The following Opinion Editorial was submitted to Montana 1st News and written by Tracy Sharp, retired USAF -LTC.
The Psychology of Stupid
“What on God’s green earth makes people vote against basic competence in government? In the 2022 midterms, it is likely there was, once again, cheating in key areas. Nonetheless, even without taking into account voting irregularities which are abundant though it is supposedly not okay to say so in polite company, there were still a large number of ballots cast for people who clearly have no business holding any elected office. (John Fetterman and Joe Biden come to mind since both are mentally handicapped and their afflictions are as conspicuous as an Emperor parading about naked in his ‘new clothes’).
But large masses of people vote for them anyway. I believe the only explanation is ideology.
Great thinkers throughout history have put much effort into figuring out why people behave one way versus another. We should consider what they have written, said, and witnessed in their own lives and professions.
Dr. Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist whose profession centers on long-term studies of why people do what they do. He is probably the greatest mind in this arena alive today–possibly ever. Whether you agree or not is not important, but it is undeniable that Dr. Peterson has spent his life studying this topic and has not just theorized but has had the opportunity as a practicing clinical psychologist to observe the behaviors of hundreds and possibly thousands of fellow citizens as they struggled against the currents of life. Dr. Peterson has also extensively studied the great calamities of the last century from the perspective of why one human could do something so wicked and catastrophic to a fellow human being. He draws heavily on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s first-hand experience with the Gulag system put in place by the viciously authoritarian regime of the Soviet Union.
Dr. Peterson writes that all ideologies–left or right–are poisonously bad. They create an “us versus them” version of everything. Being trapped in an ideology makes reasoned arguments attempting to achieve even moderate commonality of agreed and mutually beneficial goals impossible. Think National Socialism, the USSR, Cambodia in 1975, and today’s China.
It appears to me that voters ignore merit and basic competence because they are trapped in ideology; particularly ideologies of the left. It seems the left today–the ‘Demamarxist Party”–is now completely ideologically driven, with Marxism as its core ideology. I do not believe there is tit-for-tat reciprocity here; that the conservatives are one-for-one equally driven by ideology. That’s a leftist dodge to accountability. After all, how many leftist speakers have been stopped from presenting their views at universities by obnoxious and violent mobs of conservative students? No, this is a phenomenon of the left; of the Demamarxist Party.
Dr. Peterson writes about what Alfred Adler called “life-lies.” He writes:
“Someone living a life-lie is attempting to manipulate reality with perception, thought and action, so that only some narrowly desired and pre-defined outcomes is allowed to exist. A life lived in this manner is based, consciously or unconsciously, on two premises. The first is that current knowledge is sufficient to define what is good, unquestioningly, far into the future. The second is that reality would be unbearable if left to its own devices.”
He goes on to note:
“I have seen people define their utopia and then bend their lives into knots trying to make it reality.” And, “A naively formulated goal transmutes, with time, into the sinister form of the life-lie.”
And,
“This kind of oversimplification and falsification is particularly typical of ideologues. They adopt a single axiom: government is bad, immigration is bad, capitalism is bad, patriarchy is bad. Then they filter and screen their experiences and insist ever more narrowly that everything can be explained by that axiom. They believe, narcissistically, underneath all that bad theory, that the world could be put right, if only they held the controls.”
The Demamarxist Party today lives a lie every day.
Yet the ideology of Marxism is so ingrained in them after fifty years of hate for America being preached at every school in the country in grades K through PhD, at law schools, and from every newsroom and media outlet of any kind to include Hollywood, that what used to be America-loving Democrats have turned into a crazed leftist mob immersed in an ideological-driven fantasy.
Their entire world view is packed into the axiom of the Marxist worldview.
Thus, the Bill of Rights and the Constitution are obstacles just as America was an obstacle to the USSR and, today, China. In fact, the entire Western world is now an obstacle and one these ideologues are hell-bent on destroying as they move, one violent or deceitful act after another, closer to their imagined utopia. All the world is reduced to one axiom: if only the United States, the Western world, and capitalism did not exist, everything would be better. And the ends justify the means.
Dr. Peterson points out what the world should have learned from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s work, “The Gulag Archipelago”. Peterson writes;
“One of the major contributions of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s master work, The Gulag Archipelago, was his analysis of the direct causal relationship between the pathology of the Soviet prison-work-camp dependent state (where millions suffered and died) and the almost universal proclivity of the Soviet citizen to falsify his own day-to-day personal experience, deny his own state-induced suffering, and thereby prop up the dictates of the rational, ideology-possessed communist system. It was this bad faith, this denial, that in Solzhenitsyn’s opinion aided and abetted that great paranoid mass-murderer, Joseph Stalin, in his crimes.”
And then Peterson notes,
“Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist and Nazi concentration camp survivor who wrote the classic Man’s Search for Meaning, drew a similiar social-psychological conclusion: deceitful, inauthentic individual existence is the precursor to social totalitarianism.”
There is conspicuous suffering occurring today in the United States, and it is unnecessary. Inflation; rampant crime; a non-existent border; energy prices so high people in the first-world West might freeze this winter; formerly great US cities where drugged out homeless maniacs scream at you, aggressively panhandle, and defecate in the streets; where criminals can openly sell drugs and stores can be robbed with no fear of penalty; men easily defeat females in what used to be female-only sports but now males can compete; where boys can call themselves women and parade around with their junk hanging out in the female locker room; where men prisoners can claim to be female and get shipped off to women’s prisons to impregnate the inmates there; where teachers groom children for sex and parents go to libraries to cheer transvestites dancing about in front of kids; where compelled speech laws cannot be far behind as people’s livelihoods are threatened if they do not comply; where corporate and government coordinated censorship exists and to hell with the First Amendment.
This is today’s America.
This all happened suddenly and it did not come from the Republican Party, Donald Trump, or the conservatives. This is owned 100% by the Demamarxist Party–today’s Democrats.
Why would anyone vote to sustain this conspicuous disaster?
Because of an allegiance to an ideology. Maybe not consciously, but with enough passion they will not vote for competence if it means giving up their utopian scheme. For them, violence and cheating are approved means for obtaining the final goal, and if you can manufacture a circumstance by which your cheating can obtain legal sanction, all the better.
The old America–”land of the free and home of the brave”–is gone; a noble period in history now passed. What comes next is the issue before us today. Who will build it, who will shape it, or will we as a nation even survive? Nothing is certain. Especially when ethics, merit, and competence take a back seat to ideology.
