‘No Kings’, Did You Say?
Reversalism, 2 Ancestral Remnants of Peasant Psychology in the Modern World, and the Time Ben Shapiro Sued the Federal Government Over Vaccine Mandates
You might have heard about the new trend in “No Kings” rallies.
Elizabeth Warren, referring of course to Donald Trump, says: “The American people do not bow down to Kings.”
My thought for the week: These rallies are, as Ben Shapiro explains below, based on a fake, hypocritical supposition, and, further, are an example of what I call Reversalism.
That is, how people all over the world (and especially, at present, those on the far left, although it happens at both political extremes) are tending to falsely project their own failings (in this case, over-centralisation of power) onto their perceived enemies.
Once Reversalism is understood, as a psychological phenomenon, it not only helps us to understand the world better, but it also specifically unveils the impetus behind a lot of misguided protest movements of many stripes – ranging from protests about Trump to ones about Israel, or to anyone just railing against the West in general – because they tend to have this in common.
The Guardian says: “The aspiration of No Kings... is... to rebuild, perhaps a little sturdier and more honest this time, the kind of constitutional system in which law and persuasion replace Trump’s model of violence and domination.”
Ben Shapiro responded this week with a characteristically brilliant tirade:
One of the most amusing things about these “No Kings” rallies is the supposition by the Left that somehow they are opposed to grand expansions of executive power...
I’m old enough to remember Joe Biden who tried to use the Occupational Safety and Health Organization in order to cram down vaccine mandates on 80 million Americans and we had to sue* to stop him!
The idea that that somehow people who are opposed to Donald Trump are not opposed to him because of specific policies but based on a sort of broader rubric of anti-executive power is just ridiculous.
It is the Democratic party in the United States which, writ large, has expanded the power of the executive branch wholesale over the course of the last century since the Progressive Era... The idea that they want to delegate power back to the states, or that they want to delegate power back to Congress, is a lie... The very premise of these No Kings rallies is just silly.
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*The above-mentioned lawsuit is a true story of people power (spearheaded bravely by Ben Shapiro in this case – which is one of the reasons he first called my attention and respect) fighting against an actual tyranny-leaning government through a private corporation suing the United Stated federal government a few years ago under Biden.
I say “actual” because, as he explains above, there were 80 million evidential reasons to say so.
It’s such an interesting example of tyranny run amok in the modern world, that it’s worth a closer look at some of the details.
First, it’s notable that although similar Covid-related mandates were in vogue in many countries around the world, the USA as the so-called “leader of the free world” was a surprising addition to that list.
It came to pass in November 2021 when, initiated by the Biden administration, the U.S. federal government introduced an “Emergency Temporary Standard” (ETS) that would require private employers with 100 or more employees to require their employees either to be vaccinated or to submit to weekly testing and various other requirements.
This would, indeed, have impacted about 80 million employees, by their own statement.
Next, Ben Shapiro’s private media company, The Daily Wire, itself one of the most successful alternative news networks in the world, was one of the earliest petitioners who spearheaded what later snowballed into a massive legal resistance effort spanning dozens of suits, including other private corporations, alongside state governments, trade organisations, business coalitions, and religious and advocacy groups.
Ben was especially outspoken and public on the issue, and showed both courage and leadership in making it happen.
Kudos to him. To me it demonstrates that not only is he unusually good at logical thought, but also he shows valour by being one of the few to step up at such a time.
The Supreme Court, sure enough, within 2 months shot down the original ETS, by issuing a “stay”. The Court explained that the federal government did not have the authority to issue sweeping public health vaccination mandates across the private sector, and that it was exceeding its statutory bounds.
The mandate never, then, came into effect. So, in short, the case was won by the petitioners, who rightly observed that the original mandate had been unconstitutional.
Thanks goodness the USA, at least, has a constitution based on humanitarian values!
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Yet why, then, in spite of such clear examples of how Biden’s government, not Trump’s, was the one leaning towards tyranny, do many people still wrongly believe that it’s the other way around?
Strangely – in another feature of Reversalism – many people fail to analyse such factual information logically, and instead allow the mass media to condition their subconscious into thinking that Biden’s government was a “liberal, progressive” one, and certainly not tyrannical, while it is now Trump’s government which is the tyrannical one.
Surely, though, the mandate example above was a clear example of “violence and domination” of a national government over its people. And yet why did The Guardian instead reverse things and project those words now onto the opposition? And why do many credulous people believe such things?
It’s a curious feature of human psychology that, no matter the facts, if people are repeatedly told that the sky is green and the grass is blue, they will soon start believing it.
That is, if they have never learned the skills of true critical thinking and living systems science.
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What is the psychology behind it?
I can see two interrelated mechanisms at play.
First, it’s like there’s a switch in the human brain that goes off, whispering into your inner ear a message which goes: “Everybody seems to think that the sky is green and the grass is blue, so that must be the case.”
Ancestrally, I speculate that it must have been a useful mental function in those days for people to have a finely-tuned mechanism for sensing what the tribe’s consensus was on any given topic, as a source of truth.
Nowadays that makes people ripe for manipulation by the mainstream media and government, but back when most people were illiterate and uneducated this mechanism would have been an effective survival tool during rough times – and a way to help a tribe stick together through thick and thin.
Secondly, there is its psychological cousin known as “the fallacy of the appeal to authority” – that is, namely:
“What are my betters, the ‘experts’, saying? – that must be what’s true…”
When people place their faith so unquestioningly in pronouncements of politicians, journalists, doctors and scientists, they don’t stop to think that it’s an impulse that most likely originates deep within the infantile part of the human brain, that can be traced back to an ancestral behaviour pattern of hungry peasants bowing down in the mud to their superiors.
Nowadays, however, these behaviour patterns should surely be regarded as infantile remnants of the ancestral human brain, which we should consciously strive (through active study) to overcome!
Who wants to behave any more like a hungry peasant bowing down in the mud to his or her superiors?
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[Endnote: Calibration of this post = 510. For those aware of the work of Dr David Hawkins, I nowadays calibrate my articles to check what overall context of truth (“level of consciousness”) the current of ideas within them matches. It helps me to do my best to anchor my main themes in the broadest and most humanitarian truth context I can. And, far from being an exercise in self-congratulation, it’s a useful exercise in self-critique, as it also helps me to identify and correct any lower-calibrating content or ideas that may mistakenly creep in. So, I use it also as a personal compass. Soon I will be writing more about what this means and why it is useful!]