Last Crusade 33: Beware the Heffalump
Any advocate for the Devil’s Party, because he cannot summon the truth to his side to battle his opposition, cannot argue the merits of the case. He must silence the opposition. This he does by denying speakers any platform to speak, by driving honest debate away from the public square, and by luring the onlookers to close their minds and stopper their ears.
A recurring lie of the Devil’s party is that the speaker is increasing the danger to society by promoting dangerous ideas. Merely the discussion is a danger, since time is short. The current emergency is immediate and immense.
That is why the mass starvation or new ice age or flooding or drought caused by global warming or global cooling or both are always said to be ten or twenty years in the future. This is true even of predictions made twenty or forty years ago, none of which ever eventuate.
In order to promote the idea that the emergency is immediate, it is useful merely to scream hysterically and foam at the mouth like a rabid dog. This energetic display of twitching, glaring-eyed insanity deters calm men who have day jobs from engaging the speaker in debate.
The claim of emergency is also used to subvert the basic liberties on which any Christian and Civilized polity is based: the freedom to exchange and debate one’s views. The sole freedom in which all other freedoms are rooted is the freedom to tell the truth.
But the most important point is that the danger which the emergency holds over all our heads and threatens with so much menace to drop is and must be utterly imaginary and unreal. To be afraid of plague or war will not do: plagues can be cured by doctors, and wars be fought by soldiers, and in the case of real emergencies the real steps to be taken to face them are rational ones. Real problems can be faced, real enemies be fought, and real challenges met, and, with the grace of God, overcome.
On the other hand, when the danger is as imaginary and unreal as the heffalump from Winnie the Pooh, the merely fact that nothing can be done to alleviate the unreal danger means that anything can be proposed. It means that the proposition cannot be discussed rationally.
It means that whatever is proposed is regarded as a necessity. This conveniently allows all discussion of efficient versus inefficient means to solve the problem to be shelved indefinitely: since any honest discussion of the problem, any honest analysis of what needs to be done, would leave those who invented the problem with nothing to do and nothing to complain about.
In the eyes of ordinary men, who are accustomed to look at problems as something to be studied and solved, the concept of seeking out utterly imaginary hefflumps and labeling them as problems in order to prevent solutions, the behavior of the Devil’s Party is so contrary to common sense as to render it invisible. The sheer audacity of the deception acts as camouflage.
But the motive here is not difficult to understand.
The purpose is complaint, not solution. We are dealing with a psychological imbalance or severe moral gangrene or both. By inventing an imaginary problem, by hunting a heffalump, the perpetrator gains several advantages in dealing with his own internal demons.
First, he seems wise, as he is farsighted enough to detect spoor of heffalump invisible to normal mortal men. It is for this reason that the perpetrators of such frauds often cloak themselves in some sort of pseudo-scientific authority, in these days, often by having a group of politicians or newspapermen or someone else without any scientific qualifications, announcing to the public that the perpetrator is an esteemed scientist, or agrees with a consensus of anonymous experts.
So the art of hunting heffalumps will naturally seem attractive to fools who, more than anything else, wish to seem wise in their own eyes.
But his wisdom is as fake as the diploma awarded to the Scarecrow by the Wizard of Oz.
Second, he seems a prophet in a land of infidels. It is for this reason that the various dooms and drawbacks predicted are always obscure and indirect, always a few years in the future, never something here and now which anyone can see with his eye. When his warnings are disregarded by all but the True Believers, the prophet can wrap himself in the flag of victimhood, pretending to be misunderstood, a man before his time, a martyr, and so on.
For men of low self esteem, discovering a convincing excuse to explain away why no one listens to you is an intoxicating brew indeed. But here the perpetrator awards himself the palm of martyrdom without the effort, pain, and sacrifice of actually being martyred.
And his self sacrifice and self sanctimony can be nicely disguised as philanthropy, motivated by love of fellow man. All the sane men who oppose or ignore him can be dismissed and belittled as hardhearted and mean spirited. But the compassion of the martyr is not in him, no, not even a drop, because the problem his alleged big heart allegedly urges him to solve exists only in a hallucination, not in reality. So, again, his compassion is as fake as the testimonial awarded to the Tin Woodman by the Wizard of Oz.
Third, he seems a crusader in a land of indifferent and slumbering ignoramuses. While he fights the problem, a spark enters his life, a thrill, a sense of purpose. For now he serves a great cause, and he is trying to right a wrong or save the world.
For a craven, fearful and small souled person, the chance to fool oneself into donning the outward coat of bravery is alluring beyond measure. But, as before, it is as fake as the medal of honor granted to the Cowardly Lion.
Finally, the perpetrator might get worldly reward as well, fame, or wealth, or the power to interfere with the lives of other men. It is frightening and shocking how often governments and great social movements are set in motion or are taken over by crackpot ideas perpetrated by hunters of the dread heffalump. In each case, the perpetrator either ascribes to himself, or to the state, superhuman powers to change nature or human nature.
It is intoxicating indeed to the perpetrator to pretend to himself that he has such magical powers, or soon will have, in order to achieve the impossible. He claims he has the power to slow the rise of the oceans, to overcome the patriarchy, abolish the White Supremacists, stop the witchhunt of McCarthy, undo the machinations of the Elders of Zion, or bring to an end all the evils produced by Capitalism that Utopia be achieved.
In which case, like the Wizard himself, he claims to work miracles: but the Wizard is a humbug, and his alleged magic is a puppet show run by the man behind the curtain.
The difference, of course, is that the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and Lion actually did, in the WIZARD OF OZ movie, face an evil witch and save Dorothy, and they actually had all the qualities they sought for themselves, but did not recognize. To make the analogy fit, one would have to write some perverse version of the story, where the Wizard was a wicked man, not just poor wizard, and had invented tales of wicked witches to frighten fools living in the Emerald City into accepting him as protector and liege.
The repeating pattern forms a summary of the history of the Twentieth Century. Let us note the highlights in chronological order:
At the Turn of the Century (last century, that is) industrialization was improving the lives of the poor, making fortunes for the rich and making famine a thing of the past. The classical liberal philosophy of the equality of rank and equal protection under the law had swept all opposition into the dustbin of history. No rational argument could be framed against it. Serfdom and slavery were abolished.
Hence only an irrational argument was raised, primarily by the Victorian writer Karl Marx. He was not a philosopher nor an economist in the honest sense of those words. He was a malcontent, and borrowed just enough ideas from Hegel or Adam Smith to cobble together his heffalump, which he called capitalism.
Marx blamed the free market for everything from breaking up the family unit to child labor to poor wages to slave labor to tyranny. In reality, the free market had already abolished the social ills of which Marx complained, and was the only social institution capable of doing so. Hindering, crippling, or abolishing the free market merely reintroduces these ills. We have seen, repeated endlessly as experiments in Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, and even in slower and gentler form among European nations, the results of both mild and violent socialism. Marxism is nothing more than blaming the doctor for the disease.
Marxism is a worldview that identifies an utterly imaginary problem, the alleged conspiracy of the economic activity of investment as if that activity were membership in a ruling social class, a class which systematically conspired against, exploited, defrauded, and oppressed another class that is not a class but an economic activity, namely, wage earners.
The mere fact that a wage earner can invest his earnings by buying stocks shows the Marxist enemy is a heffalump. Also, the fact that corporations, large or small, are in competition with one another for limited customer dollars. Also the logical paradox of saying that abolishing the price system will lower prices of necessities to the poor.
Marxism deals with these and all other criticisms by alleging that all critics are biased by the ideological superstructure of their thinking which is conditioned into existence by the means of production used by the economic class of which the critic is a member, hence the critic is impeached as biased and unscientific before any argument is heard. Marxism also indulges freely in paranoid conspiracy thinking, by alleging a sinister unity of purpose rests behind all human activity, all of which is ultimately economic. It is to be noted in passing that Marx himself did not write his treatises and manifestos to make money, that is, his motive was not ultimately economic.
It is child’s-play to find the flaws and self-contradictions in this morass of jabberwocky and nonsense that surrounds and justifies the Marxist worldview. Yet this psychopathology and pseudo-religion conquered the Second and Third Worlds in a single generation, and stood within a step of total and unending world hegemony, before it stumbled.
Note the pattern. That the perpetrators of socialism, like the Wizard, have humbug superhuman powers, namely, to bring about Utopia on Earth, and to abolish poverty and social injustice.
Their constant talk of revolution pins the medal of the Cowardly Lion to the breast, as if marches and riots, book burnings, censorship-via-mob shouting, and looting by masked thugs were crusades, not craven crimes.
Their alleged compassion for the poor and downtrodden flourishes the testimonial of the Tin Woodman, as if socialism were meant to aid the poor, rather than grind their faces into the dirt.
Their alleged scientific knowledge of history, and their gobbledygook of pseudo-intellectual phrases, Orwellian doubtlethink and gassy doubletalk puts the diploma of the Scarecrow in their hand.
During World War Two, a particularly virulent brand of socialism known as national socialism, or fascism, made a bold and direct attempt at world conquest. In that case, the heffalump was an alleged conspiracy by international Jewry to undermine the German people. This particular unsightly madness has been revived in the current generation with hysterical theories about white genocide.
The pattern is again the same: this time the Scarecrow’s diploma goes to junk science fretting about I.Q. scores, genetic purity, miscegenation, and Darwinian blither. The Tin Woodman’s testimonial is given for patriotic love for one’s fatherland or mother race. The Cowardly Lion’s medal goes to bold warriors who target what is perhaps the weakest and most inoffensive tribe of men on the planet, the Jews, who will not strike back, or only tentatively, even against their most fanatical foes. The Rules of Engagement used by the state of Israel against the mad bombers and Jihadists seeking their blood would be comical if the affair were not so serious.
After the war came the Cold War, and the heffalump in the mind of the press became America, namely, a thing called McCarthyism. This was a normal operation of the law in response to what history has since proven to be the activities of paid agents of the Soviet Union, attempting to infiltrate the State Department, and to influence Hollywood and so on. Here, the perpetrators pretending that the normal operation of the law against foreign spies was paranoia hence stupid; and was bigotry based on hatred and xenophobia; and only the bravest of reporters could rip free the mask of hypocrisy of the mighty and powerful who lurked behind this abuse of the law.
The same pattern is present again of a pretense of wisdom by the foolish, of compassion by the heartless, and of courage by the craven. No reporter defying Senator McCarthy was in any danger of anything aside from being awarded a Pulitzer Prize by his likeminded peers.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, cultural Marxism came to the fore, taking the forms of various pathologies of environmentalism, feminism, and social justice warfare.
The heffalump of environmentalism changes every few years. The Greens were wrong about the DDT scare, the ALAR scare, the radon scare, the mercury in the fish scare, the acid rain scare, the hole in the ozone layer scare, the power cables or mobile phone towers causing cancer scare, the chloroflourocarbons scare, the overpopulation scare, the salmonella scare, the Mad Cow disease scare, and so on. The absurdity of the claims made by the Global Warming scaremongers is beyond parody. Every storm and flood is blamed on it, even in decades when the average global temperature is dropping, and the severity and frequency of storms is also dropping.
The surest sign that an alleged problem was a heffalump to begin with is the speed at which it falls into the memory hole of public opinion, once the alarmists stop ringing the alarm. Who had read any headlines about the immediate dangers of overpopulation causing mass starving in India by the 1980s recently?
But a real problem that really exists, such as the high homicide rate or failing schools among the inner cities, continues to be discussed as long as the problem persists, because the problem is real.
The heffalump the feminists oppose is, of course, the Patriarchy, and the rape culture, and the forms of oppression so small that without any sense of irony the heffalump hunters call them micro-aggressions.
That the most privileged generation of woman of all human history, and the generation most well protected by unfair laws and customs set firmly in their favor, should nonetheless complain about oppression shows that the complaint is the point, not the solution. There is no solution. One cannot break a glass ceiling when there is no glass ceiling. Even this metaphor is gives away it innate dishonesty: the so called ceiling preventing the rise of women to positions of wealth, power, and esteem is called glass precisely because it is invisible.
Now, this could be because it is real but so well hidden that no evidence exists to confirm its reality. The same thing could be said for flying saucers crewed by bigfoot. The other option is that it is invisible because there is no such thing.
The Patriarchy is to feminism what the Capitalist is to Marxism: an imaginary scapegoat.
In places where real oppression of women exists, that is, among Mohammedan communities, nothing is said. Even to mention the ugly reality of genital mutilation, wife beating, honor killing, and rape gangs is to invite the accusation of racism.
Which brings us to the heffalump of the current news cycle: the White Supremacist. As with the feminist, the black in America lives under the best circumstances his race has ever enjoyed in history. Racism is a problem solved by colorblindness, that is, by treating each man as an individual, and rewarding or punishing him based on his individual actions and merits, not based on an arbitrary and involuntary group classification.
Within the last decade or so, it became commonplace among the heffalump hunters to declare that colorblindness was a new and subtler form of racism, and that only white folk could be racist, due to the condemnation any given white deserves for being a member of an arbitrary and involuntary group classification.
It also became fashionable to claim that whites were born to a life of privilege merely because of their skin color. I first heard this claim spoken by a young black woman going to an Ivy League school talking in tones of sneering condescension to and older white woman of rural background who was bankrupt and living in a hovel. A member of the elite was lecturing a member of the lower middle class about privilege.
The absurdity of the accusation is absolute when it is spoken in a nation were laws and lawsuits favoring blacks above whites are routinely enforced, and hiring or promoting an unqualified black above a qualified white or oriental is commonplace.
Within the last year, basically since Trump’s election, this racism against Whites has reached the tipping point where a group of pro-White racists called the Alt-Right has arisen in direct response to the endless accusations by pro-Black racists that everyone not a pro-Black racist was a racist. This may look, at first glance, as if the heffalump in this case is real, but the irony is that this is hardly real racism.
None of the so-called White Supremacists (at least, none I can find authentically quoted) are calling for laws to assure the superior status of the White Race over the Untermenschen.
All they are doing is echoing the logic is the Left, and asking, that if Black Lives Matter, and if the law can support and enforce racial quotas in hiring and college admissions and the like, to help Blacks merely because they are Black and for no other reason, why not also say White Lives Matter, and have the law enforce quotas to help White merely because they are White and for no other reason?
Is this real racism? If you say Black Lives Matter is legit, then you must say the Alt-Right is legit. If you say the Alt-Right is racist, then you must say Black Lives Matter is racist.
(For my money, one is the father of the other and shares a family resemblance, with the marked difference that Black Lives Matter is a violent group that murders cops, and their violence is called peaceful by the Fake News, whereas the Alt-Right are a peaceful group called violent by the Fake News.)
The sign that the problem is a heffalump is precisely the means allegedly needed to combat it. If a man asks you to buy him an expensive elephant rifle to hunt a fox that has been eating your chickens, you know he merely wants a fine firearm. If he asks you for a bottle of wine and tickets to the theater, you know he is not going to hunt your fox at all.
In the case of all these examples, the heffalump hunters allegedly are hunting the capitalists, the Jews, the Witchhunters, the polluters, patriarchs, and White supremacists, but in no case, is any limited government solution being requested.
To hunt a fox, one needed only limited numbers of hounds or horses. To hunt the heffalump, nothing is ever enough.
In these named cases what is being requested is an absolute power over the entire economy, the racial mixture of the population, all human industrial activity including cattle farming and breathing, all courtship and family and sexual relations, and all social relations whatsoever, anywhere any trace of privilege might reside.
And the absolute power being requested cannot be used justly, precisely because the standards of justice are what the perpetrators seek to abolish.
If a fox is raiding the henhouse, you want it dead, and you take steps to hunt it. A wild animal merely living nearby, who poses no threat and has no history of raiding, the farmer has no reason to hunt, if the creature poses no threat. This is the way real problems are met.
This is why juries try men based on the specific crime he is alleged to have committing, not on his arbitrary group membership in a group he never volunteered to join and from which he cannot resign, even if he would. The jury trial is a carefully evolved social institution meant to reduce crime while acting as a check on the overreach of the police. Because the problem to be faced is real and specific, the institution evolved to combat it is likewise specific.
It is not something the capitalists do that the Marxist wishes to halt. It is the middle-class the Marxist hates. And the rich he wants dead. Likewise the Jews for the national socialist; the industrialist for the Green; the Patriarchy for the feminist; and White privilege for the race baiter.
It is every member of the group the activist wants to harm. It is nothing any given member does, it is merely what he is. What he is, in fact, is a scapegoat: an innocent bystander onto whose back is placed all the sins of the community.
The means used to punish scapegoats are and must be the opposite of something like trial by jury. The accusations must be vague. They apply to groups, not individuals. Guilt is presumed before any facts are examined, as facts are irrelevant. Only the act of making the accusation matters.
The thing is not done to solve the problem allegedly threatening the community. The problem being solved is personal, a spiritual problem of envy and the mental problem psychological projection: the fool wants a diploma, and the heartless man wants an testimonial for philanthropy, and the coward wants a medal, and they all want to be the Wizard, and have the masses quake before a booming voice. This is the way imaginary problems are met.
Of course, going to a confessional booth is the only way, in real life, to address problems of envy and psychological projection. Pretending these problems are caused by heffalumps merely makes the heffalumps bigger.