Comments by "TJ Marx" (@tjmarx) on "Academy of Ideas"
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These are very lofty jdeas, which are evidently cherrypicked by someone who has never known totalitarian rule. We need only look to Palestine, to Myanmar, to see what happens under totalitarian rule.
Based on this video Palestinians just need to protest, refuse to obey and create a society underneath their totalitarian colonial state of Israel. But they've been doing those things for 75 years, how's it working out for them? Myanmar has been doing the same for almost as long. Can you name a single totalitarian state that was overcome by civil disobedience? 😂
The nature of totalitarian states is brutality, they will label all those whom oppose them a terror¡st threat to peace to have everyone else cheering their execution. Totalitarian states will beat, break and destroy people and things to garner that compliance.
Counter culture social structures does not deter totalitarianjsm either. Indeed, more frequently it is the source of totalitarianism. The PC movement started as a counter culture movement, that grew and informed additions such as critical race theory and what is colloquially referred to as wokeism. We've gone from togetherness and fighting against segregation, to a movement in popular mind fighting for division and separation. It's all swings and round-abouts.
As the movement has grown over the decades it has become increasingly violent, nasty and extreme in the enforcement of its ideology. This has caused a growing number of people to submit. The capture of the universities allowed the ideology to creep into every major social structure in society and take hold. To create a new normal. Anyone who does not agree is labelled a "far right extremeist" by their second prize capture, the media.
There's a reason discussion of civil disobedience is allowable, and why peaceful protest is legal. They do not threaten in any way, the powers that be. Those things which do work are illegal even to talk about. One only needs to look to the history of what kind of revolution fell every totalitarian regime in history. It starts with a v, and no I don't mean vendetta. It only works when the masses are sufficiently disillusioned so as to at least not interfere.
But there is a problem with all of this, it's one highlighted by Russian and Ukrainian culture. It isn't by accident that the fall of totalitarian communism left those in organised crime or connection there to running things. Who in every day society are the masters of hiding their activities from the state, whilst also being strong enough and rich enough to oppose them in any meaningful way? Organised crime. Whenever you start any kind of opposition to an established totalitarian regime you inevitably must make a deal with organised crime for their assistance. I don't think that gets talked about anywhere near enough in any of these essays on lofty ideals.
Freedom isn't free. It's purchased in lives through a deal with the least savoury in society. This is the real reason the masses comply. They aren't willing to pay that cost or make that deal. It's far cheaper to comply.
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What nonsense. A life requiring delusion to find meaning is no life at all. Religion makes slaves of us all. To claim that meaning can not exist in ones life without religion is holds no water.
Yes, if one fills their life with consumerism or other hollow pursuits they will lack meaning. But to suggest all pursuits outside religion, or spirituality hold that same outcome is ludicrous. Indeed, religion itself quite often leaves one wanting and lacking true meaning or purpose. There is more meaning in truth, than there should ever be in the delusion of religion.
The rise of anxiety and depression do not come from a lack of religion, but from a simultaneous lack of struggle and lack of life experience. To the infant, the momentary lose of a toy in discipline seems both an eternity and life changing, yet it turns out to be neither. When we breed children whom have been so wrapped in cotton wool their entire lives that they've never experienced and overcome repeated insurmountable odds to shape their confience. Never learned self reliance through skills and experience. Never had to want for anything or struggle through life. Where all things are delivered on silver platter. What should one expect the outcome to be as independence is thrust upon them but a bundle of nerves knowing they can't stay as they are but unable to comprehend a way forward. And even if they should comprehend a means, deficient in the self confidence and self reliance to make it a reality. After all what is anxiety but doubt, in ones self, in ones actions, in ones place. And what is depression but knowing one can not stay as they are, but being for whatever reason resistant or unsure of how to change.
The problem is not a lack of religion, but inadequate community and parental structures united under a unified goal. Secularism can get there. It just needs society to finally stop returning to the drug of religion like a battered spouse to an abusive ex seeking tempofary familiarity over the ability to grow and thrive through something new.
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