THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

in reply to Shari:

Thanks for your thoughts!

I'd like to tie my response into the "Jammed Brains" topic of this thread, and then discuss part of what I am doing with my nephews to insure the jamming does not take place.

I've always had the belief the System was lying to us, big time, and the stories and histories we were given were not true, and were not true in some deep, substantial manner.

When I read the Frank Herbert's novel "Dune," I thought he was really discussing human consciousness, and how it is shaped by society to serve social ends. This is the underlying theme of Herbert's work - shaping and structuring human consciousness.

So, when Bob talked about Wordism, I remembered my readings of Hoffer, and of Hayakawa, and my Marketing Research course, taught by a singularly ruthless man.

Seeing my nephews in the light of where they came from, and I can see how so many were trapped in the hills in more ways than one. If you're nice, clean, upper-class church holds coat drives for poor people in the winter, these are the people whose clothing are hand-me-downs.

So is their thinking - the public school system exists to serve the local employers, who want trainable drones; that the local employers all left had no effect on the school system, whose curriculum is on autopilot.

THOSE are the people who, for the most part, composed "Movement Past," and their brains are jammed with lies, half-truths, and the dreams of the powerless.

They posed more of a threat to themselves than they do any system of governance...

I've spent a lot of time wondering why "Movement Past" didn't make any of the headway it should have, given the political realities it was facing.

I've broken it down to two factors:

One, most of the Leadership of "Movement Past" was Greatest Generation. Relentlessly submissive to authority, they waited for the Leader, and followed the most conspicuous Leader they could, who used the symbols they had been indoctrinated to follow.

So, for instance, Pierce used Kevin Alfred Strom's words on American Dissident Voices broadcasts, and they listened, just like they did when they were younger man, to the quietly wise voice of an old, wise man.

Strom's words, and Pierce's speaking, inspired them, and gave them comfort, of a sort, in a world win which they were destined, at best, to be marginal, at best.

They, and their fathers, came out of the hills - no tv in those days, particularly in the hills, and most anywhere, for poor people - and listened to the radio, while they were told what to think about World War II, and Korea, and even the early phases of Viet-Nam.

The symbols used to control their thinking had been implanted, and they reacted to them damn near blindly.

These were all they had to hold onto, in a world in which they were becoming increasingly marginalized, every day.

And they had been lied to.

Still, "Movement Past" included fat men wearing camo BDU's, adopting the Forms and Symbols of POWER when they were young men, without the Substance of Power to fill the empty Forms.

Daily, they grew older, poorer, and broker and they could not understand why this was happening.

So they retreated - blaming "the Communists," and, in time, "The New World Order," and you name it. They did not have a Positive Framework in which to place their efforts, and transform their Identities.

They used the Forms of the Past with greater intensity, to lesser avail...

Two, "Movement Past" seems damn near calculated to AVOID dealing with the issues before them in an intelligent manner, starting with the foundation of a Positive Theory of Race.

Thus the fat, subpotent alcoholics - which is what far too many of them had become - filled yesterday's Forms, with yesterday's Substance - the failed Substance of a day that had passed, and no one understood why, much less what to do about it. So they did the wrong things with ever-greater enthusiasm, until they were too old to do it anymore, and put aside their hooded robes, and contented themselves with the jobs they still at the factory.

And then the job went away and soon the factory closed down largely because they all missed the larger issues. I have been reading Beinhocker's "Origins of Wealth," and realize his models hold true in biological systems - organic systems - as well.

The Foundation of Society is Family. Jobs come and go, employers come and go, but the family remains, and the most successful Families are extended Families.