6min chapter

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#15 - God’s Socialist, pt. 5: The Wounded King

The Martyr Made Podcast

CHAPTER

The Love Potion - I'm a Liar

i've been running my mouth for a while n because ive been very indulgent. And i've been actually just trying, forike the last 20 minutes, to work my way back over to the actual topic of the podcast, and i'm failing. So i'ms make you guy suffer through an abrupt segway, or were going to be here all day. Here's the point. Jim jones was a liar, ok? Before he was anything else. And notwithstanding everything else i have said about him, he was a liar. He told himself that his lies were in the service of a greater as. But lies told with good intentions corrupt just as surely as malicious slander

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And people tell lies when they're trying to get a relationship started all the time. They lie to give the other person a false sense of who they are, to create an image of themselves that the other person might be attracted to. Which is essentially what the love potion would do. And the consequences are the same. Instead of lying awake at night worrying that the magic spells wear off, you lie awake wondering if she shell discover your bull shit. Anyway, i've been running my mouth for a while n because ive been very indulgent. And i've been actually just trying, forike the last 20 minutes, to work my way back over to the actual topic of the podcast, and i'm failing. So i'ms make you guy suffer through an abrupt segway, or were going to be here all day. Here's the point. Jim jones was a liar, ok? Before he was anything else. And notwithstanding everything else i have said about him, he was a liar. He told himself that his lies were in the service of a greater as. But lies told with good intentions corrupt just as surely as malicious slander. He covered up old lies with more lies. And in his paranoia at his lies being found out, over time, he turned people's temple into a totalitarian state in miniature. Not by himself, you know many of his people, his inner circle, the planning commission of about 50 to a hundred people, depending on which period we're talking about, an an inner inner circle called staff, mostly made up of his female sexual partners. They were in on the lies. They participated in them, and sometimes they pushed him as much as he pushed them. All totolitarian systems work to undermine their subjects sense of reality, to break up any relationships that are not mediated by the system, to get their subjects to say and do and go along with things that compromise themselves, and to create a system like the one marshal mc lean described as a whispering gallery, in which virtually everyone is engaged in keeping every one else under surveillance. We're compromised every time we nod our head along with something we don't believe to be true. And every time it happens, we lose the strength to refuse the next time the critic theodore dalrymple once said that in my study of communist societies, i came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist paganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate. And therefore, the less it corresponds to reality, the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even more, when they are forced to repeat lies themselves, they lose, once and for all, their sense of probity to assent to obvious lies is, in some small way, to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is eroded and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. Dalrymple makes that point about moral compromise, but there's something even worse, even more insidious. Over time, we lose the perspective necessary to even know the difference between truth and lies, especially if we've been cut off from other ways of looking at things. The sociological concept of the imaginary, orer the social imaginary, refers to the web of inter subjective symbols and assumptions that structure life in a given society. Deep assumptions, not not superficial beliefs. The terms not referring to, say, common agreement about whether the moon landing was real, but to a common agreement about whether it is appropriate or possible for a sane person to even ask a question like that. A totalitarian system always, it builds up around a fragile social imaginary that is not going to be able to survive con with the outside world. Cults have been pretty common in america over the years, partly because, you know, our shared social imaginary has always been looser than in other places, and the grip of tradition has always been relatively weak here. And so there's more room, politically, socially, psychological, there's more room for people to split off and turn inward and start doing their own thing. But some eras are more ripe than others for the proliferation of alternative ways. Space opens up when existing authority structures are stabilized or can't rise effectively. Meta challenge. Colts proliferated in europe after the reformation. I came afterthe the peasant wars, the 14 hundreds, after the hundred years war and the plague and the 13 hundreds, you get the reformation. Colts prolifery. But they became lessc as the catholic church and the protestant national church as established their dominions. The 19 sixties counterculture movement sprouted up after faith in the ideas and the institutions and the people in power had been shaken by a youth rebellion that the adults of our society seemed unable to comprehend or control, and by changes in media consumption patterns, and by by vianom water gate, you know, the violent resistance to the civil rights movement that people were watching on t v.

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