BADGE OF DISHONOUR - PART 1
Andrés Miguel Rondón recently published an article on the similarities between the destructive dictatorship of self-proclaimed Marxist Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and the Plutocratic Fascist Donald Trump. Rondón is an economist living in Madrid but was born and raised in Venezuela, so his first-hand experience under the insanity of Chavez and his sycophants cannot be ignored. His advice to the people of the US, however, is deeply flawed. His knowledge of human psychology is, clearly, limited.
His assessment of populism and its reliance on polarization is faultless, albeit a narrow view of all methods used in a campaign to manipulate and control a population, but his suggestions on a practical response are seriously defective. Rondón warns against providing what is needed to feed polarization, to leave “the theatre of injured decency behind” because it does not convince sycophants to change their minds. He makes the observation that “shaming has never been an effective method of persuasion.” Clearly, he wasn’t raised under the same kind of Catholicism people like me were.
The
assumption that a dictator rises to power because he is a genius gives Trump
credit where none is due. Lurking beneath murky waters waiting for those
foolish enough not to exercise caution, or who are blessed with an abundance of
stupidity, does not require genius, just the skill-set and natural instinct of
a predator. Deceiving fools does not require a great deal of intellect, only
the ability to manipulate them. Trump is both a business- and con- man. He
knows the market he seeks to exploit, and he knows how to exploit it. It is not
a “hissy fit” to defy hypocrisy, tyranny and injustice. The protests to oust
Trump do so by pointing out how badly his policies will and have failed and the
injustice they will inflict. There is no distinction between injury and policy
failure, so focussing only the second of these undermines the impact.
Besides,
there is no point in attempting to use facts to make your case. You cannot
reason with unreasonable people. There is no cure for wilful stupidity, only ignorance.
Trump’s fanatical supporters combine the very worst excesses of both. Idiocy.
The self-centred, narcissistic desire for their vile, hypocritical ideologies
to be imposed upon others, a vindictive need to inflict harm and suffering on
those they sadistically sacrifice to get what they want, and an inability to
take responsibility for the failures that result from their foolishness because
they project blame upon their victims to dehumanise them and justify the
injustices inflicted. It is the same behaviour of a domestic violence or child
abuser. Logic, fact, reality have no place in the vast, cavernous, vacuous
space inside the head of a Trump supporter, only delusional psychosis.
Seriously, consider the nature of the two candidates Trump and Sanders. They both gained so much support by focusing their efforts on the frustrated masses, albeit with different motives. Sanders actually cared about the people and wanted to deliver equity. Trump simply used them to get elected and impose his own vile agenda. Their supporters has almost the same grievances against the socio-economic situation in the US at the time, but with one very clear difference. Those supporting Sanders were disconnected from politics and the status quo, they wanted the ideologies of the US to apply to every citizen. But Trump’s sycophants were disconnected from reality. They didn’t vote for Sanders because he did not embrace racism, homophobia, misogyny, and fascism. Don’t fool yourselves, that’s what differentiated the two factions.
The intellect of individual Trump supporters is meaningless. The collective has been reduced to a mindless mob. Throughout this article are a number of links to news reports (actual news reports, not “alternative facts”) that should trigger normal emotional responses most of us share despite political differences. What separates the mentally well-adjusted is the inability of too many right-wing voters to understand they are supporting a party that doesn’t actually share their ideologies, values and moral and ethical integrity. The advice of Rondón to effectively discard the knowledge and intellect that separates you from them is foolish. It is like telling someone to throw away a buoyancy vest and jump into a stormy sea in order to rescue a group of violent ice-addicts holding onto anchors. Any attempts to form a connection with these people will only work until you use the word “but” and try to redirect them to a normal, rational way of behaving.
The only reason any dictatorship fails is time. Trump, like all the others, will be undone by his own greed, those reprehensible, self-serving ideologies and agendas, his paranoia and backstabbing that is a shared trait amongst his supporters and henchmen. The rule of Chavez probably would have continued had he not died. It continued for fourteen years despite the evidence of extreme social and economic disaster. His sycophants refused to accept fact or reality. Adolf Hitler is another good example. The only reason he never conquered the world was because good people stood against him. Nobody could reason with him, nobody ever changed his mind by trying to convince him they had anything in common, and not from lack of trying.
Dictators like Trump are defeated because their enemies embrace the polarization. They wait until dictators turn on one ‘minority’ group after another. They use the excesses of a tyrant to polarize those disconnected from the delusional psychosis of the mob and respond with unrelenting resistance to break their enemy with cold, hard, fact. It doesn’t matter what the mob believes. Trump and his KKKabinet are all power-hungry, hate-filled, narcissists driven by pleonexia, but unlike the mob they manipulate, they know they are lying, and they are paranoid to the point of betraying one another to seize and maintain what they want. Resistance enrages them, it forces them to respond, it makes them lash out and make mistakes that sacrifice one another or part of their mob, and it will ultimately divide them.
So when did ignorance become a badge of honour? When did being educated become something for which intelligent people should be ashamed? When has wilful stupidity – idiocy – ever improved life for anyone? One of the most irksome things in our society is just how far the worst examples of humanity can advance, how those individuals are rewarded for their self-centred narcissism and enabled every time they inflict themselves on others to the half-wit cheers of equally ignorant and bigoted toadies.
Their profile page will too often proudly display “the school of hard knocks” as background “education”, as if this holds more credit than an actual educational institution. They will rant their barely literate tantrums and tirades even as they unleash their ignorant hate and bigotry at better people, accusing those they brand “lefties”, “leftards” and “sheeples” of being selfish for defending the rights of those being denied equality and justice, and bullying with mockery, insults and threats those who dare to say things with which they disagree. They demonstrate idiocy of such magnitude we would almost feel pity for them if they were not so undeserving.
But here’s the thing: not everyone who is educated accomplished this because their parents paid for them to attend the best schools. That kind of rhetoric allows a collection of unpleasant, self-centred fools to justify deplorable behaviour. A lot of us are educated because we were desperate to escape the hell in which we were raised and barely survived. We did not want to end up like our parents and siblings, or any of the other intellectually stunted trash that have no excuse for becoming all they could be. We, too, went to “the school of hard knocks”. The difference is, we grew up.
The truly sad thing is that people like me struggled to get through high-school not because we weren’t that bright, but because our parents and step-parents felt it was their right to brutalise us. Bullies, cowards who blame their victims. We suffered physical and psychological violence that scarred us for life and prevented us from becoming all we could be. The kids like me often went without food as we watched our parents or step-parents stuff themselves. We feel very little except hunger, anger and frustration. We imitate others when we cannot process normal emotional responses. We suffer from anxiety. We suffer from depression. We yearn for what could have been but are unable to process it. We suffer hardship every day but we keep going and do not inflict ourselves on others because we get it.
That’s what “the school of hard knocks” teaches you. It doesn’t teach you to be a self-absorbed, narcissistic arsehole who goes out of his way to bully, intimidate, insult and mock the disadvantaged and victims of injustice. It doesn’t teach you to support right-wing fascism that allows predators to impose themselves on better people while pretending to be a victim and justifying hypocrisy by slandering and vilifying those who are the real victims. If you think like that, you didn’t graduate “the school of hard knocks”. You barely got through “the school of shit-for-brains”.
People like me worked our way through tertiary education so that we could climb out of the pit of such vile ignorance as we were raised. We seek to improve ourselves so we can try to change the world to make it a better place. This is the world we all must share. There is no place for the self-centred greed of pleonexia, for the kind of arseholes that happily sacrifice the lives of others for even the misguided believe they will be able to retain a few pitiful dollars more in their wages. Mindless hate only leads to more mindless hate, and hate leads to violence and misery, then the shameful bitching and whining of cowards that discover the wheel has turned and now the boot is on their throat.
But this is where “the school of hard knocks” takes centre-stage again. We live in it alongside some of the worst examples of humanity, horrible people who think they have the right to inflict themselves on others. Simply because you are trying to better yourself, to get an education, to be more than what you are and to contribute all that you can to society, these pricks will accuse you of things like “you think you’re better than the rest of us” because they assume your “mummy and daddy gave you everything” so, by default, it is they who are better than you. I’d like to take this opportunity to address those morons directly with the following rebuttal, one that is all too abundantly apparent to anyone with even half a brain.
If people like me have access to parental funding, why are we stacking shelves at one in the morning, or cleaning toilets at a hospital, fucktards? The reason I’m doing those shitty jobs and putting up with half-wit comments from gutless bullies is because my chain-smoking, alcoholic, degenerate gambling, self-centred, pathologically lying, narcissistic, child-abusing, thieving, rapist parents gave me nothing. In fact, what little my grandparents gave me, my parents stole from me. And just for the record, no, I don’t think I’m better than you, I fucking know it because you’re nothing but a pinch of pig-shit blowing in the wind. Not because I’ve managed to educate myself more than you, but because you’re an arsehole – you have all the things you need to be more than what you are, but you refuse to learn and be better.
The differences between me and you are multitude and obvious, but in this case it’s the simple fact that I don’t say that to your face. Instead, while you bully me and don’t do your damn job, people like me just get on with it and do our best to ignore you. Why? Because the urge to punch you in the throat, beat you to the ground, kick the living shit out of you and then stomp on the back of your neck is a constant struggle. That’s the response you develop after almost two decades of constant, unrelenting, remorseless abuse from the day you were born to the day you broke all ties with relatives and never saw any of them again, and then from every greedy, self-absorbed, idle, dim-witted, bone-smuggling douchebag that decides they need to behave as a human bollard that spews a constant stream of hypocritical shit at everyone it encounters.
That’s what education does. It teaches you how to deal with it. It teaches you that you are better than that, that you are better than trash like them. It teaches you to bottle-up all that anger when the authorities refuse to help you, when they refuse to investigate all the “allegations” you and others have made against people with which many of them have relationships, and know are rotten. It teaches you that those who violate you do it because they are protected by the very authorities that are supposed to help and protect you.
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