Many years ago I read one of those short interviews they have at the back of the New York Times magazine. I don’t remember who they interviewed, but he was asked what he thought was the most dangerous idea. And he responded the most dangerous idea is monotheism.
Monotheism claims to have in their possession the truth in the form of the word of God, which no one can disprove. Since their god is the One True God, allowing for no others, its word is final. And if one is a devotee and defender of the One True God one is entitled to do anything in God’s name, slaughter, massacre and genocide for example. People aren’t reasonable about their beliefs as the Pastafarians have demonstrated.
Today we live in an ostensibly unreligious culture which evinces nevertheless religion-like beliefs and behaviors. Since God was declared dead, the question has been: What will fill the God-shaped hole? Unhappy people need something to believe in, a solution and salvation. God died, Zealotry did not. The Cult of Science prevails in my part of the world. And some of the masses have found opiate-like relief in the belief of their victimization.
The High Priest of Total Victimization, the wounded and witch-hunted Donald Trump, fans the flames. His cries of victimization are constant, and he is the heir of a long tradition of The Paranoid Style in American Politics, an essay it is worth reading now, if you haven’t read it already, and if you’ve read it already, it’s time to read it again.
Whenever actual victims are identified–women in the #MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter—there is the outcry, the men’s movement twists its panties into bunches, the abuse against women and POC increases, there is a cry of “White Lives Matter! WE are the victims!” Classic Tu Quoque. You can take almost any statement by Donald Trump and see it clear as the day is long. What you give to others, takes something away from his Us, the particular Us that excludes Them. His core. Here’s a quote from a random article in this week’s New York Times:
“Westchester was ground zero, OK, for what they were trying to do,” he said on Monday, in an interview on Fox News with Laura Ingraham, referring to Mr. Biden and his fellow Democrats. “They were trying to destroy the suburban, beautiful place. The American dream, really. They want low-income housing, and with that comes a lot of other problems, including crime.”
Westchester! That cesspool of Jacobins, thieves and demons!
In America we have an idea of justice that we hold up as a thing, our thing, THE thing–that we stand for and love: Liberty and Justice for all. But when people point out that there is not justice for all but justice for some, injustice for most–existing powers move to silence them.
You’ve got to have a code says Omar Little in The Wire. And indeed there is a code among criminals–and the justice system!–determining who is and isn’t deserving of justice, which crimes are acceptable and which are not. It turns out it’s not the crime itself that decides if a crime is ‘acceptable’. Like, say, murder is always wrong. It’s who it was done to: the victim. John J. Lennon, a prison journalist convicted of murder, writing from prison, defends his killing of another man by writing, in his “apology”:
I killed a criminal, not an innocent, and in prison that was respected. Walled off from society, we create our own social hierarchies here. Those of us at the top of the pecking order — gangsters, drug dealers, stick-up kids (all of whom also may be killers) — rationalized that our crimes were merely the predictable result of “the life.” The predators and sexual deviants who preyed on women and children were the miscreants at the bottom.
Good crimes are committed against worthy victims; bad crimes are committed against the innocent.
So. To convince people that your enemy is a criminal, you have to say it over and over and over and over and over until other people believe it: Crooked Hillary. And to convince people that she is not just criminal but evil, go to extremes. It’s hard to convince others your enemy is evil by pointing out that they support national healthcare, oppose privatizing social security, and are in favor of increasing the minimum wage. But child-raping satanists? Obviously, obviously evil.
Next, to ensure that the perpetrator you’ve chosen will be punished, you need a perfect victim. You yourself are a victim, but flawed. So you need a proxy victim, a perfect victim, to stand in for you. You look around.
Whenever a woman steps forward to accuse a man of some violation, her past is mined for things she may have done to show her to be undeserving of justice. Whenever a black man is shot, any bad thing he ever did or said is written about, and his mug shot–not his graduation photo–is published in the newspaper. Justice isn’t about what you’ve done, it’s about who you are.
There are no perfect victims.
There are no saints, there is not a single person who has reached adulthood in unalloyed virtue, who has not done something wrong, who has not been mean, or drunk, or stupid, who has not lied, said something offensive, slept with the wrong person, forgot to sign the permission slip, fell asleep while driving, neglected his kids.
Except one group of people, who haven’t lived enough yet–and that is children.
Which is why QAnon is the perfect belief system. It’s like monotheism: Q is unknown, invisible, nameless, and but is telling the truth. And no one who protects children can be wrong, nor can they be bad.
On December 4, 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch, a 28-year-old man from North Carolina, went to the pizzeria Comet Ping Pong, carrying an AR-15 rifle, went to the back of the restaurant, attempted to open a door, which he attempted to open using his gun, firing three shots. He thought the door went to a basement where Democrats were operating a pedophile ring, and he expected to rescue children. Instead, the door opened into a utility closet. He surrendered without resistance or incident, and was quoted as saying, “The intel was not 100%.”
For some reason, this quote of his has always stuck with me. It’s in the passive voice, like the famous George Bush Sr. quote “Mistakes were made.” It left the door open for there to be a real conspiracy. He admitted his actions were wrong, but only because they were misinformed. And he stuck to the position that there were Democrats (celebrities, billionaires, politicians) operating a pedophile ring, which he was heroically trying to destroy. And he held that door open.
He’d found a closet, but the door to the basement was somewhere else if not at Comet Ping Pong. You could feel the rush of air coming up from that basement. The door would open and from the basement emerged QAnon.
QAnon is a baffling phenomenon.
In a nutshell, its Wikipedia entry:
QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory alleging that a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles running a global child sex-trafficking ring is plotting against President Donald Trump, who is battling them, leading to a ‘day of reckoning’ involving the mass arrest of journalists and politicians. No part of the theory is based on fact.
I mean, really, reasonable people, come ON. This QAnon thing has been so exasperating to me. But–it’s a religion, based not on reason, but belief. It’s got all the hallmarks. It’s bulletproof, waterproof, irrefutable, insuperable, inarguable, unattackable, unassailable, undeniably true. AND it has a perfect victim.
We appeal to people’s reason to try to convince them their beliefs are wrong using Snopes, the New York Times, reputable journalism, or Wikipedia articles to back us up. This never works! So, if you’re managing a QAnon situation, what do you do? Maybe have a look at the How Stuff Works Getting out of a Cult page. And if the usual methods don’t work, you might need Deprogramming.
And meanwhile, what the hell, what the hell, what the hell.
Caterina.net 