Gaslighting Harrison Butker and our Humanity

The Systematic Erosion of the Rights of Conscience

www.RevisionistHistory.org

C O N T E N T S

I. What Does it Mean to be Human?

II. The Fundamental Aim of Gaslighting

III. A Challenge to last week’s study deconstructing the Noahide Laws: Isn’t the Talmud just a series of debates?

I. What Does it Mean to be Human?

Let me define my terms with a few examples. My maternal grandmother was a northern Italian descended from a family of small landowners. She came to America with her father. Her baby brother, Raphael, would follow at age 18, in time to volunteer for the US Army and be sent to fight in the First World War. (He received a battlefield promotion to sergeant and was awarded the Silver Star for “conspicuous gallantry under fire”).

Grandma was another kind of hero, though I won’t regale you with accounts of her astounding work ethic. It was her songs I wish to mention. As a girl in rural Italy she learned by heart upwards of a hundred of them. She sang them in Italian, they often rhymed and almost always involved a complex play on words. Some were sad; many were humorous. My first generation American mother spoke fluent Italian and would on occasion laugh so hard at one of grandma’s songs that she was nearly in tears.

At age eight or nine I would beg her to translate the hilarious parts, but mom would reply that she couldn’t because the meaning would be lost in translation. The humor turned on gioco di parole. That’s when I began to grasp the complexity of the language of “simple” folk.

Years later, while working weekly in the archives of Cornell University’s Olin graduate research library, I met a co-ed who was studying the traditional jump rope songs of American children. I collaborated on her project and we learned they were occasionally more than jingles. Almost all of them possessed musicality and some a mischievous light-hearted view of life. I recall our oldest daughter, born in 1980, singing them on the dirt road in front of our home on the edge of the Borrego Desert in the hinterlands of southern California, circa 1987. I did not teach them to her. They were part of the fabric of childhood back then. Her children, my grandchildren, don’t sing those jump rope songs; nor do their friends.

When we lived among the Old Order (horse-and-buggy) Mennonites I observed that it took about a year for them to believe they had some idea of what, if any, integrity a newcomer possessed. It was a slow-motion culture. Friendship was something that was earned, not instantly conferred.

They didn’t possess “labor-saving” devices but they seemed to have all the time in the world. Schooled only to the eighth grade, nonetheless, if they thought themselves fit to write hymns and publish them, or pen novels or memoirs of Mennonite settlements in Central and South America, they forged ahead, without insecurity about having no “higher education.” Those Old Order folk oriented toward the written word often read the great books voraciously. (There’s no better teacher of writing than the essays of Samuel Johnson and the novels of Charles Dickens).

Th written word remains the premier means for conveying detailed information. Without attachment to the typographical universe our humanity decays.

This was analyzed by Sven Birkerts in his classic volume, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. As Cecil Bothell observes, Prof. “Birkerts reports that most of his college students are unable to read deeply—that is, they come equipped to read the words but not the meaning of texts, and are increasingly uncomfortable with the pace and linearity of the written word. They get the story line but not the irony, the pathos, the juxtaposition of assertion and intent…”

Reading has been replaced by viewing. 90% of the research recommendations sent to me are YouTube and other types of videos. I am expected to sit spectating for fifteen minutes to gain the information I could have obtained in five from a transcript or essay. As a supplement to deep reading, still and motion pictures are an undoubted asset. As a substitute for extended reading they are a deadening fixture of the alchemical devolution of humanity.

Like staring at cell phone and computer screens all day, videos make us boring. We only come alive in what Guy DeBord termed, The Society of the Spectacle—with a video game, surfing the Internet, or at the movies, the coliseum or the “amusement” park.

Our own backyard and neighborhood are often not a place of joy or gratitude because we have become too dull to experience the magnificence of the customary. John Stilgoe in Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places, was among the first to point to the decay of acute observation and celebration of ordinary things, as did our grandparents.

Mr. Stilgoe taught me to see that television and electronic reading devices—from computers and cell phones to kindle texts—were fundamentally unnatural. How so? They require us to stare into the light. In the past we read by indirect light which poured over our shoulders or came from above.

Our ancestors mainly stared into a light source such as fire to cook, warm themselves, relax or contemplatively zone out. We in turn are looking into the “fire” throughout the day on our viewing screens. We are numb to the powerfully deleterious effect of this habit on our psyche. Even movie theaters were superior in this regard, maintaining at least one aspect of ancient human perception. Unlike television, the light from cinema is indirect, projected from behind the viewer, onto a screen.

Shrug your shoulders as you choose at these subtle indicators of what we have lost, but the cumulative effect of all of these post-modern reductions of of our humanity have been devastating, as an examination of the condition of our youth will reveal, beginning with the algorithmic Gen Z attention-span destroyer known as the cell phone. After that, near catatonia.

In terms of the Revelation of the Method we can’t plead ignorance. The Control System has itself has divulged our zombie-like condition to us—in this year’s Super Bowl 58 advertisement, produced by web design company Squarespace. The video imagines what would happen if no one noticed an alien invasion from outer space because masses of people wouldn’t look up from their computer and cell phone screens.

Directed by Martin Scorcese and titled “Hello Down There,” the ad shows a fleet of flying saucers soaring over a world whose inhabitants don’t see them because they are staring at their phones. So consumed are the people of earth by their digital devices that they don’t even register the attempts of the UFO inhabitants to make contact.

The Revelation of the Method makes it virtually impossible for us to pretend we are unaware of the harm we are choosing to do to ourselves. If we continue in our addiction with this knowledge we are then doubly blinded and enslaved.

As with over-eating, the only sure respite is to fast—from all screen spectating—one day a week, or one week a month, or one month in every six, depending on your situation and the duties to your state in life. Whenever possible, disconnect.

To desire to recover our humanity should be a universal aspiration. Where the dreaded shadow of controversy enters is when we uphold other beliefs and practices equally ancient and human but which have been shamed into disuse by a minority of Leftist authoritarians —from Samantha Power and Cass Sunstein to Joy Reid, Jill Biden and Admiral Rachel Levine, all of whom have designated themselves arbiters of national behavior—and whose cronies have gained control of the corporate media and many of the Fortune 500 corporations.

President Biden may yet get his wish and impose on our nation a Federal decree authorizing the entrance of men who say they are women into traditional women-only spaces like bathrooms, showers and locker rooms. This is an unmistakable assault on the modesty and privacy of women, celebrated as a great step forward in the liberation history of civil rights.

I recall 1980s feminism in rural New York. A hard-working farm wife of our acquaintance invited my wife to her women-only birthday party. I’d never heard of such a thing but knowing that lady to be a fine mother, wife and farmer, I figured it couldn’t be wrong. Feminists in that era campaigned to obtain women-only spaces. Where are they now?

A minority are in opposition to impersonators entering women’s private rooms. In April one of the few, author J.K. Rowling, stated the crux of the issue when she wrote that the Establishment seems “to have placed higher value on the feelings of men performing their idea of femaleness, however misogynistically or opportunistically, than on the rights and freedoms of actual women and girls….”

Most feminists however, have yielded to the encroachment, or gone silent. Why?

They have been gaslighted.

The 1944 movie “Gaslight” starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman is derived from a 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton centered on psychological deception. Set in London in the 1880s, the lady of the house correctly observes gaslights flickering low in the evening and the sound of footsteps in the attic. Her authoritarian husband insists she is wrong. She has become captive to his version of what is happening—a vision shaped by his goal of making her doubt herself at a fundamental level.

In vol. 50, issue no. 1 of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly (1981), Victor Calef, M.D. and Edward Mr. Weinshel, M.D. published a study, “Some Clinical Consequences of Introjection: Gaslighting.” In it the psychiatrists wrote that the gaslighter, “disavowing his or her own mental disturbance, tries to make the victim feel he or she is going crazy and the victim more or less complies.”

“…his or her own mental disturbance…” As it is often remarked these days, the inmates have taken over the asylum. They are in power over those of us who live in accordance with the natural law of the ages; and we have more or less complied.

Harrison Butker’s Commencement Address

Earlier this month Harrison Butker, the kicker for the Kansas City Chiefs NFL football team gave a commencement speech at Benedictine College in Kansas in which he stated:

“For the ladies present today, congratulations on an amazing accomplishment. You should be proud of all that you have achieved to this point in your young lives. I want to speak directly to you briefly because I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you. How many of you are sitting here now about to cross this stage and are thinking about all the promotions and titles you are going to get in your career? Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.”

For his re-statement of the traditional verities concerning motherhood as being among the most fulfilling roles for women, he has been excoriated as a polarizing moral leper, a divisive deprecator of working women, and an underminer of human rights. In other words, he’s been gaslighted.

His address wasn’t perfect. Mr. Butker should have acknowledged the role of single women as devoted educators, physicians, nurses etc. Single women fulfill a vital role when they assist mothers and fathers in their vocation of child-rearing.

French Canadian Esther Pariseau (1823-1902) became Mother Joseph of the Sisters of Providence. As a painter, sculptor, architect, locksmith, blacksmith, watchmaker, farmer and nurse, this extraordinary Catholic woman helped to found Sacred Heart Hospital in Spokane, Washington offering medical care to indigent Protestants, Jews, atheists, Catholics—whoever was in need.

My hometown’s lady head librarian did not marry. She dedicated her life to encouraging in callow youths like me a love of the printed word; as did my unmarried female PhD. high school economics teacher.

Formerly, Protestant and Catholic culture fostered altruism in women who chose the single life, some as nuns, others like my non-Catholic librarian mentor and my high school teacher. My wife’s maiden aunt lived with her parents in the family home and aided invaluably in the upbringing of the children.

Harrison Butker

Butker missed these other dimensions of a traditional woman’s life. Our Gabriel blew his horn but missed a couple of high notes; that’s no reason to pillory him. He spoke desperately needed sane words founded in the natural law to young people who otherwise are being sold a delusional view of the past life of traditional humans.

Benjamin Kunkel writing in The New Yorker (March 18, 2024): “In period drama after period drama, Hollywood producers appear to pride themselves on the exact reproduction of everything from candlesticks to carriages, but they do not seem capable of imagining the lives of women and girls before birth control… and ready abortion. In the Hollywood version of American history…no woman is ever pregnant. Most 19th-century American women, whatever their race or wealth or state of servitude, were pregnant or nursing for decades. You hardly ever see them on screen: no swollen bellies…no babies in arms, no toddlers clinging to legs…(Hollywood) gets the warp and woof of daily life quite wrong.”

It’s a deliberate attempt on the part of the movie moguls to impress on our minds the false sense that our contemporary childlessness and sterility have always been the condition of humanity and there’s nothing strange or pathological about it. If we object, if we cite historical records, the torrent of abuse from the “tolerant and loving ones” will drench us.

The message is, we don’t have the right to differ with our elite managers of what constitutes fact. Reality is whatever they say it is. Those who dissent are “reactionary extremists” and “religious fanatics” destined for the bottom of the cancel culture barrel.

II. The Fundamental Aim of Gaslighting

The Systematic Erosion of Individual Moral Agency and Rights of Conscience

Kate Abramson in her book, On Gaslighting notes that, “Agreement isn't the endpoint of successful gaslighting. Gaslighters aim to fundamentally undermine their targets as deliberators and moral agents.”