Gnosticism

This is a dangerous time for me. I gave the unread Chicamauga account to the brother-in-law from Tennessee. (I read half of it a couple of years ago while at the Father-in-law’s.) It is from the notes penned by a Union officer on our Wive’s side of the family. I therefore have nothing to read. And with the CBS lineup of ways to kill someone and get caught in less than an hour that I’ve already seen, you can be sure I will find something.

I was hauling stuff around GSO yesterday and heard David Guterson on the Diane Rehm Show. I didn’t catch it all, but did hear a bit about gnosticism.

If, like me, you’re not terribly interested in everything this weak-kneed blowhard has to say, skip to 34 minutes.

Here’s the Wikipedia entry, but reading it makes my head hurt.

It seems I’ve stumbled on the religion of the Left:

Since her book “The Shock Doctrine” was published last year, Klein, now thirty-eight, has become the most visible and influential figure on the American left—what Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky were thirty years ago…

The central thesis of the book is that capitalism and democracy, free markets and free people, do not, as we’ve been told, go hand in hand. On the contrary, capitalism—at least fundamentalist capitalism, of the type promoted by the late economist Milton Friedman and his “Chicago School” acolytes—is so unpopular, and so obviously harmful to everyone except the richest of the rich, that its establishment requires, at best, trickery and, at worst, terror and torture. Friedman believed that markets perform best when freed from government interference, so he advocated getting rid of tariffs, subsidies, minimum-wage laws, public housing, Social Security, financial regulation, and licensing requirements, including those for doctors—indeed, virtually every measure devised to protect people from the market’s harsh logic. Klein argues that the only circumstance in which a population would accept Friedman-style reforms is when it is in a state of shock, following a crisis of some sort—a natural disaster, a terrorist attack, a war. A person in shock regresses to a childlike state in which he longs for a parental figure to take control; similarly, a population in a state of shock will hand exceptional powers to its leaders, permitting them to destroy the regulatory functions of government.

This tracks well against the lie of trickle-down economics.

The post-traumatic childlike state also explains outsourcing of IT, making it “someone else’s problem.”

Oh shit:

The New Deal is usually told as a history of F.D.R., she said, but we don’t talk enough about the pressure from below. Neighborhoods organized, and when their evicted neighbors’ furniture was put on the streets they moved it back into their homes. It was that kind of direct action that won victories like rent control, public housing, and the creation of Fannie Mae. The other thing that’s important to remember, she said, is that the organizers were a threat—of socialist revolution—and it was that which allowed F.D.R. to say to Wall Street, “We have to compromise, or else we’ve got a revolution on our hands.”…

In principle, she is a Keynesian, but she distrusts centralization, institutions, platforms, theories—anything except extremely small, local, ad-hoc, spontaneous initiatives. Basically, she really, really doesn’t like being told what to do…

Klein believes that change comes about only when social movements become so large and disruptive that politicians can no longer ignore them.

Naomi would dance in the Grandover fountains.

The only kind of protest she likes is the Yippie kind, theatrical enough to be entertaining and self-mocking enough to dilute the earnestness to a level that she can tolerate. At the protests in Quebec City during the Summit of the Americas in 2001, for example—when the officials surrounded themselves with a tall protective fence, a group of activists built a medieval-style wood catapult and lobbed Teddy bears over the top. “Quebec City was just madness,” she says. “It was one of those times when nobody knows what’s going to happen, and there are these breakthrough moments, these liberated moments, these moments of euphoria. It was mostly young people, and they were getting gassed, but they were still enjoying themselves tremendously, playing cat and mouse with the police. What I loved about it was that the whole city joined in—people working in cafés on the main streets, and neighbors got buckets of water to wash out people’s eyes. It was like an alternative reality.”

Again, we agree:

“What we have been living since Reagan is a policy of liberating the forces of greed,” she declared. “I don’t think the project has actually been the development of the world and the elimination of poverty. I think this has been a class war waged by the rich against the poor, I think that they won, and I think the poor are fighting back.”

To bring this thing home, the people calling Klein a Gnostic seem to be nasty old Christofascists. Fie on them, but I’m not gonna read her book.

I missed the orgies last night.

I’m not gonna read this one, either.

We obviously visited this stuff during the Dan Brown craze. Nope, not this one.