Despite lusting after subversive non-conformity, these mere re-enactors are content to live in the shadows of their rebel icons, resigned to merely creating the palest imitation of the lives of truly adventurous people from the past instead of having the courage to live their own adventures today. With their obsession for safety, these people can only infuse their lives with the adventure they still crave by living vicariously through others more daring than themselves.
That is why when finally faced with the #opportunity to rage against the machine, these imposters got behind the machine and helped push it along instead. Lacking the moral courage to stand for their supposed convictions, they sublimate their own desire to be deviant into movies and make-believe. From the #punk enthusiast with a shaved head and ripped pants to the John Waters fan who identifies with the Drapes in Crybaby–many of these people who lust after subversive non-conformity and style themselves after countercultural icons are ironically, laughably, pathetically devoted to fitting in.
When it comes to the dichotomy of maestro versus tribal character types, they are #tribal people through and through. In essence, the tribal personality is the #conformist who is conventional, strives to fit in with others, and is great at tasks requiring unity and standardization. The maestro is the aloof non-conformist who is comfortably on their own wavelength, who is not afraid to think outside the box, and prefers to work independently. According to a popular career guidance book, the vast #majority of the population are tribal types, and maestros comprise a tiny minority.
It is easy to see this dichotomy illustrated in the #pandemic. We see it amply demonstrated in mask compliance, with tribal individuals basing the strictness of their mask-wearing, not on any supposed concern about germ prevention— but solely based on what others around them are doing. They are stringent about mask wearing when around others who also appear to be strict in their compliance. But when around others who defy the custom, they let their masks slip down to their chins or even take it off altogether because they know the risk of social ostracism is low. For most people, the mask serves as a social tool rather than a tool of supposed #hygiene.
Tribal people’s sense of values is relative and changes based on their social environments. All the societal evils that have taken place in the United States (and elsewhere) have occurred by the hands of an #establishment with the consent and complicity of masses of otherwise good, tribal-minded people who lacked the #independence and courage to be deviant. If it looks like the majority are going along with something, even something in retrospect that would clearly be deemed wrong or evil, the tribal person will go along with it as well by rationalizing their guilt and responsibility away. These rationalizations, collectively, become mass delusions that are later used to excuse the complicity in the wrong-doing. “We did not now any better,” or “it was a different time,” they will say. Hogwash. They knew exactly what they were doing, but they lacked the courage to stand apart from the crowd. For every mass atrocity that was committed, there was a strident minority that not only knew better but tried to hold the majority to task for its actions. These minorities were #historically and are currently dismissed, ignored, laughed at, socially ostracized, or even penalized.
Progressive #ideology teaches that we are better than previous generations, that we have learned our lessons from past mistakes, and that we will not repeat those mistakes. This is a load of crock, and the past two years have shown that humans are no more evolved now than they were at any previous period, that they are more willing than ever to persecute others for their differences and to subjugate people into #conformity. If nothing else, the pandemic revealed that most people today have no deep understanding of why various past persecutions were wrong, and if persecution today does not look exactly like a persecution of yesterday they cannot recognize it for what it is. Their understanding of persecution as a moral wrong is a reductionist list of rote memorization rather than an innate value borne of an underlying moral #philosophy.
These tribal-minded people, these supposed lovers of #rebellion and #subversion, are going to rationalize their culpability and cowardice away. They always do. They will say that they were operating on the best information they had at the time, that no one could have known, that even the experts were fooled, that they simply followed the leaders and experts.
We cannot let them get away with these lies.
Their complicity was not an innocent mistake as they will try to make us believe, but a willful effort to persecute the rebel #opposition.
Declared emergencies are the most expedient way for governments to seize power and the method by which many military dictatorships come into existence. A medical #dictatorship is a new twist on an old classic. Emergency powers enable politicians to do things they otherwise do not have the power to do and to severely trample on the rights of the citizenry
