The Case for Censorship

by Not Sure

7 August 2022

“Transition phase…That's what they call it in sociology, transition phases, when they're altering your culture and your morals or anything that goes into creating that culture.”

“…the changes in your life are planned for you. Fashions and even music is designed way ahead of this introduction into society, all depending upon decisions of those who create your culture and it's called culture creation.”

- Alan Watt, “Cutting Through the Matrix” on RBN, 7 Dec. 2007, “They Grow Your Culture, So Pick "Your" Cult”

In July, David Beasley met with Sam Worthington. In late July, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas issued a statement. Last week, Brittney Griner was sentenced to nine years in prison. Pete Davidson has ‘amicably’ split with his girlfriend of less than a year.

You might not know some of these names. David Beasley was a one-time governor of South Carolina, and he is currently the president of the United Nations World Food Programme. Sam Worthington is the CEO of InterAction, an alliance of international nongovernmental organizations. Through InterAction, Worthington is deeply involved in a wide range of policy and programs with the highest levels of the United Nations, national governments, philanthropies, and people and organizations within civil society. He was a resident policy fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. He is currently a trustee of the Van Leer Foundation; sits on the U.N. Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC); USAID’s Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aide (ACVFA); Brown University’s Advisory Board on the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies; the boards of the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, Forus, Religions for Peace and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas is a French economist and the current chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF is an international monetary institution consisting of 190 countries. Its stated mission is “working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world.” It was formed in 1944 at the Bretton Woods Conference and has been critical to global financial policy since that time.

The names you are likelier to be familiar with are Griner and Davidson. Brittney Griner is a black lesbian basketball player for the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA). In February, she was arrested in Russia, accused of trying to smuggle less than a gram of hashish (cannabis) oil into that country. On 4 August of 2022, she was sentenced to nine years in prison in Russia. In 2015, Griner was arrested for domestic violence against her fiancé, fellow WNBA player, Glory Johnson who she subsequently married. On 4 June 2015, Johnson announced that she had become pregnant with twins via in vitro fertilization. The next day, the couple announced the annulment of their marriage. They were divorced in 2016. In 2019, Griner married Cherelle Watson who later changed her name to Cherelle Griner. President Biden is working to obtain her release from a Russian prison.

Pete Davidson is a comedian and an actor whose father Scott Davidson was a New York City firefighter who died during the 9/11 attacks. Scott Davidson was last seen running up the stairs of the Marriott World Trade Center just before it collapsed. Pete was a regular on Saturday Night Live until this year. By 2018 he had over 40 tattoos. He recently ended a relationship with Kim Kardashian who praised him for his “BDE” and said while she had grown to be deeply in love with him, initially she was attracted to him just because she was “DTF.” But you probably know all that already if you follow the “culture.”

What you might have missed was David Beasley being hosted by Sam Worthington at a Council on Foreign Relations meeting where he reminded the audience that when he delivered the Nobel Peace Prize speech in December of 2021, he had described this period of food insecurity as “the worst humanitarian crisis we’ve faced since World War II,” and he had made that statement prior to Ukraine. “But we’re facing unprecedented crisis right now, and if we don’t deal with it strategically, effectively, and timely, you are going to have mass famine, you are going to have destabilization of dozens of nations, and you’ve going to have mass migration. This is not hyperbole; this is reality.”

In an update to the IMF’s World Economic Outlook report, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas wrote, “The world may soon be teetering on the edge of a global recession, only two years after the last one.” He said that central banks needed to clamp down on inflation without engineering a recession. “It’s a very, very narrow path, and I think it’s getting narrower and narrower.”

We know all about the incarceration of a black, gay female basketball player and the end of a relationship between a comedian and a television personality because of “culture creation” and the news media. We are told what to worry about and told what is worth thinking about. As Alan discusses in the Redux from 7 December 2007 entitled “They Grow Your Culture, So Pick "Your" Cult, the media has an essential and critical role to play in shaping our perceptions. He talks about “psychic driving,” a technique of depatterning and reprogramming the mind that the Canadian psychiatrist Ewen Cameron concocted and experimented with. The term has been relegated to the dust bins of exposés on MK-Ultra, LSD experiments and the CIA and it’s mocked in the movie Men Who Stare at Goats, but the actual technique is in daily use, nonetheless. It’s the repetition of footage of the Twin Towers collapsing. It’s the fact that we all know what “Twin Towers” means. It’s the image of people dropping on the sidewalks of Wuhan or “Weapons of Mass Destruction” or “Trust the Science.” The technique destroys minds. Just research what happened to Cameron’s “patients” at Allen Memorial Hospital in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

***

The concept of cultural industries - the creation, industrial reproduction and mass distribution of cultural works - is not new. In 1948, Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer coined the term. Adorno and Horkheimer were founding members of the Frankfurt School which started in Germany in 1929 during the Weimar Republic.

The Frankfurt School line of philosophical inquiry was based upon the Freudian, Marxist and Hegelian concepts of idealist philosophy. “Idealism” asserts that reality is indistinguishable and inseparable from human perception and understanding; that reality is a mental construct closely connected to ideas. If you ponder that, you will see how subjectivism and existentialism arise from this and it will be easier to understand how concepts such as moral relativism and situation ethics become the philosophical norm. You can see that “idealism” is the perfect philosophy to promote in a culture in which you want the New Age and all its many facets to proliferate. Only in a world in which reality is subjective and morals are relative can one “do as thou wilt” or “be the change you want to see.” In a world in which there is a reality beyond what individuals can perceive and understand, there might be a few inconvenient rules.

But long before the Frankfurt School, there was Plato and his Republic. Alan Watt has often mentioned that Plato wrote about the need for artists, poets and performers to be “licensed” by the state, so powerful were the arts. It has been many years since I read Plato’s Republic. I recall that one of the things I was most struck by in the dialogues was the long and comprehensive conversation about justice, what constituted justice and how it could be achieved in a society. At the end of the dialogue, it was concluded that justice itself was not as important to a functioning society as the appearance of justice.

I didn’t have time to re-read The Republic today, so I searched out some commentary that might help illustrate the points that Plato had made about licensing artists. I came upon the work of Stephen Hicks, a Canadian-American philosopher who is currently teaching at Rockford University in Illinois where he heads the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship. In a little summary of The Republic by Hicks, I found this:

“In The Republic, Plato makes a systematic case for censoring all arts. The task of the Platonic philosopher is to take up the “ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry” and to assert the State-enforced dominance of philosophy. To that end, The Republic as a whole is a powerful integration of philosophy, religion, education, and politics, and its argument for the political suppression of most art follows from that integrated system.”

Hicks makes the point that Plato criticizes poets for not always portraying gods and heroes as worthy and exalted beings. Sometimes the poets, e.g. Homer, show the gods bickering and behaving immorally. According to Plato, good people and gods do not deceive — but painters constantly deceive us by trying to make their fake imitations look real. Meanwhile, Plato asserts that politicians (and only politicians) ought to be allowed to lie to their citizens. (And we’re back to my takeaway from many years ago: Justice isn’t necessary for a functioning society, but only the appearance of justice.)

Stephen Hicks writes, “The Republic‘s overall argument for censorship thus combines a particular conception of morality with religion and authoritarian politics. Formalizing the argument:

1. To have a good society, we must have good citizens.

2. To have good citizens, children must be well educated.

3. To be well educated, children must be exposed to good material and shielded from bad material.

4. So, to have a good society, children must be exposed to good material and shielded from bad material.

5. It is the obligation of the State to educate its citizens.

6. So the State should allow only good material and suppress bad material.

7. The State’s censorship applies also to art.

8. So the State should allow only good art and suppress bad art.

***

In this Redux, Alan mentions Aldous Huxley and the non-fiction follow-up to Brave New World that he wrote in the late 1950s, Brave New World Revisited. Huxley said when he wrote Brave New World in 1931, he thought that his dystopian vision was many years in the future, but he wrote that book before Hitler’s rise to power, before Stalinism, before World War II. From his perspective in 1958, it all seemed imminent, indeed some of it already arrived. Regarding propaganda he wrote:

“The effectiveness of political and religious propaganda depends upon the methods employed, not upon the doctrines taught. These doctrines may be true or false, wholesome or pernicious -- it makes little or no difference. If the indoctrination is given in the right way at the proper stage of nervous exhaustion, it will work. Under favorable conditions, practically everybody can be converted to practically anything.”

***

We are in a culture war, where what is good is determined by the State and what we are given as art, literature and performance has been determined by the State to be “good” and what is “good” is all we are allowed to see and know. In our present culture, it is “good” to have forty tattoos. It is “good” to exude BDE (Big D**k Energy). It is “good” that comedy should be “a series of brutal truths and vulgar confessions” that focuses on drug use and all the sex that even a socially awkward young fellow can have. This is all good, so becoming wealthy from it is also good and because it’s so good you can attract an even wealthier middle-aged woman whose career was launched by a “leaked” sex tape and whose only real asset is her ass…et. You won’t know if the woman is sincerely interested in you or if she is just DTF (Down to F**k) but it doesn’t matter because you are DTF too.

Even though we’ve all just lived through nearly three years of Covid, with a tremendous loss of rights, where thousands of small businesses were destroyed and countries’ economies are now teetering on the brink of disaster, we’re so well managed that we cannot maintain equilibrium within the rapidity of change. We are back to the restaurants and bars, guzzling cheap and meaningless entertainment. The mainstream media hasn’t been told to cover David Beasley’s discussion about a looming worldwide food shortage. The alternative outlets are caught up in hype about snake venom in the vaccine or the graphene oxide that makes the parasites in the vaccine transmit 5G signals that will turn the vaccinated into easily controlled zombies. These topics must be safe enough, perhaps even authorized. After all, no one wants to get hit with a $49 million bill for peddling misinformation.

Not long after Alan died, someone said that his talks weren’t so “relevant” now and what was the point of the Redux (replaying old talks) because people “out there” wanted to hear about current events. You can’t get “subscribers” and “likes” with old stuff. To each their own, but I find Alan’s talks as relevant now as they ever were, and it amazes me how often a talk that is years old nails it regarding topical events. What Alan delivered, and still does, is timeless. He has meticulously described a system of control that is ancient and diabolically effective.

In this Redux, a caller rather sheepishly explained that his question was coming from his wife. “She wants to know what happens when you die?” It’s an interesting little exchange between Alan and the caller as Alan tells him that “it depends on what you personally experience in your life. As you seek truth things happen to you and things almost come to you, but you have to bring it on, you have to be ready and the only way really is to know yourself. Know thyself. That takes a lot of examination and you have to have a hunger, an absolute hunger for truth. When that happens, you’ll have a few experiences that’ll make something happen. That will confirm in your mind for you what there is after. For everyone else…they’ve always called those who simply follow blindly a given set of rules or a religion…they were always called the dead…Let the dead bury their dead…Those who accept the rules that are given to them, never question anything…There are people who will use the given religions as steppingstones and go beyond that. Unfortunately, it’s countered by the whole New Age movement which leads you off into complete fantasy, fiction and actual psychosis. It’s a psychosis, so don’t follow gurus that are supplied to you…If the kingdom of heaven is within you. It’s within you. Then it’s up to you to find it. It’s up to you to find it. And that’s the answer to that one.”

© Not Sure

Additional reading:

Stephen Hicks – Plato on Censoring Artists – a summary

https://www.stephenhicks.org/2012/01/21/plato-on-censoring-artists-a-summary/

A Conversation With David Beasley

https://www.cfr.org/event/conversation-david-beasley

Alex Jones must pay more than $45 million in punitive damages to the family of a Sandy Hook massacre victim

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/alex-jones-must-pay-45-million-punitive-damages-family-sandy-hook-mass-rcna41738