Beware The Kool Aid

The invitation extended by various bloggers and commentors to "drink the Kool-Aid" has been used so often that it has lost it's potency. I well remember the Guyana mass suicide and the shock I felt when I first became aware of it. It made no sense at all. How could people act like this? How could supposedly intelligent people let themselves be talked into something like this? Nearly a thousand lives snuffed out for the sake of .... what? Some suicidal nutjob preacher? How could he possibly talk these many adults into murdering their children? And we think that we and others like us are not susceptible to this type of manipulation.

Since then, events have conspired to dilute our sensitivity to tragedy; we are not as easily moved as we once were; we are not quite as innocent. Nevertheless, the admonition against drinking the Kool-Aid is still operative - a warning against complacency. We need to carefully examine our belief systems, for it is the ultimate foundation for our actions. And like any system it is built upon information, information passed on by reliable sources - like our parents and teachers.

Bruce Walker has written an insightful article at the American Thinker that deals with the abandonment of our traditional belief system - God, Country and Family - for something else.

We are drifting into the sort of horrific future he described. Too many of us for comfort or solace have become just like the denizens of Jonestown: Orwell's children -- a new generation of creature enraged into constant militancy against eternal enemies, oblivious to the notion of a Blessed Creator, melded into the consciousness of the party hive, divorced from history, hypnotized by images, inoculated against reason, stripped of family, and existing only to serve the cause.

[...]What are the characteristics of the Orwellian state?

Start with God. He must go. The great Russian novelists knew this: "Without God, everything is permitted." In Oceania, God simply does not exist. The Nazis bragged that they would raise a generation "...without ever having heard of the Sermon on the Mount or the Golden Rule, to say nothing of the Ten Commandments." The Soviet persecuted anyone who followed the God of Jews and Christians. God is hounded in our world today. A generation of Orwell's Children are growing up without thinking about God at all or thinking that God is a silly idea cherished by sillier old fogies.

Truth must go too. Nazis embraced the "Big Lie." Soviets denied that honesty, per se, mattered. In Orwell's Oceania, the Inner Party members learn to even lie to themselves and to hold utterly contradictory beliefs at the same time. Truth and honesty have little meaning to Orwell's Children in our world. All truth is relative, all honesty a sham.

Have many Americans drank deeply of the liberal Kool-aid? Are we as a nation committing cultural suicide? Orwell's darkly prophetic book, 1984, describes how a totalitarian government assumes power and control.

Orwell even told us, by name, the professionals who would lead us into the nightmare of 1984: "sociologists," "teachers," "bureaucrats," "journalists," "professional politicians," "scientists," "trade union organizers," "publicity experts," and "technicians." (The term "community organizer" was unknown to him.) Those who enslave were those who taught students, who created the news, who sat in the halls of government power, and who defined official "truth" (at least truth de jour.)

But we can only be enslaved if we choose so. This is why our belief system is so important. We elect those who make the laws. We chose how we want the governemnt to act.

Orwell's Children live among us now, not in tiny numbers in weird Marxist cults like Jim Jones' People Temple, but as leaders of Congress, as the establishment of academia, as the producers of news and entertainment, as the administrators of public schools, as the "experts" in a thousand myriad and odd fields of putative "expertise." They infatuate our bored children with the only reality and the only diversion that many can find. They wait for the rest of us to grow older and to die.

[...]We are all anchored in belief, but it is what we believe that matters. We can believe in the lies of Big Brother, which change each day with the needs of the party or we can believe in the truth of a living God. We can become the children of Orwell or the special creatures of God. Everything -- our nation, our world, our families, our communities -- flows from that choice.

We will not be condemned because we did not educate our children.

We will be condemned for not passing on our beliefs to them.
We will be condemned for not protecting our cultural heritage - our freedoms.
We will be condemned for not helping them resist the lure of the Kool-Aid.