'In an earlier dark age, authoritarian monarchies partnered with authoritarian religious institutions. When the world exited from this dark age and entered the Enlightenment, there was a burst of energy. Much of this revitalization had to do with risking skepticism about authoritarian and corrupt institutions and regaining confidence in one’s own mind. We are now in another dark age, only the institutions have changed. Americans desperately need anti-authoritarians to question, challenge, and resist new illegitimate authorities and regain confidence in their own common sense. In every generation there will be authoritarians and anti-authoritarians. While it is unusual in American history for anti-authoritarians to take the kind of effective action that inspires others to successfully revolt, every once in a while a Tom Paine, Crazy Horse, or Malcolm X come along. So authoritarians financially marginalize those who buck the system, they criminalize anti-authoritarianism, they psychopathologize anti-authoritarians, and they market drugs for their “cure.”' -- 'Does Big Brother exist?' 'Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party.' 'Does he exist in the same way as I exist?' 'You do not exist.'

"If you get rid of the government, then the costs of violence are imposed directly upon the person who wants to use the violence." - "Intellectualism is a defence against inflicted falsehoods as a child." - "People get that morality has been used to control them as children, and as soon as they try to treat morality as morality and make it universal to their society as a whole, they're attacked as immoral, as uncaring, as brutish and wrong... It's crazy. People's brains are fried... they have been crippled, mentally." -- How many fingers, Winston?

'This is the value of Ben Bernanke, a shill for Money Power. He is trotted out like the proverbial potted plant to verbalize the statist nostrums that will then be elaborated on by the manipulated media of the mainstream. The goal is to keep people believing in the system until world government is established. The real point has to do with the continual establishment of wise men. This dominant social theme is one of the biggest and most important of all the power elite's memes. The world needs to be run by a few good, gray men in expensive, understated suits. Ben Bernanke is the oracle of the day (and it is an oracular phenomenon) but there are others. They are infinitely important and endlessly replaceable. These men are plucked from Harvard, Yale and MIT. They learn the lingo... They are launched into society to save the world. The most successful men are doubtless those who are able to lie to themselves the most effectively. One cannot be a successful liar if one does not BELIEVE.'

'It hurts to be wrong. Not just emotionally, but physically, especially when it’s public... The horror of it is almost cinematic. The more artificially pumped your ego, or the more brainwashed with academic pretension, the more terrifying that moment of realization is, that moment when all your assumptions are dashed aside like a three-year-old’s alphabet blocks. To a certain point, it is understandable why so many people live in such violent denial, however, this does not detract from the perils of that denial… Useful idiots talk, they don’t listen. They ask lots of questions, but never wait to hear your answers. For them, questions are not a search for information, but rather a method of antagonism. It is a way to keep everyone else on guard while making themselves feel superior. In this game, the useful idiot never has to expose his ignorance because he never has to enter into a meaningful dialogue with anyone who has an opposing view. All he has to do is attack, attack, attack.'

'It begins in the school system. Instead of being objective forums for the transmission of the values of civilization to the young, our colleges and universities have now become fervent breeding grounds for this statist recruitment process, in which the better students get swept up in the "false ideal" of collectivism. It is a powerful futuristic vision that is subtly instilled into callow minds who lack the necessary sophistication to resist. Being young and prone to idealism, they perceive "political centralization and a one-world government" to be an ideal just as the students in Marx's day mistook his "dictatorship of the proletariat" as some sort of ideal. Thousands of highly intelligent students spring forth from this brainwash every year to enter the world and spread their newly learned convictions that capitalism and Western civilization are the "roots of all evil." They think they are working for an "ideal."' -- Alumnus illuminatus!

"It is functionally impossible for a human being to argue for a system that defines his current activities as evil. This is the astounding power of morality in the world. People resist the definitions of virtue so much because once the definitions of virtue change, behaviour must inevitably change. Definitions are like gravity wells for people's behaviour. People struggle only to accept or reject definitions, once those definitions are accepted or rejected, behaviour flows inexorably from those definitions. The definitions are the first dominoes that go down in the endless causal chain of human action. The definitions of virtue are what control the entire world. This is one of the reasons why governments are so eager to press money and unjust privilege into your hand. Because they know that once you accept the money, you will begin the ex post facto rationalizations to justify why accepting the money is a good thing."

'Thought leaders are necessary from a credibility standpoint. But now the power elite has a problem. Not all of the intelligentsia is leftist or socialist these days. Some of them are right wing and a good many are libertarian. This is a very big problem for the elite. The response (and it is increasingly effective as we have indicated) is apparently to cultivate a whole new brand or class of quasi-libertarian intellectual. This is heady stuff. Hirsi Ali is using the firepower of her intellect not to promote peace or understanding but to advocate what is essentially (in our humble view) the "long war." This is indeed a new paradigm for the modern intelligentsia. In the past century most of the intellectual class has been seen as peaceable and even pacifistic. But the new tone of the modern-day mainstream writer for thought magazines (some of them anyway) is increasingly militant and chauvinistic. It is fascinating (in a queasy way) to watch.'

'How false concepts obscure real violence.' -- "Like all [2+2=5], she wants to divide violence into 'good violence' and 'bad violence'."

(A God-fearing screed, yet still very useful.) -- 'Under Critical Theory/User Friendly Marxism, every tradition of Western life was to be redefined as ... "victims" or "oppressors." The stream of criticism was relentless and extremely sophisticated in an intellectual sense. Thus it mesmerized the pundit class who then disseminated the criticisms' fundamental content to the populace at large.' These intellectuals now control and administer our schools, media, courts, and legislatures. The cultural Marxists adopted Nietzsche's "transvaluation of all values," in which the Mad Hatter's world is instituted: Everything that previously was an evil now becomes a virtue while all the old virtues become evils. Individualism, self-reliance, property, profit, family, marriage, fidelity to spouse, strength of will, personal honor, rising through merit -- all these integral pillars of our civilization become distinctive evils that oppress us as humans. They must be rooted out of our existence.'

'Physicist Dr. Denis Rancourt is a former professor and environmental science researcher at the University of Ottawa (as green as they come), and has officially bailed out of the man-made global warming movement. Climate Depot has released a video of Dr. Rancourt: Man-made global warming is nothing more than a “corrupt social phenomenon.” “It is as much psychological and social phenomenon as anything else. Global warming is strictly an imaginary problem of the First World middleclass.” Rancourt is scathing of universities (and rightly so): “They are all virtually all service intellectuals. They will not truly critique, in a way that could threaten the power interests that keep them in their jobs. The tenure track is just a process to make docile and obedient intellectuals that will then train other intellectuals.” Climate Depot has <choice excerpts> and a list of other greens who have jumped ship.'

'People seem to be fairly clear that big government and big monetary enterprises (central banks) don't work well, but somehow they believe that Big Science, funded by massive amounts of big government money (your money), is necessary to the progress of humankind's intellectual development. Governments have an incentive to provide funds for science to show that government is indeed the driving force behind all that is progressive in the world. Scientists are glad to provide theories that need hundreds of millions of dollars to come to fruition. It is a kind of intellectual welfare. The Wright Brothers, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla. None of these individuals had access to huge government grants, or even large amounts of private funding, when they were starting out. Necessity is the mother of invention. Lacking government funding, who knows what some anti-social thinker—a modern day Newton—might have come up with in, say, a cardboard box rather than a 17-mile long elephant-sized tunnel.'

On Critical Theory -- "The theory is to criticise: an unremitting destructive criticism..." -- 2/2: "Critical Theory actually attempted to politicize logic itself..."

'The root causes and only solution for what we all face.' -- "You have to stop listening to people who tell you that the problem is the free-market – the free-market is simply private property and the non-initiation of force. This is kindergarten philosophy: Your stuff is your stuff and don't hit people." -- "Will you see reason before it's too late?"

'Max and co-host Stacy Herbert look at the latest scandals of economic bloggers branded heretics as the high priests of economics are busy preparing "monster" money-printing and refusing to recognize housing bubble "time bombs".' -- ECONOMICS IS SERIOUS GOVERNMENT BUSINESS!!!

A studied avoidance of pointing out the gun in the room. (Stefan Molyneux) -- "We academics who are seriously involved in the world..." -- LOL

'The 20th Century was a horrible litany of absurd experiments and atrocities committed by intellectuals, or by elite groupings that claimed a higher knowledge. Simple folk usually have enough common sense to avoid the worst errors. Sometimes they need to take very stern action to stop intellectuals leading us to ruin. Economics should never be treated as a science. Its claims are not falsifiable, which is why economists can disagree so violently among themselves: a rarer spectacle in science, where disputes are usually resolved one way or another by hard data. It is a branch of anthropology and psychology, a moral discipline if you like. Anybody who loses sight of this is a public nuisance...'

'The intellectual wants the whole society to be a school writ large, to be like the environment where he did so well and was so well appreciated. The wordsmith intellectuals are successful within the formal, official social system of the schools, wherein the relevant rewards are distributed by the central authority of the teacher. The schools contain another informal social system within classrooms, hallways, and schoolyards, wherein rewards are distributed not by central direction but spontaneously at the pleasure and whim of schoolmates. Here the intellectuals do less well. It is not surprising, therefore, that distribution of goods and rewards via a centrally organized distributional mechanism later strikes intellectuals as more appropriate than the "anarchy and chaos" of the marketplace. For distribution in a centrally planned socialist society stands to distribution in a capitalist society as distribution by the teacher stands to distribution by the schoolyard and hallway.'

'If we lose the ability to project our negative traits onto some other person or entity, we actually experience the anxiety, fear and rage within ourselves. The growth of psychological and emotional maturity is the slow and often painful process of withdrawing your projections from the world so that you can see what the world actually is. Most people wander around the world with highly reflective sunglasses on – but pointing the wrong way – so that they are only seeing a distorted reflection of themselves, rather than the world itself. When a man hears that taxation is force, his unconscious hears all of the implications contained in that statement immediately, at light speed, and leaps into action to protect him from being tortured and killed. The hostility that he feels will arise in him as if out of nowhere. You have also provoked a feeling of humiliation in him, by creating fear and anxiety within him that he has to avoid.'

'There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.' -- George Orwell

Every vote is against your own interest. As for the healthcare discussion, the words "appear to be" and "seem to be" particularly stand out. -- '...authenticity has replaced economics as the driving force of modern politics. The authentic politicians are the ones who sound like they are speaking from the gut, not the cerebral cortex. Of course, they might be faking it, but it is no joke to say that in contemporary politics, if you can fake sincerity, you have got it made. This is a culture war but it is not simply being driven by differences over abortion, or religion, or patriotism. And it is not simply Red states vs. Blue states any more. It is a war on the entire political culture, on the arrogance of politicians, on their slipperiness and lack of principle, on their endless deal making and compromises. And when the politicians say to the people protesting: 'But we're doing this for you', that just makes it worse. In fact, that seems to be what makes them angriest of all.'

Yup. Intellectuals are funded by the state to create non-solutions to state-created problems so the state failings can be continually excused because they can claim to have the "BESTEST and BRIGHTEST" working hard to solve (create) the problems, so what else could you possibly ask them to do?! No tests against the real/empirical world because that might accidentally produce some knowledge that would free people from the artificial scarcity created by the state (don't tell me nonsense about NASA and TEH Internetz). Kids herded into universities to be 'universalised' in non-sense (non-empiricism) and non-think (non-rationalism). But let's not be downhearted, because all of this is about to change!

'...a bit of bad logic has been faithfully repeated by intellectuals seeking power: the belief, as sincere as it is silly, that if you have the right ideas, you are by definition smarter than the system you are trying to control. That's Weishaupt's Fallacy. -- Systems theory was a victim of the same fallacy. Very few of the newborn institutions in the systems movement were self-funding, most of them subsisted on government grants, and thus were in the awkward position of depending on the social structures they hoped to overturn. That those structures could respond homeostatically to oppose their efforts might, one would think, be obvious to people who were used to the strange loops and unintended consequences that pervade complex systems. Read books by many of the would-be global managers of the 1970s and you can very nearly count on being bowled over by the scent of intellectual arrogance. -- Unfortunately [systems theory] might have made the transition ahead of us less difficult.'

'Orwell's essays remind us that better than our best intentions is our inescapable nature, our shared ordinariness, which will always have the potential to redeem us all if only we will embrace it. -- One of Orwell’s most appealing tendencies as a critic is that he never presumes to improve our tastes. He dispenses with aesthetic appreciation in favor of sociological questions, and he rarely seeks to justify his own preferences. He is pleased to come across as the common man’s representative, delivering common sense to a snob intelligentsia whose contrarian posturing has left it twisted it up with “humbug.” Appreciating avant-garde art, championing utopian crusades, sneering at plebian entertainments: these are available only to a pampered leisure class. Orwell instead romanticizes an emotional Spartanism that’s open to everyone.'

'...we must distinguish between "free-market capitalism" on the one hand, and "state capitalism" on the other. The two are as different as day and night in their nature and consequences. Free-market capitalism is a network of free and voluntary exchanges in which producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others through prices voluntarily arrived at. State capitalism consists of one or more groups making use of the coercive apparatus of the government — the State — to accumulate capital for themselves by expropriating the production of others by force and violence. -- If there is to be a rollback of statism, there will have to be another ideological revolution to match the rise of the classical radicals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Intellectuals will have to shift, in large part, back from their role as apologists for the State to resume their function as upholders of the standards of truth and reason as against the status quo.'

'To a "man of system," to borrow Adam Smith's terminology, capitalism just isn't that exciting. Participants in the market economy are wholly beholden to consumer wants. The academics envision a grand world, where Great Men fight Great Wars, periodically inventing Great Things or developing Great Ideas. Instead, the market provides us with incremental processes, which expend enormous piles of resources, in a quest to make better Triscuits. It is hardly the stuff of high drama, to say nothing of Great History. Under capitalism, the common man does not need an intellectual vanguard or a group of virtuous surrogates to make his decisions for him or to defend him against the rapacity of his fellows. He can do just fine without our help, thank you very much, and would be much obliged if we would go back to our ivory towers and leave him alone.' -- Pretty much

"From the beginnings of recorded thought, intellectuals have told us their activity is most valuable. Plato valued the rational faculty above courage and the appetites and deemed that philosophers should rule; Aristotle held that intellectual contemplation was the highest activity. It is not surprising that surviving texts record this high evaluation of intellectual activity. The people who formulated evaluations, who wrote them down with reasons to back them up, were intellectuals, after all. They were praising themselves. Those who valued other things more than thinking things through with words, whether hunting or power or uninterrupted sensual pleasure, did not bother to leave enduring written records. Only the intellectual worked out a theory of who was best." -- Ouch!