https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-sadistic-state_4676314.html
The Sadistic Stateby Jeffrey A. Tucker
August 19, 2022
NOTE: when reading articles at The Epoch Times, DISABLE JAVASCRIPT in your browser. This can be done with the click of the mouse using free add-ons/extensions.Excerpts:Governor Ron DeSantis has a theory about those 87,000 new tax collectors, some of whom will be armed, as unleashed by the latest legislative triumph of the monopoly party ruling Washington today. He believes that they will be political agents. They will target the middle class in particular, with the hopes of punishing those people who dared vote for the other party.
The theory is not crazy. Tax collection in the whole of human history has always been about politics as much as it is about state finance. If the party in power can enlist a brutal gang of bandits on the public with the legal right to seize as much as they can find, they will do so. They always have.
To add more credibility to this claim, consider the events of the summer of 2021, when the Biden administration suddenly and implausibly decided that the pandemic was the fault of the unvaccinated. It was never true and within months that became incredibly obvious.
How could they have made such a disgusting and false claim? It began with a New York Times story, copied within days by the Biden administration, that teased out some data on who was getting vaccinated and who was not. They found a disproportionate number of the people who refused the shot were in red states, which is code for likely Trump voters. At the time, virus data was showing that the hot zones were in red states.
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There are many books on this topic but my favorite is from 1922: Sigmund Freud’s astonishingly brilliant “Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego.” “The psychology of such a group … —the dwindling of the conscious individual personality, the focussing of thoughts and feelings into a common direction, the predominance of the emotions and of the unconscious mental life, the tendency to the immediate carrying out of intentions as they emerge—all this corresponds to a state of regression to a primitive mental activity, of just such a sort as we should be inclined to ascribe to the primal horde.” This primal horde “wishes to be governed by unrestricted force; it has an extreme passion for authority.” It has “a thirst for obedience.” Their enforced doctrine “is not based upon perception and reasoning but upon an erotic tie.”
Yikes!
If you have never read Freud, this is a good place to start. So far as I’m concerned, anyone in public life needs to read this book. It explains “cancel culture” entirely. It reveals how a group—which does not genuinely exist in any durable form and is therefore consumed with fear of its own annihilation—can be so inviting and charming on your way in but then switch and become so brutally immoral if you dare to deviate on your way out. This is why the military promises you can be “all you can be” when you sign up but shoots you in the head if you desert.
Poor Leana dared to deviate just slightly and therefore she has to be made an example of lest the life and meaning of the entire primal horde is threatened. The same dynamic takes place in any group, from the local garden club to the smallest religious congregation, but it is all the more intense in politics when the stakes are so high.
In other words, we are truly at the moment of ferocious enforcement of opinion and allegiance. All means to the end of complete political control are justified. Facing a possible death in November, the primal horde is right now on a wild rampage, targeting the out group and also anyone from the in-group who would dare to think on his or her own. It’s an exceedingly dangerous time, and we would be naive at this stage to interpret anything coming from the regime in power as motivated by anything less than revenge.
Representative government has mutated into the sadistic state. This will not end soon or well.
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