Tal Bachman: We Have Met the Enemy, part IV

If you're just joining us, this is Part IV of an ongoing series about how patriots can take back their country (see parts I, II, and III). (Thanks all for joining in the fun in the comments section.)

My first thought when I considered how patriots might take back their country was, know thine enemy. You know, Sun-Tzu and all. Seemed sensible enough.

So, I threw out a few of my own ideas about Wokism's nature and causes, then wound up mining a classic of political psychology, Erich Fromm's 1941 Escape from Freedom, for any additional insights.

Fromm contends that the great freedom created by modern society can leave people feeling isolated, anxious, and insecure. Some of those people will seek to overcome their painful feelings by immersing themselves in authoritarian, destructive, conformist political movements—like Wokism. That is, they will seek an escape from freedom. They will even seek to destroy it. If Fromm is correct, it's not just that, in great amounts, freedom enables anti-freedom movements like Wokism to arise, as per Popper's Paradox of Tolerance. It's that it makes them inevitable. On this view, too much freedom begets the dissolution of freedom.

This sounds plausible enough, if unpleasant. And it would be natural to hope Fromm has some equally plausible solution to lead us out of this mess. As it happens, that turns out not to be the case. To summarize Fromm:

The cure for isolation, anxiety, and insecurity is to achieve what he calls "the realization of self". We do that by practicing spontaneous activity at all times, "like the artist". We thereby overcome all the human needs which would otherwise drive us toward the escape from freedom.

I went back to Part I (https://www.steynonline.com/11195/tal-bachman-we-have-met-the-enemy):

we either enabled the destruction, or participated in it. Among other things, we broke up our families. We departed from traditional social codes ourselves, or said nothing when others did. If we even noticed at all, we contented ourselves with merely complaining as nutjobs took over our local school boards. We didn’t fight back.

We even continued to send our children to those schools, which we now knew were being run by nutjobs, because it was easier and cheaper than the alternatives, or because we vainly imagined that a twenty minute chat over dinner (if we even still had family dinners) would be enough to flush the previous six hours of Wokist brainwashing from our children’s heads. In most cases, obviously, the dinnertime chats were no match for the Wokist imams down at the local middle school madrassa.

We also voted for idiots. We voted for idiot mayors, idiot governors, idiot senators, idiot representatives, idiot party leaders, idiot presidential candidates, idiot everything. We allowed mega-donor fatcat globalists to take over the Republican Party. We sat by as they neutralized the Tea Party, and then resumed pushing for endless corporate tax breaks, endless job exportation, and endless scab labor via illegal immigration.

And we sat by while that same party—at least until Trump arrived—usually didn’t even bother to mention an opioid epidemic which has killed tens of thousands, or the cultural problems with extreme levels of illegal immigration, or a hundred other meat-and-potato problems, let alone try to solve them.

All the while, those of us who are Christians pushed our churches away from preaching James, who insisted on the necessity of right action, and toward Paul, whose language (notwithstanding Romans 6: 1-2) usually seems to suggest that Christianity reduces down to a perpetual “Get Out of Jail Free Card”. Paul’s creedal religion was so much easier than James’s action religion. Why, it felt just as good as a Hallmark card poem. For too many of us, that’s all that mattered.

And those of us who are Jews pushed our synagogues away from the weekly renewal of covenants with the God of Abraham, and toward becoming just another self-congratulatory social club for neighborhood Democrats.

Believing in the authority of man vs the simple belief in Gods Word. He created a perfect world, with man made in His image. Through Jesus He desires to walk, talk and keep you. He requires you to humble yourself and confess sin. The fallicy that science equals truth denies what science is today and has always been.. interpretation of evidence. There are billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by a global flood. That is the evidence we can see and touch. Science is the interpretation of evidence, continually wrong.
The mutation rates of our very dna do not support what consensus science says.
So now we are beginning to see what causes consensus.. force and depriving people of their liberty.
National sin is upon us. But. There is always a remnant.
Actionable faith is hard.. cant we just write checks and watch tv?

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.