Politics, Realpolitik, Nihilism and Hope

It’s Time to Make a Choice

This excursion has been a long time in the brewing, partly because my own area of expertise is relatively narrow, and partly because it addresses a world that has always been distasteful to me, the world of politics.

Nonetheless, wherever there are people, there are politics, and the processes that emanate from a gathering of individuals in furtherance of any particular end are daunting, difficult and never quite wholesomely satisfying, however necessary.

As a member, past and present, of various societies, professional groups and institutional affiliations, I have marvelled at how individual agendas push up against a group objective, sometimes to subvert it. For example, while serving as a Trustee of a psychiatric practice group many years ago, I met with a lawyer who had sought us out. He came with a request that was wonderfully simple and clear, namely, to accept referrals and provide counselling for lawyers in need of help with addictions. During this meeting, attended by two other Trustees, this easy matter inexplicably became rather impossible, mainly because one of the other Trustees on our Board incessantly interrupted the lawyer and threw up roadblocks at every possible opportunity. In the end the plans were scuttled.

I discovered a few years later that the querulous and obdurate Trustee had his own addictions counselling practice which he felt would somehow be threatened by referrals to the professional organization of which he was a Trustee. So much for teamwork!

In the larger arena of world politics, which none of us can have escaped thanks to covid, I have to conclude that things are worser and worser, exponentially. Those who aspire to positions of political power have to traverse a minefield which, if survived, may well claim every good intention and shred of conscience, so that the resulting product becomes a mere mouthpiece for his or her own notoriety and gain, the public weal often – but not always – becoming a distant forgotten shadow.

Recently I was tasked with perusing several books about the late President Lyndon Baines Johnson. The ordeal was both nauseating and enriching: nauseating because of the sick, perverse, relentlessly corrupt machinations and dealings at every level of the United States’ Congress, and enriching because it demolished the last remaining traces of personal naivete about the planes which powerful politicians inhabit. Johnson was as odious as he was scheming, as venal as he was sadistic, as manipulative as he was profane, and as criminal as he was self-aggrandizing.

I once saw the man as he passed through the streets of Philadelphia in his motorcade during the Sixties and I still remember the creased face of his large disinterested head seen through the right rear window of his limousine.

I therefore fully understand the scepticism of friends towards any world leader – indeed, we should always be sceptical and critical. Yet we must not so easily dismiss any form of hope or good and plunge into a nihilistic pit that offers no way out.

JFK is often held as a beacon, a man who did good and promised better in his short tenure before the – what shall I call them? The Deep State, the Warmongering Establishment, the CIA/FBI/MIC cartel? Whatever term I may use I now have no doubt that the faction that cut JFK down is part of the even more powerful faction responsible for covid, endless war, depopulation, total surveillance and total control over us little people. So let me call them, simply, the Globalists.

Yet JFK too was no stranger to dirty tricks on the road to his position: there was a dark side to Camelot, as there is a dark side within us all. The greater political question then becomes, given the vicious battle it takes to assume a position of power, will there be enough left for ideals, for helping us to a fair shake, to decent lives, to the exercise of liberty, and to the impartiality of law?

My own answer to these questions has been to compile a series or assumptions or premises as a kind of guide.

1. The Awareness of the Common Person

The greatest majority of people are busy working to make a living, paying off debt, worrying about whether the next paycheck will cover their needs and wants, avoiding physical harm, and negotiating the travails of child-rearing in an age of easy crime and profligate temptations. Their political information is derived from the Major Media Outlets, which therefore define the parameters of their political awareness.

2. The Major Media

I have come to believe, as indeed covid has amply proved, that the Major Media are nothing more or less than organs of propaganda. Hiding behind the mantle of journalism, they have cleverly and efficiently pushed out phoney stories, falsehoods of every hue, and agendas of every stripe save those faithful to truth. If and when they dangle a morsel of truthful reportage, it is only to ensnare us into believing the other tripe they have on offer. I have personally not owned a television set in decades, and I have stopped reading the newspapers and magazines so dear to me in my youth: The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The London Review of Books, The Guardian. It’s protected me from a lot of garbage and from the susceptibility to influences meant to relieve me of my capacity to think and inquire critically. “Fake News” doesn’t go far enough to describe their activities.

3. Political Manipulation

I listened recently to a person whom I would describe as an operative. He spoke about his friends in business and the capacity businesses have to analyze and parse potential customers’ wishes and sales vulnerabilities on a moment-to-moment basis. It rang true. I have no doubt, with the technology now possessed, that politicians do something similar with the masses of digital data collected and stored. Their use of focus groups is well known – in fact, when Bill Clinton ran for the presidency, I understand that his ‘thumbs up’ gesture had been developed out of the focus-group workshops his team had engineered. When I first learned this I was aghast. Now I conclude that virtually everything a politician does or says is done or said with a meaningful purpose.

4. Closed-System Nihilism

During the heyday of covid inoculation, when the push was on to jab children, I tried to caution a friend. She exploded furiously and would not deign to hear me out. When I asked her if there was anything I could show her to support my view that the jabs were hazardous to children, or at the very least, unnecessary, offering to send a particularly good article from an established medical journal, she said ‘no’. She said that nothing I could give, submit or proffer would change her own established view.

Closed-system thinking is not thinking: it is cultishness, it is solipsistic illusion that needs no verifiability nor brooks disconfirmation. When extended into the greater political sphere of our today – and we are in a battle for our lives and liberties, the likes of which has never approached our dangerous culminating times – this kind of gloomy nihilism only serves the opponents of decency and life.

For example, to some of the people I know, there is absolutely nothing that Trump could do to stir a glimmer of hope that he will actually change the political establishment that has itself done everything in its power, including attempting actual murder, to stop him in his tracks.

‘He didn’t start a war during his presidency,’ I say. ‘He’ll plunge the world into a devastating war if he gets in again’, they respond.

‘They maligned him before he took office, started the phoney Russiagate, went after his tax returns, levied criminal complaints and actions, raided his home and even tried to kill him in cold blood,’ I say. ‘It’s all part of the show’, they respond, ‘he’s a fascist dictator playing a role.’

There is, in short, absolutely and positively nothing I can show, describe, illustrate, report or suggest that would change their view.

If I speak about facts or deeds or evidence, they talk ominously about personality and character traits, about which I really don’t care because what I care about are what a politician does in office to help the people he or she represents. Speaking of which, did JFK’s well-documented extra-marital sexual philandering render him unfit for office?

A view or theory or proposition that is impervious to modification by any evidence is therefore no better than a self-feeding self-serving Belief. In this case, the Belief is utter nihilism: no-one hailing from a position of wealth and power can do us any good (with, of course, the exception of JFK, whose father was a tycoon and whose family fairly rolled in money).

I reject this. While I am all for having us people on the ground do our thing to further democratic and just ends, within our highly complex and stratified societies we need help in high places.

JFK vowed to shatter the CIA into a thousand pieces but they got him before he could even scratch their skin. Trump vowed to drain the swamp but they made brushing his teeth a victory with their suffocating attacks, which included covid, by the way, and despite which he managed to keep the country out of war and to move it into the direction of self-sufficiency.

The coming American election in November – if it is not postponed – will be momentous. The playing field is clear. On the one side we have the unabashed Globalists, masquerading as virtue-touting climate-concerned humanitarians who are all for eating bugs and further purifying the land of industry. On the other you have a Constitutionalist who touts peace, American manufacturing, and breaking the back of the Deep State.

Illogical nihilism leads to one end: darkness and despair. Measured optimism to another. We need a break, an opening, a chance. I’ve made my choice.

Emanuel E. Garcia, M.D.

July 2024