…and they will beat you, Tazer you, spy on you, and imprison you without cause under false charges–they can even break
Conformity should be rendered Obscure, not books
your arms and get away with it.
However, long before it occurs to you that you must revolt, you will likely have been beaten into submission, or set up on some false charges.
Robert M. Lindner, was a psychologist who told us a little about that in 1956, the year he died. Were it not for his concept of a Rebel Without a Cause, we would likely never hear his name, save for a footnote or two in the annals of psychology.
More interestingly, his work “Must We Conform?” provided a piece or two of the template of the police personality.
Police can harass you, compile false data about you, plant evidence in “official records” about you, and attempt to set you up for crimes before you realize that you must begin to fight them back. By then it will be too late, because by then, they have won: they have created in you the exact thing that gives them their purpose, and their excuse for being.
You are outside the “norm” of mediocre.
You, resistant in the least to their brutal, unaccountable attempts to smash you into conformity, will be looked upon as criminal, and you will be abused by police and the social mechanism; and actions that fight back, or seek to uncover their crimes at the most extraordinary end will be seen as acts of your—not their–deeper criminality, and threat to “society.”
Sadly, “American society”is not on the side of individuals, and has grown to the bloated and untenable position in the world of exporting violence for oil, and believing in lies before truths, as they defer only to “official sources,” and “scientific opinions”, or art that takes only the form of propaganda; and a media that guides them like sheep.
Ironically, if you don’t believe me, Google “American Society”. Before you get even one hit on our actual society, you get auto-suggestions at the top of the listings, and The American society of Plastic Surgeons, right at the top.
If that isn’t a suggestion of the importance of enforced conformity, what is?. When you actually get the results, Wikipedia’s definition of the term is on the top, followed immediately by the American Cancer Society. This is how Google, even, ranks the importance of American society.
Robert M. Lindner’s “Must We Conform?”
In the specific context of this blog, and its purpose, one can understand the police personality and the violence they exert over the non-conformist with the translational lens of Freudian pro-script, but we must look upon the Freudians as what I think they really were, as philosophers-doctors who were on to something about the organic mind; an organ with biological impulses in contrast to imposed societal structures that influenced the mind.
But Freud alone isn’t going to supply the answer for why American society has become overly afraid, and willing to kill others first, ask questions later; to character assassinate others first, find facts later; to criminalize one type of mind over another type of mind.
Whereas the individual struggles daily with the contradictions of hypocrisy in the social condition, or marginalization at the hands of the mass, the police are many things, but what they are not are individual, humane, or clever; intellectual or creative in interpreting causes of individual impulse.
What police are is the antithesis of what one should be, as, in the words of psychiatrist Robert M. Lindner, police and others in the social order are “psychopaths,” and, as the conformity enforcers of the “mass” they have become the ‘ leaders’ of the common Americans .’
We should not be, nor should we consent to be, ruled by psychopaths.
Lindner’s book, written in 1944 was called Rebel Without a Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath, the title of which, and some of the essence of substance, was later adopted in the famous 1955 James Dean movie, Rebel Without a Cause. which has been added to the preserved films of the United States Library of Congress‘s National Film Registry as being deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
Without digressing into the endless loop of discussion of how flawed Lindner’s hypoanalysis was in that case, or wade into Freudian practices and beliefs have been refuted or debunked, critiqued ad infinitum, and debased in modern mans eye’s, there are ideas and concepts that were described by these early Freudian philosophers which remain as pertinent today as they were then.
Lindner wrote, In his 1954 book “ Must We Conform?” in regards to the end-stages of any given civilization, that the appearance of a “new” breed of men, “whose genesis may be discovered among the conditions that conspire to petrify the forms by which the given civilization or society has chosen to express itself.
“These men, I think, are always psychopathic, dedicated to action and violence rather than the contemplation and compassion.”
He was talking about a modern police state, like Stalin, Hitler, and the emergent McCarthyism and its ominous presence in America.
“They prepare the way for the elevation of a Leader, and on his assumption, and thereafter in his name, rule. He in turn, carries the unconscious drama one step further by getting himself killed and immolated. By his death, he brings about the blood bath in which the civilization dissolves; while elsewhere another society is being born—to follow the same unconsciously motivated timeless cycle.”
Without unpacking all that is Freudian and arguable in Lindners’ statement, what is important is his belief that the leaders of modern (“mass men” as he called them) humans are always psychopathic, and always the violent, action driven antithesis of contemplation, or compassion.
That describes the police mind to a fault.
Henceforth, they are driven by violent, murderous impulses, and that has wide ranging implications for interpreting what the American society has become: a society that is ruled only by the violent overlords; oppressors of freedom, intellect, creativity, or compassionate interpretations of the actions of those who are different.
Rarely, they themselves rebel against their own positions, and do good in the world through individual acts of rebellion against their own violent natures. But those rebellions carry a cost, as Sgt. Joseph Bozicevich of Minneapolis can now testify.
Police are the primary upholders, trend setters and brutal enforcers of mediocrity. Anyone different will be persecuted, marginalized, and contained until hyper-masculinized police power can control, displace, or otherwise conquer ones lack of desire to compete for the position of either a leader or a follower of the mediocre.
You must adjust, writes Lindner.’ Adjustment is the element of humanity that the oppressor seeks, your compliance to its authority at all times is the adjustment they seek; your eradication of individuality, and its consummation by the collective “herd” ,’as he calls it.
You must adjust, he writes, is ‘the command above the door of every church, synagogue, cathedral—your passport to salvation. They have conspired in the name of the spirit against the spirit of man—though most of them were founded upon protest, and rebellion, these are now the things they hold in horror.’
You must adjust. Is ‘the slogan emblazoned on the banners of all political parties; modern man is homo politicus…Love, hate, friendship, enmity—these have come to have political significance,’and have become the bartering chips of our American society—the transactional devices of deciding who the police can, and cannot victimize.
“But there is no freedom even here, since conformity is of the essence of all the political organizations that rule over us. Paradoxically, the systems that most loudly proclaim the right of human liberty, and offer themselves as instruments of change are those systems which oppress most heavily.’
“The surrender of individuality is urged, or forced…In the congealing amber of politics the individual is pressed and imprisoned.”
Lindner most presciently anticipated the state of affairs the U.S. is in today, with police misconduct the norm, not the exception, largely because “The sciences have sold themselves to the status quo,” he writes.
“For psychiatry, psychology, and the medical or social arts that depend from them have become devil’s advocates, and sorcerers’ apprentices of conformity. Joined in the criminal conspiracy against human nature, they have poisoned the last oasis for the relief of man. Of all the betrayals, their treachery has been the greatest…equating protest with madness, and non-conformity with neurosis…they labor with art and skill to gut the flame that burns eternally at the core of being. “
These sciences, and the highly politicized and polarizing debates in the hard sciences are especially noteworthy because they are in essence the root cause of the condition of over-policing and poor policing that we suffer from today.
Especially noteworthy as the linkage and unholy matrimony of feminist rape culture studies, or rapeology , allied with polarizing academic liberals, and police science that has birthed upon our nation children that willingly assume gender based, war-like postures from birth, and police are a reaction formation against the idea of weakness, or the possibility that they themselves could be raped [ this is a subject for a later post].
Hence, our society depends almost exclusively on men being in fear of weakness–fear of being raped, but worse, by living in fear of discussing it.
Modern American media, which is composed of only five companies [ video here ], caters to men who uphold violence based endeavors, like ESPN, and Bill O’Reilly, ensuring that different versions of male psyche are diffused, demeaned, or demonized.
They cater to women who are indoctrinated through Oprah, the View, and such other propaganda to believe that they are perpetual victims of men (but not men who are police or police structure affiliated; that is a forbidden dialogue); meanwhile every other show on television panders to the false notion that police are heroes of one kind or another, rather than psychopaths who have bullied themselves into the American mind.
And all media perpetuate the myth that police are safe for your children, and provide “idols” who kids look up to, with a constant stream of police “drama” ( cop porn).
Our media carries stories of the ongoing wars that our society has groomed men and some women to fight, and herald’s police dogs as heroes , and punctuates them side by side with the story that rape of women and girls is everywhere, even in your backyard or shed. Never mind that actual stranger rapes are incredibly rare in America, or worse, that in the story above, some residents say the girl herself was complicit.
Rather than asking if rape culture is growing, we should question the very bizarre projection, and sexual fetishization of women, and girls at the expense of discussing males or male sexuality in positive terms.
We should question whether and how much our government and our CIA is involved in production of pornography as a tool of social control, rather than repeating CIA disinformation about bin Ladens purported porn stash [ and we should be re-visiting this odd state of American sexuality and its connection to the notorious CIA projects MKULTRA and MONARCH which used children as sex slaves and here ]; and question an even more bizarre American society bent on the corruption of the natural and basic sexual impulses of human beings.
Lindner wrote at a time when shock therapy and lobotomies were being used on human beings—he wrote that if the psychiatrists, and the drugs and psychotropic dopes; if the evil madness of psychiatrists aligning themselves with the status quo; and if the literature and the “soft persuasion and counsel that apes wisdom” doesn’t “cure” men into conformity, and level him with the “mass,” then
“there remains in the arsenals of adjustment the ultimate weapons: the little black box for shock therapy, and the swift and silent knife for psycho surgery. From the skies the lightning and thunder are stolen to be discharged into the brain, the seat of reason, the home of evolution, and the treasury of manhood. In the convulsion that follows, resistance ebbs and another sheep is added to the flock…”cured” of his humanity.”
Reagan closed the asylums, and Americans built jails to house the mentally ill, right alongside the actual rapist, and murderers. Freudian psychoanalysis was replaced with American drug conglomerates, the dope dealers replaced with scientific opinions that work toward conformity, and against freedom.
I posit that the police powers and their Tazers have replaced shock therapy, and in collusion with media produce the dull-minded programs and propaganda like scared straight, rather than examine the root cause of social dysfunction in America .
Despite the modern trend to debunk the Freudians, the psychologists are as Lindner predicted: merely tools of the police power structure, in collusion with conformist visions of “society,” rather than visionary visions of peaceful possibility.
Fight the_Police 