Consider the words of the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno: "Those happy men who yield to their apparent good luck, an ephemeral good fortune, seem like men without any substance, or, at least, men who have not found their own essence, who have not palpated it. Such men are usually incapable of loving or of being loved, and they go through life without any inner meaning." In his book, The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations, Unamuno explains, "The satisfied, the happy ones, do not love; they fall asleep in habit, near neighbor to annihilation. To fall into habit is to begin to cease to be."
These are the words of a thinker. There is nothing more fatal to thinking than the sleep of habit. The snare of ideology is there for those who (consciously or unconsciously) seek relief from the tortures of thought, and for those intellectual children who mistake thought and emotion. Good habits make a sound life, but habit is near to annihilation for the mind that seeks truth, that seeks to think and reflect.
The partisan rant, from whichever partisan you finger, anesthetizes with its emphasis on common rationales and fashionable misunderstandings. The common man seeks relief in commonly received certainties. But the truth is rarely so convenient, or unequivocal, or familiar as the partisans and ideologues would have it. In America neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party represent political truth. What they represent are two variations of habit. In other words, both political parties are "asleep in habit, near neighbor to annihilation."
As for those who seek profundity outside the political parties, we find many small boats crashing upon the rocks. A reader recently asked, out of curiosity, about these 9/11 conspiracy theories where the U.S. government is said to be behind the destruction. The reader noted, "These ideas seem to be coming from both the right [and the left]. How can they think that the Pentagon was not destroyed by an airplane?" The answer, of course, is simple. Men can come to any conclusion they please, and often conclude merely to please themselves. If you resent the rich and the powerful, then you please yourself by ascribing all evil to the rich and the powerful. Such a conclusion requires no thought. Those who talk about missiles hitting the Pentagon on 9/11 are asleep, even as they accuse the rest of the country of sleeping. Only their sleep rests on absurdities more palpable than those of the mainstream.
As for the future role of conspiracy theories, we see a growing acceptance of such theories. And so we ought to worry, especially if an economic crash occurs. We must remember that the impulse toward violent revolution doesn't always express itself in Marxist or Leftist terminology. Timothy McVeigh was also a revolutionary, and believed in the conspiracy of bankers, elitists and Jews. As a result of his "thinking," he blew up the Oklahoma City Federal Building. Here a man "asleep in habit," attends to annihilation through fertilizer. This differs from the sleepwalking of the political mainstream, which prefers the illusions of the shopping mall regime, popular entertainment and celebrity-dominated national news. (Fertilizer of a different kind altogether.)
The accepted form of sleepwalking (as opposed to the radical form) is also dangerous because society, having lost all sense of citizen vigilance or responsibility, ignores the advance of radical evil on every front. Dangerous nonsense is allowed to prevail in every institution, from the Federal Reserve to the Department of State, from elementary school to the Ivy League. Order is breaking down everywhere as the demand for comfort and convenience advances to the sound of gentle nonsense. Authority lies everywhere in tatters, while "the satisfied, the happy ones, do not love; they fall asleep in habit, near neighbor to annihilation."
Meanwhile, old enemies from abroad recognize and seek to exploit America's growing self-preoccupation. The old KGB, which has taken over Russia (and likely kept power, from the outset, behind the façade of drunken Boris), nourishes an old set of schemes against its "main enemy" (the United States). Is it any accident that Russia is now combined with China in support of Iran? The policy of Russia and China is clear. Their support for rogue states, for anti-American thinking, leaves no room for doubt. The leaders in Beijing and Moscow are the creatures of a long-range strategy. It is a strategy that lets America go to sleep, then sets to work. In his 26 March 1992 memorandum to the CIA, Soviet KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn warned, years in advance of the present crisis, "A primary objective of the [Sino-Russian] strategy here is to achieve a partnership with fundamentalist Iran and ... to replace the present American-oriented rulers of Saudi Arabia with fundamentalists. The opening in Saudi Arabia of a Russian Embassy ... [is] part of an offensive to bring about a political reorientation in that country."
It has been child's play to advance this strategy. This is due to the dynamic between the two sleepwalking political parties in the West. As Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev explained to the Conference of European Communist Parties in Karlovy Vary, in April 1967, "In conditions of international tension, in bourgeois countries, the reactionary elements become active, the military raise their heads, anti-democratic tendencies and anti-communism are strengthened. And conversely, the past few years have shown quite clearly that, in conditions of slackened international tension, the pointer of the political barometer moves left."
A Western politician would say that a dangerous experiment to reduce tensions, like the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, involving the upending of Soviet society, would be out of the question. But Soviet society was predicated on a series of upending experiments from the outset. Nationalization of major industries, war communism, NEP, state capitalism, farm collectivization - all these were experiments accomplished with human guinea pigs. It never mattered that millions perished. The theories of the leadership had to be tested. Anything approaching normal life (i.e., habit) had to be destroyed because the restless revolutionaries who took control of Russian in 1917 thought national habit was a form of sleep and sleep a form of death. And so, in 1989, revolutions were orchestrated on orders from the Kremlin. In this matter we must remember that Eastern politics is not Western politics. It was Hannah Arendt who first observed that all totalitarian states thrive by a process of perpetual revolution. Only by controlling the revolutionary impulses of the oppressed could the oppressor keep his office. After 1991 nobody went through the former Soviet Union and liquidated the Communist Party elite, or the sword and shield of the Party - the KGB. The old red functionaries have become the new democratic functionaries in one Soviet Republic after another. To understand the continuity of policy one must understand the continuity of fellowship and the continuity of deception between Russia's old Central Committee and the new Presidential Administration.
A country does not flip. It cannot turn into its opposite. A country, like a person, remains true to its nature. Its stamp is deep and indelible. One may ask to whose ultimate benefit is such a system? But this is the wrong question. First, one must solve the question of nature. It is an error to imagine that distant enemies aren't really enemies because the enmity bears no profit. People do what they do because it is in their nature. Therefore we must consider the nature of Russian and Chinese apprentices to politicians who have 100 million deaths to their credit over the last 90 years. I once asked a Russian colonel if there were any good people in the Russian Federation hierarchy. He gave me a withering look. "These people are not human beings," he said. "They are crazy persons."
The Western sleepers, clinging to their happiness, believe that foreign governments are like their own. But their sweet dreams of peace and plenty will soon be interrupted.
