“What became of subtilty?” Understanding the Powerful Cult called…

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Here’s a video interview of Iain McGilchrist, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who never mentions the actual thing he’s talking about but gives the most ingenious and satisfying description of how and why a certain modern cultural poison is killing our happiness and annihilating life’s meaning, especially for young people here in the US.

He calls it a crisis of total left-hemisphere dominance, the new reign of Puritanism.

He believes that the only way to reverse the damage it’s doing is to understand it and talk about it calmly.

I agree and hope you will share this video with everyone on your email list, even the one who despises psychiatrists.

After you listen, let’s see if you and I agree on the best single word to describe what he’s talking about.

The interview reminds me of Hemingway’s short story, “Hills Like White Elephants,” where two lovers quarrels over abortion, but the reader must figure that out because the word “abortion” is never mentioned.

Whenever I hear someone talking up true inclusiveness and diversity while pointing out that the root problem is “scientific” materialism, I can’t help but cheer inside. Someone out there gets it!

Quite opposite to the old understanding of how the left and right hemispheres of the brain perceive the world and deal with it, Dr. McGilchrist tells us that as a result of studying people with right hemispheric strokes (which can destroy the right hemisphere, leaving only the left to deal with things), it is the left hemisphere that believes it is right about everything and becomes angry and disgusted if anyone contradicts it. Worldview tolerance is alien to it, denial of reality comes naturally.

As you know, a right hemispheric stroke can paralyze the left side of the body (since the nerve fibers cross over). Well…

McGilchrist tells us about a presumably representative stroke victim with no feeling or movement in the left arm after a severe right-hemispheric stroke. The patient was in total denial of the fact that his left arm belonged to him.

“That’s not my arm.”

This launches an understanding of the nature of wokeness. That’s the word he never said, but only talked around.

Stemming from the divide in the early 1900’s where Physics began rejecting “scientific” materialism while Biology did a mind-meld with it (by assuming that the human body and mind are entirely mechanical and without true consciousness, free will, spirit or soul) woke society is now finally becoming so left-hemisphere dominated that woke individuals resemble McGilchrist’s left-hemisphere-dominated schizophrenic patients who had lost touch with truth and reality.

The left hemisphere, he explains, lives in a somewhat 2-dimentional world and exists for the purpose of focusing narrowly, grasping one small thing at a time (often a physical object, a word or a phrase) and controlling it beneath an inflexible, unquestionable worldview.

He tells us that when he asks a new patient what’s wrong, if the answer is, “nothing, I’m fine,” then there is nothing he can to do help.

So the best “action” available to us un-woke people who would like to bring true diversity of ideas, free speech, and the fullness of human meaning back from the mechanical grip of Wokeism, is to simply talk about it, hopefully in a non-confrontational, non-brittle and charitable way… though sheepishly now I’ve linked to the word “Wokeism” and discovered it’s a pejorative term. Who knew?

Maybe that’s why Dr. McGilchrist never mentioned it. Some people say it’s a mean term invented by FOX “News.”

I don’t listen to Fox (Republican Brainwashing) “News” or to any of the numerous Democrat Brainwashing “News” programs either (both sides owned and controlled by a small group of hyper-wealthy people), so I ignorantly thought “woke” was a neutral term created by its owners for their racist worldview of denial that addicts people like a hypnagogic drug and is now ushering in Orwell’s 1984. <– Here’s the full text in pdf, if you want to re-read it.

“Something kind of sad about the way that things have come to be desensitized to everything. What became of subtlety? How can this mean anything to me if I really don’t feel anything at all? I’ll keep digging ’till I feel something.” – Maynard (James Herbert Keenan) of Tool

Mr. Tool (as I used to call him when trying to make my teenage son laugh at his out-of-touch dad) is one of the most open and honest lyricists ever to breathe, not to mention he’s insightful.

As Tool’s haunting video for this song might be retrospectively interpreted: when the left hemisphere takes full control of a person or of an entire society (like ours in the US), it has no more use for subtly than it has for self-questioning of its deepest assumption, an empty claim and threat that echoes the Puritan culture from the early white colonies of North America:

“I am always right, so keep your mouth shut and obey me.”

I have to believe that most woke people will be able to extract themselves from this gnarly worldview once they understand what spirit it represents. It reminds me of an old story…

And it came to pass, when the time was come that he should be received up, he steadfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem, And sent messengers before his face: and they went, and entered into a village of the Samaritans, to make ready for him. And they did not receive him, because his face was as though he would go to Jerusalem. And when his disciples James and John saw this, they said, Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them, even as Elias did? But he turned, and rebuked them, and said, Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of. For the Son of man is not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them. And they went to another village.

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Right-hemisphere Love,

Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD

Wokeism’s misplaced blames

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The woke movement preaches an unquestionable dogma of white privilege and white guilt. The dogma ignores the cultural and historic diversity of the so-called “white race” and overlooks the truly privileged class because these people are racially diverse.

And it’s easier to take the lazy route of thoughtlessly lumping white people together into their fictitious monolithic camp of genetically evil abusers who must be shamed, silenced and conquered through political force and eventually all other available means including violence and possibly white genocide if their emotions run high enough.

To question the broad-brush treatment of “white privilege” constitutes an unpardonable sin called racism. With this knee-jerk programming of thought, they are able to forbid all meaningful discussion of race issues throughout the Western education system.

Even so, their ironic racism deserves everyone’s examination because it can potentially open our eyes to a truly privileged class, a group that dominates human society and probably always will unless some future generation learns to identify them and educates themselves to recognize and avoid their mass manipulations of society.

I suspect that identifying the truly privileged class within each country might be quite helpful over the long haul, though silencing them and discriminating against them would be a foolish mistake if the goal were to diminish their grip on global power.

“But why do they even exist?” we might ask ourselves.

At least from the infinitely limited perspective of human materialistic science, the world is fundamentally unfair. Gazelles provide “necessary” food for lions. Sparrow hawks must eat smaller birds to survive, we are told.

It’s hard to disagree.

Such seems to be the dark side of Nature’s balance between predation and cooperation (symbiosis). Science is beginning to believe that symbiosis actually dominates Nature while competition/predation plays a subordinate role. This reversal of emphasis is the start of great things for humanity, I think. Humanity has suffered enough from the error that Nature is dominated by the “survival of the fittest” or the survival of the best breeders. The era of “survival by symbiosis” will hopefully take root and shift us away from hatred and war.

But within the darkness of Nature’s lethal competitions, none of us seems to have been given a choice as to where we would be born or what species or subspecies we might inhabit when we find ourselves alive and conscious on Earth.

And so from birth we humans have not escaped the unfair competition inherent to Earth’s ecosystems. (Nor have we missed out on her networks of symbiosis.)

In this context, the woke movement seems to be a well-meaning attempt to fight Nature’s unfairness from a materialist’s anti-spiritual perspective. Wokeism is a resistance to the unfair birth circumstances on Earth. It uses woke racism to fight a heavily exaggerated version of white racism that would have been accurate 75 years ago, I think.

Unfortunately the woke movement has targeted the wrong group of people entirely.

A more appropriate target would be the truly privileged. But who are they?

Here are some of their lucky cultural and metabolic traits…

1. strong wills from early childhood

2. outlier courage (which is a low baseline of anxiety and fear, I suspect)

3. the gift of stable high mental energy for sustaining purpose over decades while imposing their wills upon others

4. the uncommon form of “intelligence” (for lack of a more accurate term) that enables them to mentally navigate complex cause-and-effect scenarios and make predictions that tend to come true with the help of their high mental energy and sustained physical activity over decades and generations…

People with this combination of rare metabolic and cultural advantages are the actual privileged class in today’s societies around the globe. But they are not primarily white people by any stretch of the imagination.

They are instead a racially diverse group that constitutes a tiny percentage of the top 1% of wealthy, politically powerful people in every country. They are outliers, born for dominance just as lions are born to dominate their niche.

Nature does this sort of thing routinely on Earth. No one is to blame.

The woke myth that the privileged people belong to their oversimplified version of a “white race” is a bad joke that sets humanity up for another round of racist genocide. It’s not as if two wrongs ever made anything right. 

Of course the woke folks mean well and have tried to deny their racism by redefining the word “racism” as something that the (by definition) “oppressed” people of color can’t possibly participate in. You have to be white to be a racist, in essence.

No one can reason with them on this because to the woke mind, reason, statistics, science and religion (or spirituality) represent inferior sources of truth. They believe that the individual’s “lived experience” is the ultimate source of truth, perhaps the only source.

This little Jedi mind trick is the bedrock foundation of a woke brainwashing technique that begins with school children and continues through the university level in parts of the US. 

I’m hoping that the woke movement will quickly become a dark history lesson about how easily childhood brainwashing took place back in the day within modern school systems.

As such, Wokeism could become a valuable cautionary tale.

If, however, it continues to grow exponentially, our children and grandchildren will live in a modern version of the dark ages where objective reality, logic, reason, fairness, science, spirituality, and honest statistics will take a backseat to “lived experiences” and the self-destructive emotions of victimhood expressed subjectively by woke individuals, many of whom have suffered unspeakable wrongs within Earth’s apparent unfairness.

Below is an informative interview of a professor, Peter Boghossian, who was driven to resign by woke colleagues and students of the university where he taught. The interviewer claims to be neither conservative nor liberal, which should be irrelevant but isn’t. The professor claims to be politically “liberal but not progressive,” if that matters to you. Personally, I think it shouldn’t matter because both sides of politics desperately need to hear the views of the other side and learn to respect them.

It’s a bit shocking to me to realize (and personally own) just how malleable the human worldview is, especially when the mind is seized and controlled from childhood as it is to some degree for all humans I guess, like it or not. Wokeism demonstrates that we don’t have to be part of a “primitive” culture in a stone age to undergo dramatic brainwashing to the point where we advocate anti-reason while believing we’re somehow not promoting evil.

Humans can be made to see North as South and subjectivity as objectivity.

For example, the woke community sometimes claims that science is racist. Talk about a radical retreat from reason.

But, wow! As flawed, biased, and illogically dogmatic as science remains today, and as much as the aging “scientific” dogma of genetic evolution via random mutation and natural selection has been used as justification for some of the insane racist genocides of the 20th century, the fact still remains as clear as mountain water that science and spirituality together are the only paths that humans have found toward wisdom, truth, love, understanding, fairness and peace.

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Fair love,

Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD