Are Western liberals, dumbasses? — Aurelian, Alastair Crooke and David Samuels' perspectives

23 January 2025

Fantasy and reality don't get along

Regarding the Collective West's inability to accurately perceive, much less critically think — substack writer 'Aurelian' wrote that:

I have written many times before about the lack of realism with which the West usually approaches the ongoing crisis in and around Ukraine, and the almost pathological dissociation from the real world that it displays in its words and actions.

[T]here is no sign that the West is becoming more reality-based in its understanding, and it is very likely that it will learn nothing and will continue to live in its alternative construction of reality until it is forcibly expelled.

The Western liberal mind . . . is incompatible with discipline and organization, and its search for immediate gratification is incompatible with long-term planning and careful implementation.

The very fact that you don’t understand the dynamics of a crisis means that you are powerless to propose a reasonable solution.

[T]he current generation of Western politicians is particularly incapable of understanding and managing high-level crises of any kind. The modern Western political class . . . increasingly resembles the ruling party in a one-party state.

[T]the skills that lead to success are those of advancement within the Party apparatus itself: climbing to the top and stabbing rivals in the back.

[I]t is impossible for a society raised on just-in-time delivery and impulse buying on Amazon to understand the importance of logistics and the nature of the war of attrition that the Russians are waging.

NATO has no strategy for Ukraine, no real operational plan.

It has only a series of ad hoc initiatives, linked together by vague aspirations that have no connection with real life and the hope that something will happen.

Stupidity bites?

The ultimate irony — one of parable-like dimensions — is that the 'liberal' United States, NATO and the vassalized European Union intentionally started this Ukrainian War for no rationally defensible strategic reasons.

And now, we are visibly unable to cope with what we so foolishly wrought.

Proliferating mental infection

Retired diplomat Alastair Crooke, quoting David Samuels, points out that the West's delusions can be traced to intentionally crafted government propaganda, particularly in the United States.

Here in excerpts:

The ‘permission structure’ machine that Barack Obama and David Axelrod (a highly successful Chicago political consultant), built to replace the Democratic Party was in its essence a device for getting people to act against their beliefs by substituting new and ‘better’ beliefs through the top-down controlled and leveraged application of social pressure – effectively turning Axelrod’s construct into ‘an omnipotent thought-machine’, [David] Samuels suggests [see here]:

“The term ‘echo chambers’ describes the process by which the White House and its wider penumbra of think tanks and NGOs deliberately created an entirely new class of experts who mutually credentialed each other on social media in order to advance assertions that would formerly have been seen as marginal or not credible”.

The aim was for a platoon of aides, armed with laptops or smart phones, to ‘run’ with the latest inspired Party meme and to immediately repeat, and repeat it, across platforms, giving the appearance of an overwhelming tide of consensus filling the country.

“Where this analysis went wrong is the same place that the Obama team’s analysis of Trump went wrong: The wizards of the permission structure machine had become captives of the machinery that they built. The result was a fast-moving mirror world that could generate the velocity required to change the appearance of “what people believe” overnight.

“At every turn over the next four years, it was like a fever was spreading, and no one was immune.

"Spouses, children, colleagues, and supervisors at work began reciting, with the force of true believers, slogans they had only learned last week.

"It was the entirety of this apparatus, not just the ability to fashion clever or impactful tweets, that constituted the party’s new form of power”.

The moral? — Reality's revenge will come, one way or another

Modern Western populations are too ignorantly vacuous to recall the Western Enlightenment's emphasis on exercising rational perception and thinking.

In consequence today, Reality's piranhas are beginning to nibble our collective behinds.

The question is whether actuality's gnawing bites will bleed us out, before our raging insanity drags much of the rest of humanity with us.

PeteFree.com

Are Western liberals, dumbasses? — Aurelian, Alastair Crooke and David Samuels' perspectives