Who's Got Their Hands on the Pendulum?

Laura Knight-Jadczyk has posted an essay today that explains a lot of puzzling facts about recent history. She starts with some astute observations about the work of historians, both of ancient and recent history. She then discusses theories of generational historical cycles, criticizing them for not taking into account differences between human beings.

Here’s an example I’ve been thinking over for the past decade or so. People have long noticed generational political swings in U.S. history. Generally the cycles can last about 25 years, long enough for one side, the left wing or right wing, to grow in opposition, take power, implement policies, create their own reactions and problems which in turn generates an increasingly powerful opposition which then takes over, etc. There is also concurrently a kind of cultural exhaustion with the right or left at the transition points of the cycle.

It was completely clear, for example, that in 1980, U.S. liberalism was completely exhausted. The things liberalism did well, they already did, and people longed for right wing policies. You could feel it. Watching this happen at the time, it was clear that although the right-wing policies would be disastrous for the United States if they were ever implemented, there was no way to convince most people of that before the fact; they would just have to experience it. The right-wing ideas seemed fresher, even to those who knew they were bad. Then came Reagan, of course, and the rest was history. By the nineteen nineties, the right wing seemed exhausted and spent. Polls consistently have shown majority support for liberal policies. Yet, due to skillful organization, control of the media, and criminal vote stealing, the grip of the right wing increased at the time it should have been in decline according to the theories of pendulum swings.

Where does that leave us? It leaves us to rethink our views of human nature. Here’s Knight-Jadczyk:

This idea leads to the primary reason for the failure of such systems of analysis: when considering a human population, what is left out of the equation is the fact that, in every society on earth, there is a certain percentage of individuals, that are extremely deviant from the masses of normal people, and this small group is generally very active in ways that can affect hundreds, thousands, even millions of other human beings in negative ways. The analogy of a disease pathogen in a body serves very well to convey the proper perspective.

Deviant personalities, being in a minority and knowing that they are a minority, feel driven to take power over their environment in order to alleviate the stress of this feeling of being abnormal. This drive enables them to easily "rise to the top," and then to interpenetrate the entire social structure with a ramified network of mutual and multiple pathological conspiracies in a way similar to how a disease takes over a body.

…Just as a disease organism seeks its own survival and to propagate, pathologically deviant persons want power over others and they are not inhibited by considerations of conscience or feeling for others. An analogy of this is that the disease pathogen is totally uncaring of the damage it may do to the organ systems it invades. It only wants to survive and propagate. The bacteria or virus has evolved many unique characteristics that enable it to take over a body when that body is weak. Thus, when societies are weakened for any of a number of reasons, deviant personalities are able to utilize their specifically evolved methods and means to achieve that power that normal people with normal morals simply cannot comprehend because it is not part of their reality and all human beings tend to assume that everyone else is like themselves.

And so, networks of pathological deviants rise to power again and again, imposing their distortions on the masses of normal people like a disease until the masses wake up and get rid of the deviants, (bring in the therapies), normalize human relations, and begin to take care of the body of society, thus restoring health.

The problem of deviants coming to power again and again is due to the same factor mentioned above: that human beings tend to believe that others that look like them, talk like them, walk like them, are, in fact, like them even inside. They are not. There are vast differences between human beings. All people are not created equal in ability, though they certainly ought to be equal in terms of opportunity and legal rights.

…It is this problem we are facing today. The United States has been infected for a very long time by a particular species of pathogen that, due to its long-term presence and gradual weakening of the organ systems, has finally generated a cancer that has gone metastatic: George W. Bush and the Neocons.