Dogmas of all kinds, whether political or religious or other dogmas, give people the deceptive feeling of certainty, control, security, identity and specialness. If one gets involved with typical dogmas, one distances oneself from reality instead of grasping it, one loses control instead of gaining it, one puts oneself in danger instead of becoming more secure and one loses one’s individual identity and replaces it with an artificial group identity.

People yearn for control and identity. When you grow up in sheltered, stable bourgeois circumstances, you have a strong sense of control and more opportunities to form a truly individual identity. If, on the other hand, you grow up in unstable conditions, you lack a sense of control and security and those affected tend to use various methods to gain control or at least the illusion of control:

  • Drug use
  • Narcissism and narcissistic personality disorders
  • Extreme religiosity
  • Extreme political-ideological activism
  • Domestic violence, oppression of partners and children
  • Pedophilia
  • Drifting into the irrational parts of the conspiracy theorist crowd
  • Acceptance of any dogmas like veganism, miracle healing methods etc.

A sheltered middle class citizen who grew up in a stable environment has a certain degree of control over his life and his environment. He is more or less satisfied and can try to increase his control with various strategies. He has little interest in radical, subversive ideologies or projects, because this nonsense is a threat to order and control. It is pointless for radical leftists, rightists, libertarians or conspiracy theorists to peddle their wares in an attempt to persuade the middle of society to engage in some sort of risky undertaking.

Various radicals are fundamentally frustrated at their failure to persuade the middle of society. This is why radicals hate the middle, because the middle simply rejects certain radical dogmas. This is why radicals prefer to use violence to force the middle to accept these dogmas.

As already mentioned, dogmas give people not only the deceptive feeling of certainty, control and security, but above all the deceptive feeling of identity. People integrate all kinds of dogmas, no matter how abstruse, into their identity. Instead of being oneself, someone takes elements/dogmas pre-cut from somewhere, without really understanding the faults of these dogmas and the faults of the dogmatic preachers. It is a paradox when people try to determine their own individual identity with the help of pre-cut, mass-spread dogmas.

Especially when people come from unstable backgrounds and/or have suffered different strokes of fate, or simply sink into depression without any special, singular cause, they are particularly prone to incorporate irrational dogmas into their identity and to militantly defend these dogmas.

The new Fake Self

People literally reinvent themselves through dogmas. After the radicalization process they are no longer only the latently depressive “average Joe “, but they then consider themselves to be “Super-Joe, the enlightened warrior, on a special mission to save mankind from the satanic forces of evil”. They feel special, they have a mission, a special reason to exist.

But their new identity is extremely fragile and shaky. It is built on sand. It has more or less to do with narcissism and group narcissism, a mental illness in which someone creates a fantasy world and an idealized fantasy version of themselves and only craves for confirmation for these fantasies.

When someone rejects, criticizes and ridicules their dogmas, they get aggressive. They feel attacked in their innermost being, they feel their identity as a whole threatened and they get afraid that their deceptive feeling of certainty and security and control might evaporate. Some extreme cases suffer from temporary “ego dissolution”, which feels very unpleasant. Someone with a full-blown narcissistic personality disorder can’t stand criticism and rejection because it is a blatant threat to the narcissistic fake self. Sometimes, with too much failure, narcissists become increasingly depressed, catatonic, suicidal. It feels to them as if their self, their ego is dissolving and they are overwhelmed by feelings of worthlessness.

Dogmatists are similar to narcissists. If you criticize their dogma, they react aggressively, or the aggression is supposed to cover up their inner panic. The dogmatist goes into attack position and tries a torrent of angry words, verbalized dogmas, pseudo-arguments, threats, insults. If he cannot use physical force and if the critic does not want to give in, then the dogmatist storms off in a rage. The dogmatist wants to be surrounded by like-minded dogmatists. This reinforces the illusion of security and control and identity and an apparent special mission. Unfortunately, there are so many individual dogmas that sooner or later the dogmatist will also fall out with his fellow dogmatists. Moreover, the confirmation one receives in the dogmatic echo chamber is rather hollow and empty and unsatisfactory. It feels much better to be able to influence someone outside the echo chamber and filter bubble and convince them of the dogmas.

The dogmatist’s aggression towards critics is an attempt to restore the feeling of order and control through verbal violence or other forms of violence. It is a bit like a domestic tyrant who throws a tantrum because his oppressed wife has violated one of 1000 house rules. Or an Islamist who goes crazy because someone in his family has gone “off the right path”.

Pseudo-discussions

If you read objectively into various factual topics with the help of books, you will notice quite quickly how many dogmas are simply wrong, or mostly wrong, or much too simple or much too shortsighted. You have to expose bad dogmas again and again and lead professional discussions and research. But when discussing directly with a dogmatist, you have to keep in mind that the dogmatist does not care about reality, logic or facts. The dogmatist will selectively pick out individual facts or fakes that support his preconceived opinion and at the same time reject and ignore everything that contradicts his dogmas. The dogmatist will use circular reasoning, fakes, lies, distortions and every cheap, unacceptable argumentation trick there is.

Like a schizoid or schizophrenic paranoid, he accuses the critic of the dogmas of having bad intentions, of not wanting to understand the dogmas, of not having really looked at the dogmas, or even of being part of a conspiracy.

For the leftist dogmatist, you are a secret Nazi. For the right dogmatist you are a traitor of the people, a tool of the system or even a disguised paid propagandist of the Jewish world conspiracy of the (invented) Wise Men of Zion. For the conspiracy dogmatist, the critic is an asset of the CIA or any other dark organization. With this paranoid polarization, the dogmatist paints himself as a shining knight, and he devalues the adversary/critic as an agent of evil. Even the middle classes of society adopted a devastating dogma: That there are no great conspiracies and that only crazy people believe in great conspiracies. There are indeed great conspiracies, a but the scene of ordinary conspiracy theorists is incapable of scientifically investigating conspiracies. Many professional conspiracists are usually mentally ill, and/or extremely naive, and/or complete impostors who get their education from older, low quality works of the conspiracy media.

The reasonably stable ordinary citizens do not want to adopt the vast majority of dogmas of the conspiracy theorists or the radical left or radical right. These dogmas are too crazy for the stable ordinary citizen, and the ordinary citizen feels that these various crazy dogmas would not bring more, but less control and order to the ordinary citizen.

This is also the reason why conspiracy theorists are simply allowed to talk within certain limits, and this babble went on for 200 years of modern conspiracy media. From the point of view of the ruling classes, it is useful to have a deranged and incompetent conspiracy media. It maintains the impression of free speech, but the general society does not really trust the conspiracy theorists.

In principle, the dogmatist considers himself the winner of every discussion or verbal argument. After a (heated) discussion, he withdraws into his echo chamber and filter bubble of like-minded people and lets himself be celebrated there as a hero, as a knight in the fight against evil. In his echo chamber, the dogmatist once again seeks only confirmation and the comforting feeling of control.

There are neo-Nazis who concluded that I am a Jew (and agent of the world conspiracy) with Czech roots, because I reject the neo-Nazi dogmas and because there once was a Czech politician with a similar surname as mine. If one had asked, or briefly searched the internet for the Beneschs from Middle Franconia, one would have come across my ancestor Theo Benesch, a high ranking Nazi-Gauleiter and editor of the infamous Nazi-newspaper “Der Stürmer”. Like the other Benesch men, he came from an engineering background and had no idea about Jews or peolitics or geopolitics. He had simply read some dogmatic literature and thus considered himself to be an expert. After explaining this, some Nazi said that despite my German Nazi ancestors I was nevertheless an agent of the Jewish-Bolshevik world conspiracy. So insanely paranoid is the discourse with neo-Nazis. The right-wing scene is tearing itself apart because of countless dogmas, just like the left-wing scene or the scene of conspiracy theorists.

There is hardly any nonsense that is not believed by someone on this planet. Some drink bleach and are totally convinced of the supposed health effects. If you question this dogma, you get a torrent of pseudo-arguments and pseudo-proofs thrown at you, along with subliminal insinuations or open accusations that you are a paid agent of the pharmaceutical industry. You are written off as a human being, rejected and boycotted if you reject someone’s bleach dogma.

In the highly successful Joe Rogan podcast, a friend of Rogan’s and notorious conspiracy theorist Eddie Bravo argued with notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones about the dogma that the earth is really flat. In the beginning, the two of them declared that they did not want to get too emotional, but within a short time, the aggression was boiling up.

Joe Rogan had hesitated for years to invite Jones to his show because the quality of Jones’ work and Jones’ mental health had gone downhill. When Rogan publicly stated that he dismissed Jones’ work, such as on the subject of Sandy Hook, Jones threw an epic tantrum and launched a veritable hate campaign against Rogan. It was said that Rogan was somehow in league with the CIA and had something to do with MKULTRA, Rogan had the job of distracting the audience from Jones’ work, etc. Jones even used psychopathic analogies and fantasies of hanging Rogan by his legs and cutting his throat.

Where is the BS threshold for dogmas? How absurd must a dogma be that nobody can be convinced of it and nobody will incorporate it into his identity? What if I were to claim that the cosmos fulfils your wishes if you stick peacock feathers in your butt, and jump around naked in circles, shouting “Krah, krah, krah”? Are there any techniques I could use to convince someone of this nonsense?

The daily drug fix

The radicalisation process through YouTube did not work for everyone. Some people pull the emergency brake early. Some are more stable people from more stable family backgrounds. Some only pull the emergency brake, similar to alcoholism, when they get serious problems in their lives because of the dogmatic crap: Partners and relatives turn away, problems at work or school, increasing loneliness, problems with the law, depression and so on. Some (like alcoholics) never manage to pull the emergency brake. In their search for confirmation, they receive one rejection and defeat after another. But they react in the same way as it was programmed into them: With a narcissistic defense of dogmas, with verbal violence. It’s like an alcoholic who longs for relaxation and euphoria and for this purpose drinks more and more and tries to cure the resulting stress and depression with even more alcohol.

It is reminiscent of the Native Americans who had no experience with alcohol and who were given alcohol by the colonial powers from Europe; sometimes even free of charge. Alcohol devastated and eroded Native American civilizations. Some effects of alcohol resemble the effects of dogmatic nonsense: One feels euphoric, confident, lively, courageous and special. One has the illusionary feeling of control. Some drunkards get into fights, have been cheered on by the intoxicating effects and feel more courageous than they would have been sober, but in reality alcohol makes them worse fighters. Alcohol lowers concentration, reaction speed and balance. No full-time UFC fighter would consider it a good idea to get into the Octagon drunk. If someone is freezing outside in the winter cold and drinks alcohol, they think they feel warmer. In reality, the effects of alcohol make them cool down more because they give off more heat to the outside world. Drinking alcohol creates the illusion that the laws of thermodynamics are being disrupted.

Alex Jones was once known in his high school days as an aggressive, violent lunatic. Later he put on the mask of normality and made a career as a conspiracy buff. His work was passable until 2008, then it went downhill and his focus was less and less on offering the audience facts and logic, but at some point it was all about giving the audience a sense of validation, serving dogmatic nonsense so that the people in the audience could feel like they had control over their lives and over the world. Alex Jones was just a kind of drug dealer for the drug called “dogmatic feel-good confirmation”. The facts and the logic didn’t matter anymore. The main thing was that the audience got their regular dose of the drug and could feel as if they were part of a special movement, as if a decisive and rather timely victory over the forces of evil was possible. To this end even the Russian dictator Putin and the cynical businessman Donald Trump were presented as heroes and saviors.

There were more and more people who became addicted to the drug Alex Jones had to offer. And the more addicts consumed the drugs, the greater the sense of community, the illusion of (collective) control and the greater the addictive effect of the drug. And just like with conventional drugs, there were some addicts who wanted to become dealers themselves. And as with conventional drugs, the truism “Don’t get high on your own supply” applies. If you use the drugs you sell, get high on your own supply, believe your own dogmatic conspiracy crap, then the spiral into the abyss begins. As you can clearly see in Alex Jones.

He reminds me of the cocaine boss Tony Montana from the famous gangster movie Scarface.

Programming with psychedelic pixels

When I read Tom O’Neill’s book “Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties” about the CIA’s research on the human brain, behavior, and consciousness, it became clearer to me than ever before how dangerous video is and that you should expose yourself to it as little as possible. I am not freaking kidding.

You stare at a pixel light machine (monitor) that scrambles your brain with psychedelic colors and shapes, puts you in a latent dissociative state, and makes you receptive to any kind of stupid ideas someone wants to program into you.

I’m not a technophobic old guy or a schizophrenic who thinks invisible agents will steal the thoughts out of his head. I’m surrounded by computers and screens for a living. But I use computers almost exclusively for reading and writing.

The host of an old German kids program used to say to the audience at the end of his shows: “Now you should turn off the TV.” That is exactly what we should take to heart today. Expose yourself to as few videos as possible. Only watch as much as necessary. People underestimate the problematic effect of videos.

Videos are completely unnatural. People represented by colorful pixels want to convince you of stupid ideas and behavioral patterns, using quick vVideo cuts, staging and background music. Imagine a real human in front of you putting on music and droning on about some crazy ideas. You would suspect that this person is a cult leader, a secret serial killer or wants to get laid.

Almost every video is in principle unnatural brainwashing. The CIA under people like Dr. Jolyon West researched how to expose people to the drug LSD and then program them with stupid ideas. This apparently works even without LSD, because you can replace the substance to a certain degree by colorful screens with psychedelic colored pixels.

It’s the nature of our brain to read text or to talk with real people in front of us. Videos on the other hand are unnatural and always staged, edited. You don’t really have the people in front of you. You can’t see what they’re like before and after the shoot.

The lulling effect of videos is much greater than people realize, whether it’s press conferences on COVID, government videos, mass media rubbish, or “alternative” media and Russian media. I take the disease seriously, but why the heck did governments not prepare for it properly when all the warnings persisted for years.

When I watch a video, I feel the lulling effect very clearly, which is supposed to give the impression that figures like Trump, Putin, Hillary, Alex Jones or whoever are sovereign and have our best intentions in mind.

If you expose yourself to videos too much without reading books, then trust in these characters and their ideas is built up, which often aren’t really their ideas at all. I myself almost only read instead of watching videos, and therefore the lulling effect of the videos does not work on me. People who are wrapped up in videos are under a spell and can’t understand why I don’t share their ideas and feelings.

I tell these people: “Turn that garbage off. Turn off your computers and read books. You’ll feel better and make better decisions. I also often tell people: There are many more people within the ranks of your ideological opponents, and they are also in a filter bubble/echo chamber and they are as convinced and fanatical as you are. They feel as confident in their cause as you do. Your feelings tell us nothing about the quality of your ideas.

Videos are pretty much the worst thing you can do to yourselfwith a computer. Audio is much better, but there are also too many crazy people making podcasts, and it’s not natural to listen to a podcast forever when its host may be crazy and addicted to drugs.

You can read up on almost anything without the lulling effect, the pomp, the psychedelic brainwashing with the colorful pixels on a monitor. How many people in media abuse drugs on top of alcohol? To stand out you need to be on fire, on cue and you constantly have to produce. So they turn to booze, amphetamines, cocaine or even DMT. Entrepreneurs in particular quickly run the risk of abusing such substances. The CIA studied Charles Manson to see what happens when someone with narcissistic personality disorder takes psychedelic drugs like LSD (similar to DMT) as well as stimulants. Manson gave LSD to his girls (“The Family”) and programmed his quack nonsense into them.

Regular conspiracy theorists today are blasting themselves with videos about COVID. They say, “the video said….” or “according to that video…” or “the video interview shows that…”

No conspiracy theorist comes up to me and says “so in the pandemic book XYZ….” or “compared to the book XYZ….”

People are worried about 5G, but are deliberately scrambling their brains with online videos.

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