. This bloc, politically motivated, upholds “science” and nature, but in fact, rejects both science and nature. Reality is rejected by them in favor of their own“reality” in defense of their numerology-based new alchemy which they call “settled science.” Some in the “climate change” bloc are calling for the imprisonment of or even the death penalty for scientists who dare contest the whole business as legitimate science and call it Marxist agitprop.
Germany, Sweden and other European countries – with state or state-controlled news media in a conspiracy with their governments – suppress news of the rise of rapes by Muslim “immigrants” for fear that such news will prejudice native Germans and Swedes against the invaders. The British authorities have adopted the same deceptive, “nothing to see here” policy in regards to the Muslim sex grooming gangs. They seek to establish a citizenry that will tolerate without complaint the Muslim invasion and the crimes committed against on the citizenry. They seek to assure the citizenry that nothing extraordinary is happening, even though Muslims prey on the citizenry. An ignorant citizenry, they contend, is a “strong” citizenry. It will integrate well with the moral and political actions of their predators, and won’t cause the untoward business of jailing people for speaking their minds or resisting their own rapes, murders, and robberies.
Let’s take a look at the epistemology of three members of the European elite, whom I quoted in my column, “Censorship: Over Here and Over There.” And who are the European elite? In 2012 Oxford University Press published The Europe of Elites: A Study into the Europeanness of Europe’s Political and Economic Elites, by Heinrich Best, György Lengyel, and Luca Verzichelli. These three professorial gentlemen define those elites as the top and most influential tiers of individual European governments and layers of wealth whose “Eurelitist” status may overlap into the upper bureaucratic and unelected echelons of the European Union.
It starts with the assumption that there is a formal and factual asymmetry between elites and non-elites, in that the former are formally entitled (by laws and constitutions) or factually empowered (by property rights) to make and influence decisions on behalf of the latter. The focus of our conceptual and empirical work is, therefore, the visions, attitudes, and opinions of elites concerning European integration. We address national elites specifically, because we maintain that the multilevel construction of the European edifice still attributes a pivotal role to national political and social institutions, and to the elites who are running them…..
The strong ‘Eurelitist’ bias in this approach has been systematized in the theory of permissive consensus, which maintains that the process of European unification is mainly driven by the self-interest of elites who enjoy a fairly wide margin of autonomy, as opposed to the general population, in pursuing policies of European integration. According to this approach, European integration is seen by elites as ‘a means to advance political goals which they would not be able to enforce alone’ ….
We can examine the statements of Federica Mogherini, who is the current High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, basically the EU’s Minister for Foreign Affairs. Mogherini made the following remarks at the Call to Europe V: Islam in Europe FEPS conference on June 24, 2015. (Quotations from the following European Union elitists are taken from the article, “The EU Elites’ Positive View of Islam,” October 14th, by Fjordman, at Gates of Vienna, which I also cite in “Censorship: Over Here and Over There.”)
“The very idea of a clash of civilizations is at odds with the most basic values of our European Union — let alone with reality. Throughout our European history, many have tried to unify our continent by imposing their own power, their own ideology, their own identity against the identity of someone else. With the European project, after World War II, not only we accepted diversity: we expressed a desire for diversity to be a core feature of our Union. We defined our civilization through openness and plurality: a mind-set based on blocs does not belong to us. Some people are now trying to convince us that a Muslim cannot be a good European citizen, that more Muslims in Europe will be the end of Europe. These people are not just mistaken about Muslims: these people are mistaken about Europe — that is my core message — they have no clue what Europe and the European identity are. This is our common fight: to make this concept accepted both in Europe and beyond Europe. For Europe and Islam face some common challenges in today’s world. The so-called Islamic State is putting forward an unprecedented attempt to pervert Islam for justifying a wicked political and strategic project.”
It isn’t a “clash of civilizations.” Islam isn’t a civilization. A totalitarian ideology subscribed to by countless lobotomized living zombies over fourteen centuries is not a civilization. The West is a civilization that arose from the ashes of the Dark Ages because men rejected slavery and the unreal and rediscovered the glory of man. Islam is a cult that relishes the prospect of returning men to grovel in the ashes and ruins of a new Dark Age in supplication to Allah.
Note the insufferable, elitist arrogance in her words. It’s “our European Union,” reflecting an inbred presumptuousness that she speaks for all the non-elitist Europeans who are currently chomping at the bit to leave the Union or at least to tar and feather the “higher-ups” who have bent to German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s will and arranged for the inundation of Europe by Muslim hordes.
Mogherini believes that her European civilization “expressed a desire for diversity to be a core feature of our Union. We defined our civilization through openness and plurality: a mind-set based on blocs does not belong to us.” Whether or not blocs belong to it, the blocs will come about; they are doing so even as I write this. Her “mind-set” of plurality and diversity is directly at odds with those of the disdained hoi polloi.
She whines that “Some people are now trying to convince us that a Muslim cannot be a good European citizen, that more Muslims in Europe will be the end of Europe.” It does not occur to Mogherini that by definition, a Muslim cannot be European, cannot be anything but a Muslim. He will always be a Muslim, first and foremost. European? Not so much. His first allegiance is to Islam. Mogherini must help to make this concept – that of a tamed, non-violent, European Muslim, loyal to the state, who doesn’t feel so special that he expects everyone else to defer to his “needs” – accepted in Europe and beyond. If she must knock some heads together, she won’t mind. In the meantime, Europe is dying from the cancer of Islam.
Note that she criticizes those who, “Throughout our European history… many have tried to unify our continent by imposing their own power, their own ideology, their own identity against the identity of someone else.” By that, I gather she was making a circumspect reference to Hitler and to Mussolini (Mogherini is Italian). But she would have no qualms about imposing her own ideology and identity on everyone else.
She claims that the depredations of ISIS “pervert” Islam, echoing President George W. Bush and numerous other political ignoramuses. Islam cannot be perverted, even though every atrocity committed by ISIS is chapter-and-verse, by-the-book sanctioned and encouraged in the Koran and Hadith. Islam is intrinsically a perversion of the concept of morality. Islam is a death-worshipping cult, which is why we witness so much death within and without its realm.
There is a blog site, FrontPage, whose motto is: “Inside every liberal is a totalitarian screaming to get out.” Mogherini is a liberal and one can detect the totalitarian in her screaming to get out. One can see how she would like to “manifest” her wishes onto the rest of the European continent. There is something wrong with a self-made billionaire who turns into a narcissistic, ostentatious megalomaniac.
What is worse and far more offensive is a well-heeled bureaucrat like Mogherini who is a megalomaniac with other people’s money and lives.
Up next for the couch is former Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans. He is the First Vice-President of the European Commission. He made these remarks at the First Annual Colloquium on Fundamental Rights in Brussels on October 1st, 2015.
“We have seen the homes of asylum seekers set on fire. And we have heard political leaders declare that their countries would not accept refugees if they were Muslim. Anti-Muslims [sic] incidents are multiplying across Europe. We’re seeing a huge spike of attacks. Verbal insinuations, closed-mindedness, prejudice, discrimination. The rise of Islamophobia is the one of the biggest challenges in Europe. It is a challenge to our vital values, to the core of who we are. Never has our societies’ capacity for openness, for tolerance, for inclusion been more tested than it is today. Diversity is now in some parts of Europe seen as a threat. Diversity comes with challenges. But diversity is humanity’s destiny.”
How dare Europeans resent, oppose, and fear the influx of hundreds of thousands of Muslim “refugees” into their countries? How dare they try to take action against the invasion of their countries by barbarians who have been quite frank about their reason for invading those countries: that they’re there for the welfare state benefits? The enemies of diversity must all be Islamophobes! And racists, too! And xenophobes! It’s not the Muslims’ fault that they are of different races and nationalities and have quaint cultural practices! It’s not the Muslims’ fault that they’re not…well…white.
And then one weighs all the crimes committed by Muslims against native Europeans and one sees a strong element of racism in the actions of Muslims. These crimes are not racially motivated? The motto of Bare Naked Islam is: “It’s not Islamophobia if they really ARE trying to kill you.” Or rape you. Or rob you. Or stab you. Since the beginning of the “asylum seeker” invasion, crime rates in Sweden and Germany and in other European countries have soared, with most of the crimes being committed by…Muslims.
Welfare states attract the worst elements of society. They are inherently evil. Welfare states depend on a fettered productive sector of any society or nation to subsidize their “benefits.” They encourage and sustain parasitical mind-sets and attitudes. Europeans can blame themselves for tolerating their various welfare systems. They have been an attraction for the worst kind of immigrants: the ones who don’t intend to sustain the system by working or ever pay into it. This is as true in America as it is in Europe.
That being said, Frans Timmermans’ epistemology is very, very selective. His words reveal not only a vindictive megalomania, but also a psychosis. He and Mogherini suffer from both maladies. Well, not “suffer,” as the term is usually meant. They clearly enjoy and revel in their mental “disorders.”
I will discuss the mental whirligigs of the third EU bureaucrat, Vera Jourova, in Part Two.
But here’s an example of “diversity” to ponder: Locking a man in a cage with an orangutan, a gorilla, and a troop of baboons. What do you think would happen?
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