Re-constructing History, Part 9: Is the Education Institution a Cult?

Part 9 IS THE EDUCATION INSTITUTION A CULT? looks at cults and cult tendencies. While calling an entire institution a cult is a stretch, the education institution does exhibit certain cult-like traits.

But even if we do not call something a cult, examining it within a cult-framework may provide some insights into how to address it. This applies not to just the education institution, but to the Trump campaign. If the Trump campaign honestly looks at itself through the lense of the seven signs of a cult, it may learn something about itself and how to address Trump’s high negativity, especially among independent voters.

Margaret Singer, Ph.D. psychologist author of “Cults in Our Midst” stated:

Deprogramming–that is, providing members with information about the cult and showing them how their own decision-making power had been taken away from them.

Restoring critical thinking and effective decision-making needs to be the foundation of all reform and recovery efforts. It is the first cult sign listed in the table above and at the heart of the other six. It is the only viable way to ensure sustainable liberty and prosperity.

Re-constructing History, Part 8: First, Do no Harm

Part 8 looks at the charge in the Hippocratic Oath, “first, do no harm”.
1619 seeks to re-write American history to show slavery is at the root of every institution in the US. CRT aims to show this as well as with the concepts of institutional racism, white supremacy, white privilege, and white fragility. Part 4 of the Maskirovka series covers these issues. The question is whether the Social Justice Warriors (SJW) employ these concepts to excise a cancer or to kill the current social structures and institutions. If they argue racism is permanently rooted in every social structure and institution in America, then they argue for a wholesale restructuring of American society and new institutions that are not tainted with slavery and racism.

This path does harm on several dimensions. Harm that may be far worse than the disease. There are many sites that provide arguments against CRT and 1619, so I will focus on the harm they cause, regardless of any merit they may possess.

Reconstructing History, Part 7: Conflict, History, and the Future

Social Justice movements do not try to re-construct American history because they do not like it. They do it to break the historical path dependency and set a new future based on their ideology. The questions are:
Do they have the power to completely break the path?
Will other forces counter-act them?

Reconstructing History, Part 6: Culture, History, and the Future

Reconstructing History, Part 6: Culture, History, and the Future Culture is a difficult topic. For some, any discussion of culture, especially looking at them objectively for the results they produce, is a third rail. I discussed this at length in Part 5—Does Culture Matter? of the Maskirovka series. Part 5 looks at cultural assessment. The …

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Reconstructing History, Part 5: The Education Institution and Creating History

Part 5 looks at the Education institution and how it has changed. We may want to say this all happened recently since it is now in the open and parents are challenging this transition of the schools’ role and what they teach. But if we look at the radicalization of the students at our colleges and universities, that simply cannot be true. The education institution radicalized them starting in elementary school, long before they arrived at the universities. Sure, some students were radicalized in the 1960s, but they were nothing compared to the widespread radicalization we see today.

Reconstructing History, Part 4: Multiple Punctured Equilibriums

Since 2020, the US has gone through a series of trigger events that upset the established order. The two events in 2020, COVID-19 and the George Floyd death, broke a strong path dependency in American history, opening the way for Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project to re-write American history. Then the Virginia elections in Fall 2021 called that newly emerging equilibrium into question. As Americans were starting to sort out these issues, Russia invaded Ukraine, adding further complexity and uncertainty.

Reconstructing History, Part 3: Social Justice Movements

The preamble to the Constitution and the self-evident truths in the Declaration Independence are the enduring truths. We may have strayed from them at times, but they have guided the vector of American civilization. They are why Americans dismantled racism and sought fairness while maintaining prosperity. Racial narratives and a re-writing history and destroying the institutions of prosperity are not the way.

God’s Army vs the Transhumanists

Arlington Fishing Club

God’s going to have to recast the source-of-all-evil adulteress as a transhumanist. He must have known this day was coming and used the adulteress as symbolic of anything that presents an ideal world that leads you farther from God. At least the seductress was human with longings, dreams, and weaknesses like all of us. Maybe …

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Where the Brave Go When There’s Nowhere Left to Go: The Story of Colonel Nick “Five Years to Freedom” Rowe

Colonel Nick Rowe

Man, woman, young, old, soldier, civilian—everyone will find the inspiration, comfort, or push they need from James N. Rowe’s story of captivity. The Special Forces Intelligence Officer and man eventually responsible for developing the US Army’s SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) training program was one of only two men to escape the Viet Cong.