June 18, 2002

• 
  

  Disillusionment, I’m told, is an unhappy event for most of you. I’ve gotten hints of this from clients who were anything but appreciative when I punched holes in their denial. My beloved old fart has long insisted that people generally prefer their illusions over reality’s “cold hard facts.” These revelations, now that they’ve penetrated my consciousness, come as welcome disillusionment to me, not because I’m glad most people want to be deluded, but because I do not. I’d always believed that my own attitudes were fairly typical. Now that I know better, it not only dispels another useless illusion for me, it helps explain some aspects of human behavior that had always puzzled me.

  
  

  For years, I argued with Greyfox, insisting that he had to be in the minority, that no normal average citizen could actually prefer to be fed a line of patronizing pap over having the straight facts so that he could make informed decisions. What sane person, I asked, would rather face a threat or hazard armed with warm fuzzy falsehoods than be able to stand up to it armed with the truth? It seemed to me that political parties, priesthoods, and snake oil salesmen were pulling the wool over the eyes of an unknowing and unwilling public. He insisted that people wanted to be fooled, and he cited psychologist Erich Fromm’s 1941 work, Escape from Freedom to support his contentions.

  
  

  Fromm observed Hitler’s rise to power, concluding that freedom was too threatening for most people, and that to relieve the anxiety arising from their independence, they would raise up dictators and settle themselves under the dubious protection of totalitarian regimes. Fromm leaves plenty of clues that in his estimation this tendency is not healthy, and we all know (don’t we?) that our societal norms are in many cases quite sick. I guess it was my hard-headed optimism that kept me for so long from realizing how sadly dependent and insanely frightened of freedom my fellow Americans are.

  
  

  Now I’m freed of that illusion. My disillusionment started with September eleventh, when everyone seemed so surprised… surprised!? When Europe, Africa and Asia have been plagued by terrorism for decades, and even after the bombing of one of the twin towers in 1993, America as a whole was caught by surprise. How else but through self-delusion could one fail to have expected a continued escalation of Jihad?

  
  

  At last I am convinced that Erich Fromm and Greyfox were right all along.   I’d had some dawning suspicions already, as I watched Prez Shrub’s three ring media circus distract all but a few of us from the hijacked election.  What finally tipped the scales for me was the reaction to–or the lack of reaction to–the suppression of the student protest at Ohio State University last week. It makes me wonder how far we are from a repetition of the killings at Kent State in 1970, or our own version of the massacre at Tienanmen Square.

  
  

  Now I see that most of my fellow Americans are content to trade their very real constitutionally guaranteed freedoms for the lies that give them the illusion of security. It is an illusion, you know. Just as the locks on your front doors will keep out your honest law-abiding neighbors but not protect you from a skilled burglar or determined home invader, these erosions of our freedom will not protect you from fanatically committed terrorists.

  
  

  Not every person who is conspiring to rob us of freedom is a villain or potential dictator, although a few of them are. Some are simply well-intentioned idiots, while others are just doing their jobs, covering their asses, trying to hang onto their sources of income.   It is not such a different situation from that which Fromm observed in Germany sixty-some years ago.

  
  

  If you are one who is closing your eyes to the scary facts and swallowing the reassuring bullshit the administration is handing out, then you are a co-conspirator. If you want to be safe, then don’t let the liars lull you into the illusion of security. Don’t lie to yourself.We might have a chance if we all open our eyes and stand up for the Constitution of the United States of America. Otherwise, the terrorists will have won an easy victory. Let us at the very least make them take our freedom from us. Don’t give it away to a bunch of cowardly domestic flimflam artists.

  • 2:59 am
  • 7 Comments