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-Land of the Free
The Cynical Phase
2020-11-25
( The Z blog) The Soviet Union, like all radical experiments, went through several phases in its roughly three generations of existence. The first phase, of course, was the revolution, in which the old order was toppled and a battle ensued to fill the void. This initial phase of revolution is always the one that attracts the most attention. This is when the great heroes of the revolution and the great villains of it are made. It is in this phase we get both Lenin and Stalin, hero and villain.

There is a phase that gets little attention and that is when the people come to terms with the irrationality of the world that has been created for them. One reason Stalin was able to send so many to their deaths or to labor camps is so many people kept thinking there was some rationality to the world being created. Some remained idealistic believers in the cause, while others became critics of the cause. They assumed the revolution would bring clarity and rationality when it brought only the oppositeIn time, the people came to terms with this. The humor of the Soviet Union reflected the fact that one got along by accepting the irrational in the same way you accept that the grass is green or the sky is blue. You don’t think about it. The jokes were often about these daily contradictions and how the unfortunate were those who did not get the joke that was at the heart of those contradictions. In other words, the joke was always on the fool who was not cynical enough to anticipate the lie.

This is relevant in our current age as we may be past the revolutionary stage and into that time when the people adjust to the irrational. The legacy conservative media keeps pounding the drum about how "we’re lurching into socialism" when we have been a socialist society for generations now. There is no aspect of our economic life outside the grip of the now semi-permanent ruling class. Telling people otherwise is just part of the way the ruling class controls the population.Of course, this reality is dawning on even the dullest people, so we are being told that the bad guys are planning a "radical revolution." The truth is, that revolution is well past the planning stage. It has already happened. From top to bottom, despite party labels or rhetoric, the system is stacked with people committed to the great reordering of society into the egalitarian paradise. The expulsion of Trump from office like a foreign body is the proof that the organism of state is wholly alien now.
Posted by:746

#2  Maybe I won't survive.
Posted by: Abu Uluque   2020-11-25 13:30  

#1  Just so. Exactly describes the mentality required to survive a totalitarian regime.

It is chilling to think that this is precisely what we must adopt if we are to accept the fact that our elections are a joke, that we are led by corrupt morons, and that we are living through a pointless, state-imposed economic depression that will likely endure for YEARS.
Posted by: Slats Bumble7226   2020-11-25 00:19  

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