But breaking someone isn't the same as making them into what you want them to be.

another gem from the magus!

for that you need relentless, monolithic indoctrination, starting on the very young, alla 'young commies for christ,'aryan nation for the melanin-challenged'' or some such pretension, that to the outsider seems cognitively incoherent, but to those whose grooves have been appropriately locked to their inculcated norm, is PERFECTLY RATIONAL!.

Louis Theroux goes around interviewing, (in his inimitable style) some seriously kooky characters, f'rexample the fred phelps 'god hates fags' crowd. i re-watched that one in fascinated horror yesterday, and you can see how the disease takes hold. there are their own little kids they drag along to these demos, and when louis asked them if they understood, around 5-8 years old, why they were being 'asked' to participate in holding up obscene, insanely polemic and dementedly provocative signs, such as cartoons of u.s. military getting into buggering positions, and then wave them at 'middle america' at traffic stops and such.

they get planted in the middle of a shitstorm of hate, and gradually 'learn to believe' in the patent nonsense, because of the repetition, and because they need to eat and trust those who feed and care for them.

then by the time they become teens, they either drop away, (a minority) or become fully fledged cognitive monorailers like those who carefully 'made them into what they wanted to be'.

in other words the belief system dominates the identity to the point of intense focus. these teens were against dating, any non-marital sex, their full hormonal commitment was to the propagation of the hate message of their movement, and its abc lego mental architecture. they were shunned in school by their peers, yet were fine with that, because of the strong sense of connected caring their group provided, indeed they had no wish at all to be like their peers, as they were seen as 'deluded by satan' and the smile they displayed while gaily telling louis he was going to hell, and they were glad because it validated their beliefs entirely that he and the rest of us belonged there, glory and hosanna!

but then all cultures do it too, that i have observed. rubbernecking at the more cartoon extreme can distract one from analysing one's own present situation, however educational...

along with the mothers' milk comes the zeitgeist consensus that begins the turning of the trunk of what will be the personality.

it's as if we were all reaching for the sun of self-actualisation, and yet our growth starts off more or less twisted by the cultural winds that are ambientally woven into the process of species-specific socialisation.

this pressure to flow with the coercions and constraints that are the price of survival creates so much ignorance, it boggles the mind and daunts the brave, how to unwind armatures of self-reinforcing 'logic' that have created the certainty of absolute rightness, an impregnable defence-set, cemented into place with smells of mother and home?

i saw it in israel, where it was the most baffling and painful to see, how early the children were under the spell of hatred-for-other, gleefully acting out the killing games they would play later with real arms instead of plastic toys.

living expatriate most of my life, this has obviously been a source of great wonder, what is us, and what is cultural icing?

icing? hmmm. sweet and cold.... are some people all icing and hardly any cake? why are pie and pancakes iconic right now, maybe because there's no icing?

i always loved the marzipan best...

ET tastes like marzipan to me.

gotta go pick some mint for the peas...

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty