I agree with your rational analysis. Off course the other side does not play by those rules, they actually see hypocrisy as part of the way to fight what they see as injustice, so being a hypocrite or bigot or corrupt or immoral, is not how they see it, they see themselves as morally correct and all the underhanded and insane methods to get to power is in their mind not only allowed but encouraged to fight the falsely perceived injustice in order to chase utopian social justice. In other words, we cannot moralize those that have abandoned the concept of morality itself and instead think of themselves as always correct.

I mean how do you shake hands with clinched fist?

@Krunoslav Good point. But the problem I see with their position is the direct denial of reality. It is possible to induce a population to disconnect from reality for a period, but the denial of empirical reality has this tendency to grow. More and more areas become dislocated from reality. As their experience is contradicted by what they are told, people begin to wake up, even if they feel intimidated. The purveyors of deceit lose credibility. In the Soviet Union, Pravda (which means "truth" ) and Izvestia (which means the record or the "news" ) represented the Communist Party and the Soviet government respectively. Both, of course, were propaganda organs. But the Soviet people knew this. They had a joke: "In Pravda (the Truth) there is no news (Izvestya); in Izvestya (the News) there is no truth (Pravda)." Of course, if the contradiction between people's experience and how they are told they must interpret it does not jar people to wakeful action, then, I think, nothing can be done. When people choose to embrace social deceit willingly, they have infected themselves with a social psychosis. I think Orwell wrote the three contradictory mottos of Oceania to express this psychotic social state. But contrary to Orwell, I don't see a way for such societies to sustain themselves indefinitely. And the Left's increasingly strident demands to uncouple society from what the majority of people recognize as reality will have the same effect over time. The Left has actually doomed itself. Ultimately, chaos and irrationality engulf the very pillars that hold autocracy together. When this happens, however, I think that we will experience a good deal of violence. A psychotic fantasy will not yield to reality without an unpleasant fight.

@givpd I agree, they have declared war on reality in a nutshell. And yes you can avoid reality, but no you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality. I agree it is not sustainable.

In the book "The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements", author Eric Hoffer puts it like this:

Nature of the Desire for Change:

There is in us a tendency to locate the shaping forces of our existence outside ourselves. Success and failure are unavoidably related in our minds with the state of things around us. Hence it is that people with a sense of fulfillment think it a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change. The tendency to look for all causes outside ourselves persists even when it is clear that our state of being is the product of personal qualities such as ability, character, appearance, health and so on. “If anything ail a man,” says Thoreau, “so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even … he forthwith sets about reforming—the world.”

It is understandable that those who fail should incline to blame the world for their failure. The remarkable thing is that the successful, too, however much they pride themselves on their foresight, fortitude, thrift and other “sterling qualities,” are at bottom convinced that their success is the result of a fortuitous combination of circumstances. The self-confidence of even the consistently successful is never absolute. They are never sure that they know all the ingredients which go into the making of their success. The outside world seems to them a precariously balanced mechanism, and so long as it ticks in their favor they are afraid to tinker with it. Thus the resistance to change and the ardent desire for it spring from the same conviction, and the one can be as vehement as the other.

A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business. This minding of other people's business expresses itself in gossip, snooping and meddling, and also in feverish interest in communal, national, and racial affairs. In running away from ourselves we either fall on our neighbor's shoulder or fly at his throat.

The burning conviction that we have a holy duty toward others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft. What looks like giving a hand is often a holding on for dear life. Take away our holy duties and you leave our lives puny and meaningless. There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless.

Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience... The desire to escape or camouflage their unsatisfactory selves develops in the frustrated a facility for pretending -- for making a show -- and also a readiness to identify themselves wholly with an imposing spectacle

Self-contempt, however vague, sharpens our eyes for the imperfections of others. We usually strive to reveal in others the blemishes we hide in ourselves. Every extreme attitude is a flight from the self. The act of self-denial seems to confer on us the right to be harsh and merciless toward others. Scratch an intellectual, and you find a would-be aristocrat who loathes the sight, the sound and the smell of common folk. The act of self-denial seems to confer on us the right to be harsh and merciless toward others.

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a God or not. The anti-theist is a religious person. He believes in atheism as though it were a new religion. There is a tendency to judge a race, a nation or any distinct group by its least worthy members. Though manifestly unfair, this tendency has some justification. For the character and destiny of a group are often determined by its inferior elements.

The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle. The reason that the inferior elements of a nation can exert a marked influence on its course is that they are wholly without reverence toward the present. They see their lives and the present as spoiled beyond remedy and they are ready to waste and wreck both: hence their recklessness and their will to chaos and anarchy.

For men to plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change, they must be intensely discontented yet not destitute, and they must have the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader or some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible power. They must also have an extravagant conception of the prospects and the potentialities of the future. Finally, they must be wholly ignorant of the difficulties involved in their vast undertaking. Experience is a handicap.

Those who would transform a nation or the world cannot do so by breeding and captaining discontent or by demonstrating the reasonableness and desirability of the intended changes or by coercing people into a new way of life. They must know how to kindle and fan an extravagant hope.

Crude absurdities, trivial nonsense and sublime truths are equally potent in readying people for self-sacrifice if they are accepted as the sole, eternal truth. It is obvious, therefore, that in order to be effective a doctrine must not be understood, but has rather to be believed in. We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand. […] The devout are always urged to seek the absolute truth with their hearts and not their minds. […] If a doctrine is not unintelligible, it has to be vague; and if neither unintelligible nor vague, it has to be unverifiable. One has to get to heaven or the distant future to determine the truth of an effective doctrine. When some part of a doctrine is relatively simple, there is a tendency among the faithful to complicate and obscure it. If a doctrine is not unintelligible, it has to be vague; and if neither unintelligible nor vague, it has to be unverifiable.

On the other hand, there is no more potent dwarfing of the present than by viewing it as a mere link between a glorious past and a glorious future. Thus, though a mass movement at first turns its back on the past, it eventually develops a vivid awareness, often specious, of a distant glorious past. Religious movements go back to the day of creation; social revolutions tell of a golden age when men were free, equal, and independent; nationalist movements revive or invent memories of past greatness.

Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, ‘to be free from freedom.’ It was not sheer hypocrisy when the rank-and-file Nazis declared themselves not guilty of all the enormities they had committed. They considered themselves cheated and maligned when made to shoulder responsibility for obeying orders. Had they not joined the Nazi movement in order to be free from responsibility?

A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation. The vigor of a mass movement stems from the propensity of its followers for united action and self-sacrifice. When we ascribe the success of a movement to its faith, doctrine, propaganda, leadership, ruthlessness and so on, we are but referring to instruments of unification and to means used to inculcate a readiness for self-sacrifice.

One of the rules that emerges from a consideration of the factors that promote self-sacrifice is that we are less ready to die for what we have or are than for what we wish to have and to be. It is a perplexing and unpleasant truth that when men already have “something worth fighting for,” they do not feel like fighting. People who live full, worthwhile lives are not usually ready to die for their own interests nor for their country nor for a holy cause.

Misery does not automatically generate discontent, nor is the intensity of discontent directly proportionate to the degree of misery. [...] A grievance is most poignant when almost redressed. […] Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing.

The facts on which the true believer bases his conclusions must not be derived from his experience or observation but from holy writ. All mass movements generate in their adherents a readiness to die and a proclivity for united action; all of them, irrespective of the doctrine they preach and the program they project, breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred and intolerance; all of them are capable of releasing a powerful flow of activity in certain departments of life; all of them demand blind faith and singlehearted allegiance. All movements, however different in doctrine and aspiration, draw their early adherents from the same types of humanity; they all appeal to the same types of mind. Though there are obvious differences between the fanatical Christian, the fanatical Mohammedan, the fanatical nationalist, the fanatical Communist and the fanatical Nazi, it is yet true that the fanaticism which animates them may be viewed and treated as one.

The same is true of the force which drives them on to expansion and world dominion. There is a certain uniformity in all types of dedication, of faith, of pursuit of power, of unity and of self-sacrifice. There are vast differences in the contents of holy causes and doctrines, but a certain uniformity in the factors which make them effective. He who, like Pascal, finds precise reasons for the effectiveness of Christian doctrine has also found the reasons for the effectiveness of Communist, Nazi and nationalist doctrine. However different the holy causes people die for, they perhaps die basically for the same thing.

Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America.

Those who see their lives as spoiled and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom. If they clamor for freedom, it is but freedom to establish equality and uniformity. The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of the many which make up a tunic; one thread not distinguishable from the others. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority.

The men who rush into undertakings of vast change usually feel they are in possession of some irresistible power. The generation that made the French Revolution had an extravagant conception of the omnipotence of man’s reason and the boundless range of his intelligence. Never, says de Tocqueville, had humanity been prouder of itself nor had it ever so much faith in its own omnipotence.

It is futile to judge the viability of a new movement by the truth of its doctrine and the feasibility of its promises. What has to be judged is its corporate organization for quick and total absorption of the frustrated. Where new creeds vie with each other for the allegiance of the populace, the one which comes with the most perfected collective framework wins.

There is in us a tendency to locate the shaping forces of our existence outside ourselves. Success and failure are unavoidably related in our minds with the state of things around us. Hence it is that people with a sense of fulfillment think it a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change.

...though ours is a godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious.

A pleasant existence blinds us to the possibilities of drastic change. We cling to what we call our common sense, our practical point of view. Actually, these are but names for an all-absorbing familiarity with things as they are. The tangibility of a pleasant and secure existence is such that it makes other realities, however imminent, seem vague and visionary. Thus it happens that when the times become unhinged, it is the practical people who are caught unaware and are made to look like visionaries who cling to things that do not exist.

They who clamor loudest for freedom are often the ones least likely to be happy in a free society. The frustrated, oppressed by their shortcomings, blame their failure on existing restraints. Actually their innermost desire is for an end to the “free for all.” They want to eliminate free competition and the ruthless testing to which the individual is continually subjected in a free society.

All mass movements deprecate the present by depicting it as a mean preliminary to a glorious future; a mere doormat on the threshold of the millennium. That the deprecating attitude of a mass movement toward the present seconds the inclinations of the frustrated is obvious. What surprises one, when listening to the frustrated as they decry the present and all its works, is the enormous joy they derive from doing so. Such delight cannot come from the mere venting of a grievance. There must be something more -- and there is. By expatiating upon the incurable baseness and vileness of the times, the frustrated soften their feeling of failure and isolation. It is as if they said: 'Not only our blemished selves, but the lives of all our contemporaries, even the most happy and successful, are worthless and wasted.' Thus by deprecating the present they acquire a vague sense of equality.

An active mass movement rejects the present and centers its interest on the future. It is from this attitude that it derives its strength, for it can proceed recklessly with the present—with the health, wealth and lives of its followers. It is a truism that many who join a rising revolutionary movement are attracted by the prospect of sudden and spectacular change in their conditions of life.

Freedom aggravates at least as much as it alleviates frustration. Freedom of choice places the whole blame of failure on the shoulders of the individual. And as freedom encourages a multiplicity of attempts, it unavoidably multiplies failure and frustration. Freedom alleviates frustration by making available the palliatives of action, movement, change and protest.

A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation. When a mass movement begins to attract people who are interested in their individual careers, it is a sign that it has passed its vigorous stage; that it is no longer engaged in molding a new world but in possessing and preserving the present. It ceases then to be a movement and becomes an enterprise. According to Hitler, the more “posts and offices a movement has to hand out, the more inferior stuff it will attract, and in the end these political hangers-on overwhelm a successful party in such number that the honest fighter of former days no longer recognizes the old movement…. When this happens, the ‘mission’ of such a movement is done for.

@Krunoslav I am familiar with Hoffer. I would agree that self-hatred is an unrecognized motive for people to surrender their independent minds to the ideologies of mass movements. I think such self-hatred is visible among many Progressives who act out in emotionally disturbed and self-destructive ways. In the trite accepted wisdom that says that "You can be whatever you want to be," there lies a subtle echo that murmurs, "you shouldn't want to be who you are; you should be something else." There is a restlessness in this attitude that can never be satisfied. There is also a profound expression of magical thinking in this view. Though it is true that our growth requires us to stretch beyond our current abilities and achievements to master new abilities and to achieve new goals, it is a lie to tell ourselves that we can be anything that we want to be. That is hubris in the Greek sense that guarantees failure and self-condemnation. But teachers and parents tell this to their children as if it is sensible encouragement. I have always found this curious.

But by merging with a mass movement, people who embrace this lie can trick themselves into believing the impossible. They will have social encouragement to do so. They can also direct their self-hatred and their disatisfaction outside of themselves toward other people and institutions with ferocious cruelty parading as moral justification. That is as ironic as it is unsustainable. The French Revolution turned upon itself. So did the Russian Revolution, planting seeds of its own disintegration decades before the autocracy collapsed. I think we are seeing the same thing happen to China. Again, socially encouraged self-hatred forces people to separate from reality. The Soviet Union lasted nearly to the 21st century and caused misery for millions, but the fictional reports of agricultural and manufacturing efficiency from the 1950s predicted the nation's unsustainability. Despite its military, the economic system simply would not work. People may be persuaded to embrace self-renunciation in the hope of a promised tomorrow that will heal their inner pain and sense of alienation. They may be persuaded to sacrifice themselves for that tomorrow. But when that tomorrow is postponed time and time again, people will lose faith. And those responsible for the promises will lose their authority. The problem is that when this happens, the danger of national and even international tragedy is at its highest. A conflict against a common enemy can unite people within an unsustainable system and temporarily hide the weaknesses. The Islamic Near East derives that sense of unity by its opposition to Israel. But what would happen to these nations were Israel not an issue? I am not making a religious observation here, just a political one. These nations would have no common cause despite a common Islamic culture and would fight one another with ferocity in the name of Allah. We see some of that already.

@givpd Yes, I agree.

With the so called "vaccinated" and "unvaccinated", artificial division, we are seeing people being disillusioned and feeling betrayed when they learn they have been put on perpetual subscription service of endless boost shots for the "privelage" of being part of society.

It is something similar with the lefties who join the variety of Marxist and technocratic movements in attempt to avoid personal responsibility. Some of these "useful idiots" cannot accept the new reality and will try to vent their anger.

“[T]he useful idiots, the leftists who are idealistically believing in the beauty of the Soviet socialist or Communist or whatever system, when they get disillusioned, they become the worst enemies. That’s why my KGB instructors specifically made the point: never bother with leftists. Forget about these political prostitutes. Aim higher. [...] They serve a purpose only at the stage of destabilization of a nation. For example, your leftists in the United States: all these professors and all these beautiful civil rights defenders. They are instrumental in the process of the subversion only to destabilize a nation. When their job is completed, they are not needed any more. They know too much. Some of them, when they get disillusioned, when they see that Marxist-Leninists come to power—obviously they get offended—they think that they will come to power. That will never happen, of course. They will be lined up against the wall and shot.” ― Yuri Bezmenov

“But it would be a mistake to assume that the liberal class was simply seduced by the Utopian promises of globalism. It was also seduced by careerism. Those who mouthed the right words, who did not challenge the structures being cemented into place by the corporate state, who assured the working class that the suffering was temporary and would be rectified in the new world order, were rewarded. They were given public platforms on television and in the political arena. They were held up to the wider society as experts, sages, and specialists. They became the class of wise men and women who were permitted to explain in public forums what was happening to us at home and abroad. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, a cheer leader for the Iraq war and globalization, became the poster child for the new class of corporate mandarins. And although Friedman was disastrously wrong about the outcome of the occupation, as he was about the effects of globalization, he continues, with a handful of other apologists, to dominate the airwaves.” ― Chris Hedges, The Death of the Liberal Class