Exploiting the Stupids: The Intellectual Foundation of Movement Conservatism
Exploiting the Stupids: The Intellectual Foundation of Movement Conservatism
From about the age of 8-12, I read a lot of sci-fi. Along the way, I stumbled across Robert Heinlein, in particular his novel The Day After Tomorrow, initially published as The Sixth Column. It was so crudely racist I avoided from then on anything with Heinlein’s name on it.
The plot went like this: The evil PanAsians have conquered America and set up a vicious tyranny. A few scientists, holed up in a secret lab in the mountains of Colorado, have discovered a powerful weapon that can turn the tide. They’ve tweaked it so it can kill only “Asians”, leaving white people unaffected. How to organize a nationwide resistance that can take advantage of it?
The PanAsians, to pacify their subjects, have permitted religious activity to continue, so the scientists organize a new religion. They use their skills to perform “miracles” that suck in the ignorant masses. Meanwhile, a cadre is secretly recruited who use the religion as a front in order to disseminate the new weapon and train an underground army who know how to deploy it.
The crisis arrives when the time comes to kill all the Asians, but it turns out that one of the inner group is a “good” Asian who will be killed as well. If that’s your idea of a moral dilemma, you’re a lot more twisted than I was when I was hitting double digits.
Later, as I became more politically aware and started noticing the emergence of a cult of William F. Buckley acolytes at my high school in Wisconsin, I could see that Heinlein was on to something. No, not that we needed a weapon of racist annihilation, but that the conservative mood had an underlying narrative: We who have discovered the truth are smart, but most people are stupid. You can tell them almost anything and they will believe it. By taking advantage of their dumb credulity, smart conservatives can rule. Incidentally, the same background narrative lurks in the world of Ayn Rand; self-conscious Objectivists are the intellectual elite and their success depends on dropping their scruples about misleading the easily herded crowd.
You might think of it as a form of vulgar Straussianism. High Strauss holds that the need for virtue is the perennial truth at the heart of philosophy, but most people are not virtuous. To avoid the wrath of these lesser souls, philosophers have been forced to speak in code. (Yes, this is a cartoon version, but since we’re talking about the dumbing down process, that’s OK here.) The vulgar version replaces virtue with smarts. Most people are stupid, and if smart people treat the masses as if they were smart too they will talk over them and fail. The path to success is speaking in code, making up lies for the gullible but signaling to those capable of discerning the inner truth that the movement is for them.
(Incidentally, this parallels in certain ways the Leninist strategy of front groups and cadres. It may be that the Right picked up this trope from their nemesis; I recall Ayn Rand saying this explicitly, although I don’t have a citation. Can someone help me out?)
Movement conservatism in America cultivated this two-tiered philosophy for decades before Trump came along. Recall the fictitious stories Reagan told to goose his political career? Conservative insiders knew they were made up, but that was fine because what difference does it make whether what you say to stupid people is true of false? They will swallow what you give them if you appeal to their hopes and prejudices. Do you really think the core neocons of the W Bush era, some of whom actually studied under Strauss, really believed in the Saddam-has-weapons-of-mass-destruction fairy tale? They weren’t dumb enough to fall for it; on the contrary, they thought they were smart enough to concoct and exploit it.
Which brings us to January 2021. Movement conservatives realized they could assemble a useful nationwide army of “election-truthers” by creating a myth about millions of fake votes, a vast conspiracy of treasonous or even satanic election officials, etc. They were sure the stupids, or at least enough of them, would swallow it whole, so why not?
Take Josh Hawley, with degrees from Stanford and Yale. Is he dumb enough to actually believe what he’s saying? It’s possible—lots of dummies in those fancy schools—but I wouldn’t count on it. I think the odds are better than 50-50 he knows exactly what the game is and thinks throwing meat to the stupids is how smart people win.
Just to be clear, for the record, I don’t think most people are stupid, but I do think most of us come to our beliefs through a social process in which the balance of evidence and logic play at most a supporting role.
Speaking of Ayn Rand, herewith my favorite take on her typing:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2005/01/big-sister-watching-you-whittaker-chambers/
OK, tired of posting now or just more than few lines?
Probably too many editing cases.
I never read The Day After Tomorrow, but I did read a few books by Robert Heinlein. My favorites were the novelette The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag(which was about the nature of the Creators) and Stranger in a Strange Land (which was about the second coming of Christ). It might be worth mentioning that Heinlein was a devout atheist. One might even suspect that a crudely racist novel by Heinlein was written to give insight into the crude nature of racism rather than to espouse racism as a higher calling. Of course when young boys read books their perceptions may still be quite immature, not all boys just some boys. Of course the same can be true of adults.
Nope.
Peter:
Probably a part of John Galt’s speech where he talks of the stupidity of others.
“John Galt’s Speech from Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged“
If you click on Atlas Shrugged, you will go to the site. There are 4 references to stupidity in the text.
I never read The Day After Tomorrow, but I did read a few books by Robert Heinlein. My favorites were the novelette “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag” (which was about the nature of the Creators) and “Stranger in a Strange Land” (which was about the second coming of Christ). It might be worth noting that Heinlein was a devout atheist. One might even suspect that a racist novel by Heinlein was written to give insight into the nature of racism rather than to espouse racism as a higher calling. Of course, when young boys read books their perceptions may still be quite immature, not all boys but some boys for sure. Of course the same could be true of adults.
Heinlein’s bibliography will usually be found divided into at least three sections: his early works, which were imaginative and crudely written; his middle works, which were superbly relevant and well written: and his later works which were a bit off the deep end.
…and it was not just the copy and paste either.
Dorman
my take on at least the early Heinlein was that he was definitely not a racist.
After he became famous and got groupies his writing became really really bad.
I never even heard of the story you are citing, and i can’t tell if it was from the really really bad phase, or if you missed the point. from your synopsis he could have been showing the folly of racist thinking.
after a life of believing in the inherent intelligence of everyone, and trying to repair the damage caused by misguided teachers and parents, i have come to believe in my old age (no groupies) that people are stupid… including, if not especially, college professors and Harvard graduates. this is simply a consequence of the way brains, all brains, work. It is possible to overcome it to some extent by arranging associations (as in “free association”) to have a chance of seeing something “true”. but no one can do this with “real life”…even those who have carefully (with discipline) “studied” real life.
Coberly,
Spot on. I commented much the same earlier but the comment dog ate it. Heinlein’s writing style was crude early on and Day After… was that early. Middle was Stranger… and the Moon… then shit got too weird in the later stage after as you say he began playing to the groupies and his own ego.
Run, thanks for the Gault quote, although what I dimly remember is a statement somewhere by Rand that the Leninist strategy of front groups and cadres ought to be employed by their enemies. I might have this wrong.
Coberly, I read only this one novel by Heinlein and am in no position to judge his career. I brought it up only because the role of the fake religion in Day after Tomorrow so perfectly encapsulated the idea of exploiting the gullibility of the masses to achieve a hidden goal. And in this case it happened to be a nakedly racist goal.
Dorman
well, i wasn’t judging you. i remember the “press” saying he was a right winger when he died, surprised me then because i was pretty sure i had become a left winger partly from reading his boods as a child. I stopped reading his books because they got really stupid and boring as he got older. I didn’t notice the ideology except to the extent that it added incest to the general received religion of southern california.
As for John Galt, I am happy to be able to say that when people starte to tell me “you’ve got to read this” about the time i was a college freshman, i read “this” and was not moved. but the rich telling themselves they are the chosen ones, the smart ones, the rich and well born, the intelligentsia, the meritocracy… is nothing new under the sun.
Glad you saw the worm at the heart of Bill Buckley. David Brooks did not.
You may not recognize it, but the Left is in the habit of thinking they are the smart ones. Drives the “little people” crazy… right into the loving arms of the Right.
Coberly,
Heinlein was a libertarian and a devout agnostic. In his time the libertarians were not generally associated with conservatives, but were liberal voters. It was more about personal rights than property rights before Goldwater, deeply anticommunist and antifascist. Conservatives had been a bit too ready to play footsie with Hitler. Heinlein served in the navy between the two great wars.
I take Colace daily for the prevention of movement conservatism.
Run,
Thanks for squeezing the comments dog to get him to spit out my earlier comments regarding Heinlein.
Ron:
Say something when the comments disappear. I just happened to check. When you say something Dan will see it also.
People that I read or even just hear about a lot whether I read them or not still get a bit of research by me into their lives just to have some idea of where they might be coming from.
Alisa Rosenbaum was only 12 and 1/2 years old when young Bolshevik men forced their way into her father’s home to confiscate his apothecary and his apothecary services into the service of the Russian Revolution. Apothecaries were the doctors of the day, so even though the Rosenbaum family was Jewish, they were to valuable to the revolution to just murder. So, the Bolsheviks used their services.
Later in life Alisa’s (we know her as Ayn Rand) mother commented that she was not a loving mother, but provided for her daughter out of a sense of duty. So, were they just contrary to the ethnic stereotype of close family ties or did something happen in 1917 that would put betrayal of trust and guilt between a mother and daughter. Likely, you will guess what I imply, but there is no biography available to tell you more about this that I just did. We know a lot of other things, even about her childhood. But if Ayn Rand were a sociopath, then the events that precipitated that personality disorder have been kept secret. Ayn Rand never wrote an autobiography or even gave up much information about her childhood.
Regardless of all that I never any of her books, but my speculation is born out by the inherent misogyny of her male heroes, rape scene and all.
Ron
I was ten when I read Red Planet. No judge of “crudely written” but I think I would have noticed. It was a book for children…or young teens I guess. Though I read many of his “children’s” books when I had children of my own and found them quite palatable. And my sensitivity to crudely written at that time was well advanced. And I never found them in the least racist. quite the opposite.
I am glad you clarified the “libertarian” thing. I think we are alll libertarians when we are young and when we are older if it is our ox that is gored. But I never noticed that Heinlein’s libertarian-ism was of the stupid neo-conservative variety we see today. Maybe a little ultimately unrealistic in the nature of things, but not crudely damn the poor full speed ahead.
I don’t know if he got caught by Ayn Randism in his old age.
And even agnosticism is quite respectable… if it is genuine and not just an intellectual coward’s atheism. For my part, I can no longer call myself an agnostic. But neither can I claim to have much “faith.” Which I have come to suspect is just a kind of moral laziness (not the faith, but the lack of it). But that’s me, my life, so far. I have no right to judge you, your life. your opinions or intense beliefs.
But, not judging, I do think it’s worthwhile to “argue”…present points the other might not have considered.
I though Heinlein was in the navy during WWII. intelligence or high-level technical.
OTOH, a few different female work acquaintances told me that I just had to read “Atlas Shrugged” because they found me to be individualistic and an independent thinker. I found that ironic and a bit troubling. Who would think that anyone that was individualistic and an independent thinker would have to read any book, particularly a book that espoused such behavior? If it had been a book that rebuked my behavior, then that would have at least been understandable. In effect I was being told that if I wanted to be the way that I already was then I needed to be validate by this old lady’s book. OK, she was no lady.
We need to know who to follow if we want to be individualistic?????????
wel, i read two and a half Ayn Rand novels. crudely written all.
i have long suspected her “philosophy” was shaped by bad experience with Soviet “socialism.” So I could forgive her. But not her acolytes who are brain damaged for other reasons… i think being evil is a leading cause of brain damage.
i have also known a few families where “mothering” as well as “fathering” are sadly deficient. I would expect this to produce chidren who are fundamentally self-ish if not sociopathic, though I suspect it can also produce children who are exactly the opposite.
the trickiest psychology comes from mothers (and fathers) who are amazingly loving at times*, and completely absent if not hostile at others. or one of each.
not safe to make generalizations.
*or just especially rich in what they can give when they want to.
The people who said i “had to read” Rand were either people who believed that i was an incipient Randian hero (hated the rulers of my college who thought that education began with suppression of all natural joy, freedom, curiosity…) and would be glad to see I had friends in high places.
or people who believed that THEY were natural Randian heroes and just wanted to spread the gospel
Coberly,
Better for you if you do not know much about profiling sociopaths.
Best of luck. Burning daylight now.
Ron, me and John Wayne understand all about burning daylight. get up an hour or two before that cosmic event, just in case.
but you arouse my curiosity. when you get a chance, tell me why it’s better i don’t know much about profiling sociopaths.
lived with a mild case for many years. got to see a little of the family dynamics. still would not like to generalize.
on the other hand it became quite fashionable for lady psychologists to tell their lady clients that their husbands were narcissists…which i suppose they were, as are we all. or most of us. to a degree.
I try to steer people who want to know the roots of conservatism to just go to YouTube and watch the Baldwin/Buckley debate at Cambridge or Oxford in the mid-60s. You will soon see what the core of conservatism was from the modern founder of it politically.
wooley
thanks for the tip. i’ll try to look at it. but if i may put in a plea for those of us old enough to remember when people used words instead of links: can you give us a short paragraph to give us a hint of what you mean?
i think conservatism has been with us a lot longer than Bill Buckley. Of course conservatism has meant different things to different people over time. Cicero to Lord Chesterfield, Cato to Dick Cheney, G.K.Chesterton to G.W.Bush?
i got a look at it. can’t stand to watch Buckley. more sympathy for Baldwin, but he’s still wrong.
I did not know that “modern conservatism” was all about race.
here is what i would say to Baldwin, but he would not hear me:
the people who enslaved your ancestors and built jim crow succeeded in making the society they wanted to work for them by pitting whites against blacks. you (Baldwin) need to learn to pit people who are “for” racism against those who are against it. what you do instead is pit black people against white people. and your enemy knows how to play that game better than you do.
i realize that Baldwin suffers from PTSD so I feel bad for him, but I don’t wan to listen to him. Buckley on the other hand is a clever debater, as was the serpent in the garden.
“…tell me why it’s better i don’t know much about profiling sociopaths..”
[I have known some bad people in my life, not as friends but rather as just acquaintances including friends of friends. I also developed an amateur interest in psychology by the time I had my first real job (real is not for my dad and with real pay which was not how my dad did it.).
So, by thirty-something then I had developed my Peter Parker spidey-sense about new people that I met to quite a degree, considerably attenuated by the perceived risk from one day finding myself the father of three girls, ages 4, 6, and 12.
Their mother Lori and I went out to dinner with a few of her co-workers one evening and I got a bad feeling about the man named Ken. That feeling was not confirmed until years later when Lori told me that her former coworker had been jailed as a pedophile. Lori was susceptible to such men that would court her to get to her girls. Their dad had died of cancer, a vet who had been exposed to agent orange often in Vietnam. That is the main reason that I stayed with her until her girls were grown.
Sociopaths are not all serial killers and pedophiles though. It is a spectrum disorder with consequences as varied as the childhood conditions that developed the personality with its rage and lack of empathy. The cunning high performing ones can be quite dangerous if their condition developed due to severe abuse and betrayal.]
Coberly,
The back story is in the above comment, but the direct answer is that it is better to not have had the experience of a sociopath. OTOH, it is better if you recognize the sociopath and avoid them as much as possible. Still the garden variety sociopath is just a CEO or CFO, rather than violent criminal. With them then it is just a matter of how much narcissism that you can stomach.
Coberly,
BTW, by “bad feeling” then I meant that I had suspected exactly what turned out to be true, but having no formal training or experience that feeling was a dread that I shared with Lori and no on else. I only mentioned it to her once and she had really liked Ken a lot, hoped that I was wrong, believed that I was wrong, yet had known me well enough and long enough to not dismiss my warning out of hand. This was an unhappy experience from start to end. Hence, anyone not having learned the hard way about profiling is really better off.
Ron,
yeah, i’m glad you threw the CEO’s in there. My take is that there is a distinction between psychopath and sociopath, The latter doesn’t care if he hurts you as long as he takes your money or gets some other illicit profit (sex with your daughter). The psychopath wants to kill you.
I think there is a range of these things, or only, as you say, variety. Your spidey sense is more reliable than any formal training… or at least i think so, never had any formal training re sociopaths.
plenty of experience with the lower forms. the more dangerous forms are usually in high places i don’t spend a lot of time in.
yes, they can be quite attractive. i don’t know if they practice it, or just exploit natural attractiveness they were born with. (they come in female form as well. or as bad.)
From aphorism number 8 of the “Maxims and Arrows” section of Friedrich Nietzsche‘s Twilight of the Idols (1888):
“Aus der Kriegsschule des Lebens. — Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker.”
Translation: Out of life’s school of war — What does not kill me makes me stronger.
Now Nietzsche was a certifiable nut-job. He died in a long agonizing death suffering dementia of unknown pathology. Yet, much of what Nietzsche wrote was true some of the time under some conditions for some people. However, that is not much of a basis on which one might search for universal truth. So, perhaps his appeal is that however screwed up our lives are or how foolish our choices have been then there was still Nietzsche to outdo us in every wrong way while still being celebrated as a virtuous superior being. Being human is about setting a bar low enough to cross.
Ironically enough, that famous passage has been true for my life. If I did not realize that everyone’s life was different then I might be silly enough to think that it should be true for everyone else. Even more ironically though, that passage was not true at all for Nietzsche himself. For all his success as a “philosopher” he had a lonely, loveless life and a slow, painful death overtaken by madness.
Ron
don’t know about “painful death.” but a story i like to tell myself about his dementia (insanity?) is
after a life of preaching against kindness… one day he saw a man beating a horse in the street, he rushed out to stop the beating. suddenly he realized that what he was doing put the lie to his entire “philosophy.” whether this drove him mad, or just stopped his nonsense and left him with nothing to say, i don’t know.
if there was physical, medical, pain, i don’t know. but one of my superstitions is that there is pain in the world to teach us sympathy. (a step toward love your neighbor as yourself). he may have needed the short course.
Coberly,
Interesting take on it. Perhaps I just hope that his death was painful.
[No, not just wishful thinking after all.]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche
“…In 1879, after a significant decline in health, Nietzsche had to resign his position at Basel. Since his childhood, various disruptive illnesses had plagued him, including moments of shortsightedness that left him nearly blind, migraine headaches, and violent indigestion. The 1868 riding accident and diseases in 1870 may have aggravated these persistent conditions, which continued to affect him through his years at Basel, forcing him to take longer and longer holidays until regular work became impractical… ”
“…Amidst renewed bouts of illness, living in near-isolation after a falling out with his mother and sister regarding Salomé, Nietzsche fled to Rapallo, where he wrote the first part of Also Sprach Zarathustra in only ten days.
Photo of Nietzsche by Gustav Adolf Schultze [de], 1882
By 1882, Nietzsche was taking huge doses of opium, but he was still having trouble sleeping.[92] In 1883, while staying in Nice, he was writing out his own prescriptions for the sedative chloral hydrate, signing them “Dr. Nietzsche”.[93]…”
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[Intense physical pain makes sleep very difficult. ]
Russell Kirk (The Conservative Mind) was an actual philosopher and pseudo-intellectual for movement conservatism. Ayn Rand and William Buckley were more entertainers than philosophers. But if movement conservatism really has any foundation worth mentioning then the footing for that foundation was poured by Niccolò Machiavelli and Friedrich Nietzsche.
[What would conservatism be without materialism? OTOH, Christian conservatives are nothing if not pure irony. Over one hundred years ago it was Christians that were pouring the foundation for the modern welfare state. The following link and excerpt are from where my first wife attended college. Last time I checked she was still working as a LCSW. I last saw her in 1971.]
Hunter, (Wiles) Robert (April 10, 1874 – May 15, 1942), Social Worker, Author and Socialist
Editor’s Note: The career of Robert Hunter is a complicated journey through social work, social activism, research, field studies, politics, golf course design and academia. Over the years he moved from being a prominent Progressive to a dedicated Socialist and then a right wing critic of President Roosevelt and the New Deal. When he declared himself a socialist (1905), he was elected to the first executive board of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. Later he was the Socialist candidate for the New York state assembly (1908), and he represented American socialism at the Third International in Stuttgart (1907). After moving to Noroton, Conn., he campaigned to be elected as the Socialist candidate for the governorship of Connecticut (1910). Hunter became disillusioned with socialism and left the party because it had failed to prevent World War I. In 1918 he moved to California where he lectured on economics and English at the University of California, Berkley. In 1926 he wrote “Links,” a book on golf course design. Hunter repudiated the New Deal and became an active member of the National Economic League where he published an anti-Deal pamphlet. In 1940, he published Revolution, in which he rejected Marxism and revolution and strongly asserted that American capitalism had essentially eliminated poverty.
There are no available biographies of Robert Hunter. Included below is a brief description of Hunter’s early career as a social worker and researcher. Following that is a copy of his “Preface” from the book “Poverty” he wrote in 1904 and which remains one of the most significant contributions Hunter made to the history of American Social Welfare….
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[Who said life was complicated? Well, they were spot on.]
ron
sounds like Nietzsche was in pain most of his life. might account for his philosophy. by my take it was his sudden realization of caring about the pain of others (a horse) that led to his sudden silence on the subject.
as for my theory of pain teaching us sympathy, it looks like self-pain didn’t work that way for younger Nietzsche. nor is it clear other-pain works for all people.
Run, Dan,
“Say something when the comments disappear. I just happened to check. When you say something Dan will see it also.”
[Something. I recently fed the comments dog a butchered piece of cut and paste regarding the icon and iconoclast Robert Hunter. He wrote three great books: Poverty – Links – and Revolution – that were three of the most influential of the 1st 1/2 of 20th century along with being the most disparate of views from a single author.]
Ron
i have always pitied (despised?) people who call Ayn Rand a philosopher (or a writer).
as for Buckley, i didn’t even know he was in the running. one of those sociopaths i instinctively avoid.
i would place the origin of movement conservatism with the rise of capitalists’ need to rationalize the way they treated their workers, not to say their customers. clearly this was preceded by the rationalizations of aristocrats…possibly against a rising consciousness that there might be something wrong with the way they treated the poor, something that had been accepted for a thousand years as just the way things are.
i believe this rising consciousness had its origins with Christ, if not with the older testament concern with decent treatment of slaves and even animals. i might be mistaken about the actual origins… seems like people would have had a natural sense of decency at least within the family or tribe, since the beginning of time.
Coberly,
Once you get to Thomas Hobbes and his Leviathan, then it is just a short hop to Russell Kirk. Money and power are all about money and power. The means for holding them and growing them varied from the aristocracy through mercantilism and on to industrial capitalism. Garden variety capitalism was born with the Magna Carta and private property rights well before corporate industrial capitalism, but the East India Company (EIC) was an English and later British joint-stock company founded in 1600. Marx and his industrial capitalism came later, but capitalism, hegemony, monopoly, money, corruption, and the lust for power are all fleas on the same old dog. You might name that dog trixie since it can learn new tricks. Speaking of dog, I wonder where that comment post dog is lying around now?
it was lying at the door keeping from posting at all.
thanks for the history. i sort of know all that but not with any clarity.
when marx talked about revolution was he talking about violent bloody revolution, or did Lenin at al just borrow that from their enemies and predecessors. many (more than one) revolutons in Merrie Old England, long before Marx but with more or less the same goals. All put down with overwhelming, bloody, force. American revolution had the advantage of the sea, the beautiful sea, and a fully developed economy, political organization of millions of population, and potential military structure of its own. as well as a political structure in England that included people not too stupid to see that suppression was ultimately futile. I am not too sure that English money interests did not retain their domination of U.S. economy.
Coberly,
On that tribal thing, then results may vary. There were matriarchal social arrangements where the (native American) mothers voted whether their sons would be sent into battle, but there were also (Maori) head hunters who tended to be misogynist. Earlier than any documented social arrangements then there were neolithic lake dwellers of Switzerland and southern Germany, Bavaria, northeastern France, northern Italy, western Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Albania, and Greece mostly lived peaceful unfortified lifestyles with no evidence of violent deaths among their remains. There were several other neolithic communities that likewise presented no evidence of violence in their archaeological remains.
Social evolution is a matter of survival as much as biological evolution. Harsh circumstances tend towards conflict and plenty tends towards peace. It may be comforting to think it is the other way around, but it is also grossly incorrect.
Note that the Scots settlers found the North Island Maoris rather peaceable, but the South Island Maoris were head hunters. New Zealand’s North Island had great fishing and some hunting, which improved greatly from imported European game stock. The South Island was harsh, windy, and cold, hardly fitting for man nor beast in the winter. In some places it is easier to hunt and fish and in other places it is easier to kill other people and take their stuff.
Social evolution is a two way street, but traffic moves much faster from the corner of cooperation and peace to the corner of domination and war than traffic moves in the opposite direction.
A similar lizard brain process in individual relationships distinguishes re-earning broken trust from giving trust to those that enter our lives.
Heinlein wrote Sixth Column before Pearl Harbor. It was not originally published under his name.
Arne
thanks for telling us. before the war there was a lot of racism directed toward the yellow peril. don’t know if Heinlein was caught up in it. My uncle who fought in the Pacific suffered from it twenty or more years later.
A good enough book (The Beekeeper. i’ll remember the author later) was spoiled by it. Moral for me is that not all “racists” are bad people. Even I have said stupid things because I heard them from others…. probably still do, but I have gotten more wary since i learned that that is exactly what human brains do without the good luck to be reinformed in time.
My neighbors, my landlord, and my best friend were Japanese. better people you could not hope to find. My friend was born in an American concentration camp while his father was risking his life as a spy for U.S. in Manchuria.
Gives me a whole lot of tolerance for spies, too.
the good enough book was actually titled The Keeper of the Bees, by Gene Stratton Porter.
not really according to modern tastes.