virtualmima's reviews
799 reviews

Karen Horney thoroughly disproved everything Freud has ever said, and yet people still cling to his stupid ideas because he turned psychoanalysis into a religion and no one can handle the truth about themselves. People turn to Freud's and Jung's ideas as excuses for their toxic behaviors, trying to rationalize them as instinct, as if everyone must be as they are. Karen Horney shows instead how neurosis is something you learn in order to cope with our broken culture and the torments of Western civilization. Instead of being codified into our biology as instincts or personality types, neuroses are trends of unquestioned thought patterns people develop over time that can coexist with other neuroses and gain or lose influence depending on how much you believe in certain core ideas about yourself. Everyone should read her work to learn about yourself and everyone you know.

Symbols do not exist in nature. They are a byproduct of language and exist only in relation to the cultures that manufactured them. You can also create your own symbols that mean something to you personally but wouldn't mean anything to anyone else who sees them. Western culture is built on the archaic symbols manufactured by its predecessors to control the masses of Ancient Rome and Greece through the Middle Ages into the present day. But ever since the Industrial Revolution, capitalists have manufactured symbols and used pseudo-psychology like Freud and Jung to convince us that symbols are written into our biology, denying the fact that they are manmade, even as new symbols are manufactured every other day. While many of the symbols we have are based on Greco-Roman "archetypes" (the word archetype is Jung's lie that we are born knowing symbols), a resurgence of symbol-manufacturing began in the late 19th century when a bunch of pseudo-biologists tried to make racial myths sound scientific.

The way you use and understand symbols and language shapes your perception of reality, if you believe in symbols and rely on them to understand everything. Through the arts and entertainment, as well as socialization and other aspects of culture and everyday life, fascists have been manufacturing symbols for over a century with the intent of building an illusory false-reality for the masses. Language being a collection of symbols, the symbols don't have to make sense or have any meaning because there are so many of them that even if you look for them it would take a long time to fully free yourself from their influence. The existence of cliches and stereotypes is a sign of fascism. Today, social media dominates mass culture, and algorithms are created with the intention of putting these symbols together and controlling the illusion they create. Everything is personalized both to sell products and to manipulate people into being lazy consumers who won't upset the new order of things. While the fascists themselves are too stupid to be actively manufacturing all symbols, they descend from a long line of idiots who believe in the symbols that were manufactured for them centuries ago, and this inspires them to manufacture new symbols almost automatically. With language redefined, anyone who truly is a threat to the establishment cannot possibly communicate their ideas to anyone, because anything they say will be reinterpreted as something else by everyone else. Nothing can be organized because everyone speaks the language of the oppressors, and such a language does not allow for the communication of ideas that go against the structure of the language itself. A person who understands and opposes the fascist system, for instance, may be considered a leftist, and the cultural symbol of a leftist has been redefined as a pacifist hippie. Even the so-called "revolutionaries" usually want their imaginary revolution to be peaceful, as if the oppressors would just peacefully relinquish power once enough people politely ask them to step down. Our world of symbols is such that even the most anti-fascist of individuals might inadvertently support fascism by releasing a movie or book intending it to be a statement against fascism but which actually has fascist language coded into it through its use of cliches, storytelling approach, or appeals to popular taste. Because so many people believe in this manufactured symbol of "peaceful revolution" in the image of pseudo-activists like Gandhi and MLK, it is near impossible for even the most motivated revolutionaries to find enough like-minded individuals to assist in violently overthrowing the fascist system. The only solution to prevent the world from ending is to fight a war against the fascist system (a violent war not a symbolic one) and to successfully replace it with someone who will destroy everything the West has ever built, especially its symbols.

No one truly believes in symbols until they start thinking about them. They are the game pieces of game reality. When life is treated like a game, it is easy to hypnotize the masses, because hypnotism itself is only a game. No one is ever actually being controlled like a puppet when they are under hypnosis, they are just choosing to obey instructions because that is part of the game of being hypnotized. It is important to note that not everyone can be hypnotized, and that it takes both willingness and suggestibility for hypnosis to be successful. A fascist under mass hypnosis does not lose control of themselves to any extent. If they repeat after their leader that Jews are the devil, it is because they want to believe that Jews are the devil. It is a choice that they consciously make, and only once they've made that choice do they start looking for reasons to justify this belief that they adopted. When the leaders of the mass hypnosis say something that every follower suddenly believes in, that gives the followers permission to believe in that thing. It is a challenge that they are willing to face, and the more they defend that choice the more they actually start to believe in that illusion. When a fascist has accustomed themselves to believing in certain things, they all start to pile on top of each other, creating a story of its own that they can connect everything else to. It is easy for anyone at any moment to suddenly slip into fascism because all that requires is a willingness to be a fascist. No one starts to "understand" the points made by the fascists and becomes one. It is a conscious choice that most people will make because people are fickle with their beliefs to begin with and reality to them is just another way of telling a story. It's a switch between two different lifestyles, or genres of living, like switching musical preferences. Most people don't believe themselves to be affected by politics. It is a distant phantom to them, and their beliefs only exist as a means of making them feel connected to the world at large, in fear of dying without a trace.

Humanity has been stuck in one huge ideological pause for the past half century. People keep arguing about the same things as if they're new ideas and nothing changes except to shift back and forth. This cultural amnesia is a macrocosm of the amnesia of the individual, in which most people live hopelessly stuck in the present, as the futureless ahistorical human, constantly surprised by everything that happens and not understanding why they do what they do. But they are ahistorical only because they refuse to understand their place in history, and they are futureless because they refuse to think about how their present actions may affect the future.

While Christopher Lasch made a lot of accurate observations that are still relevant today, he's unfortunately stuck in the conservative mentality that led to the problems in the first place. He contradicts himself by simultaneously opposing capitalism and embracing traditional Western values. I won't deny that his criticism of the illusory pseudo achievements of American liberalism is warranted, but one must be careful not to assume this means conservatism is any better. It only means that liberals don't go far enough because they don't want to leave their life of comfort and privilege, because they are not truly as dedicated to social change as a radical who wants to destroy the system. Capitalism and Western culture need to be destroyed if humanity wishes to survive. Read this critically and filter out the bad from the good, as you should do with all books.