Mental Inertia: Putin, Germans and their Evil Ways, Obama.
Or Why Doing Nothing, That Is, Collaborating With Evil, Is So Comfortable:
It is well known that: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” (attributed to Plato and then Mill, Burke). The question is: why would good men do nothing, when evil is triumphing? The short of it: (barring unsavory explanations) because of mental inertia.
The Parisian mathematician, physicists, philosopher and adviser to Kings, Buridan, discovered what had eluded Aristotle. Inertia. Circa 1340 CE (Buridan named it “impetus”; see note on inertia.)
Mental inertia was not an obvious feature, if one did not know what the brain was made of. But now we do. Modern neurology has revealed the immense complexity of the brain. The brain is not something that can be tinkered with in five minutes. We now know that the brain is the most complex architecture.
Just as it takes a long time to erect, or change a vast building, so it is with the brain. The brain has inertia. Thus psychological inertia.
This mental inertia is why human beings tend to go on with a task, or with an attitude, once they got launched into it (a Jihadist laden with explosives just flew by).
Once a force is applied to an object, for example a propaganda to a brain, it tends to gather momentum, and develop ever more inertia.
Putin of course creates his own propaganda, and then can listen to it, reinforcing his deviance, in a self-reflective way. It’s all the more efficient if others repeat his ideas, and he listens to them. Actually that’s not just a problem with Putin, but with all Great Leaders. (And that’s one reason why Great Leadership has to be discontinued, and replaced by Direct Democracy.)
This amplifies the inertia.
By not fiercely opposing Putin, one collaborates with him. It is not just a question of sanctions. Putin is a liar, and an aggressive one, he should be publicly called for what he is.
Another example of inertia is the lethal mood that makes a strength of Germany: discipline.
GERMANY’S PERSISTANCE IN EVIL WAYS:
It was a case of splendid mental inertia. Why did the Germans persist with deplorable ways for more than a century (I am referring here to the acerbic critique patriots such as Nietzsche made of Germany, by the 1870S; and also the fact Prussia, soon to unify Germany was already racist and “anti-Semitic”, by the 1700s). Why did Kant want to enslave Africans, why did Luther want to hear the screams of tortured Jews (that’s what both of them wrote, I am just repeating, while full of contempt. for those two).
This is a highly practical question nowadays, now that the evil extreme left in power in Greece has made extremely reasonable proposals to reduce Greece’s otherwise lethal debt burden.
In German “Shuld” means both crime and debt. Thus a debt feels like a crime. Unfortunately for Germany, both have been more indulged by Germans rather than by Greeks in the last century or so.
One can visit Northern France. There was the tallest castle of the Middle Ages, the tallest dungeon in the world. The Coucy Castle. In 1918, the German army, facing a sea of French tanks, some supporting fresh American troops, was thoroughly defeated. The French Air Force, the world’s largest, could roam at will, so it could not be argued that Coucy had a military value for observation. Still, the retreating Germans dynamited the castle (and not just the dungeon).
For decades, a French public-private effort has tried to rebuild the completely shattered castle, still reduced to a sea of stones.
I do not see the Germans anxious to repay that debt. Their Coucy debt. Actually Germany repaid its (much reduced) reparations for World War One, only a few years ago.
Germany had deliberately destroyed all of the industrial base of North East France, and most of Belgium, including the mines, and paid back only a small fraction of the cost of its destruction.
Germany’s debt was extinguished, or partly extinguished 4 times during the Twentieth Century. Germany didn’t pay for Nazism, and the wanton destruction it inflicted on Europe, including Greece. At least, not financially.
It is not that 340 billion were given to the Greeks. That’s propaganda. 340 billion was given to the banksters who had invested with their accomplices, some of them, Greek plutocrats.
But back to Germany, and its moral rectitude.
And how did all this Twentieth Century German mayhem originate? Because Germans did exactly what they were told. By whom? By the plutocrats who ruled over them. Surely, the Kaiser and his ruffians were the essence of plutocracy. Afraid to lose their plutocratic hold on Germany to the German Socialist Party, and see the rise of Parliamentary Democracy inside Germany, they decided instead to attach the French Republic, a Parliamentary Democracy.
Then, of course, Hitler was the pawn of plutocrats (ironically enough, many, if not most of them, were American plutocrats).
By doing what today’s plutocrats want, Germany is repeating history. Time to wake up!
https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2015/01/30/europes-greek-tragedy/
Notice that German attitude is a case of mental inertia: used to obey to masters, first Prussian aristocrats, then crazed fascists fronting for rabid plutocrats, now Germans want to do exactly what banksters say (said banksters don’t have a Euro in the Greek fight; what they are afraid is that, if the discourse switches from accusing the Greeks, it may well accuse the real culprits, namely high finance, of which they are a part).
OBAMA’S INERTIA:
So Obama came and gave us change we could believe in, namely none at all. So now we get a course correction:
Obama’s Budget: Plenty Enough, Too Late.
Nice, very nice. This near 4 trillion dollar budget. No more financing of the wealthiest. At last. At last a progressive budget, turned towards the future, reducing inequality, while augmenting opportunity for all, and thus improving both society and economy. We little people can dream again.
Question: why was not this proposed when “Democrats” controlled Congress, say six years ago? Because then it could have passed? Fortunately, it was not presented, so it did not pass, and now plutocrats are richer, and more splendid than ever. They will be happy to reward Obama and his collaborators handsomely, with very nice tips.
Better: Obama can now safely pose as a great progressive, giving a chance to the next fake progressive sponsored by plutocracy through the “Democratic” Party, to come up with more smoke and mirrors.
Democrats hope, that, somehow, We The People will end up believing that the Obama revolution was stopped by evil Republicans (instead as do-nothing “Democrats”, as it truly was!) Then, by mental inertia, they will come out pristine as freshly fallen snow.
Patrice Ayme
On inertia: that its discovery is still attributed to Newton is a great scandal. Buridan wrote “Newton’s First Law” very explicitly, 340 years before Newton. They both wrote in Latin, so one cannot argue that Newton deserves priority because he wrote in English.
Not all the details of how one goes from inertia in Quantum processes to brain inertia are in, but that Quantum inertia, and then Mental inertia, is clear enough. (By the way, Einstein’s motivation in his Theory of so-called General Relativity was to explain inertia: he failed miserably, as his theory is local, not global; I suggest it has to do with Quantum Entanglement, I win!)
