Category Archives: Ideology

England Unrepentant for Role in Torture

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Lynndie England is unrepentant for what she did, says this piece:

“We move on to another hideous image, in which the same group of prisoners – one of whom Graner had punched full in the face – were lined up and ordered to masturbate.

How long had this sick charade continued? ‘You are going to find this ridiculous,’ says England, half suppressing a snigger. ‘One guy did 45 minutes! Freddie [Graner’s fellow prison guard, Ivan Frederick] just wanted to see if they would do it – and all seven of them lined up doing this.

‘Well, six stopped after a few minutes, but the seventh carried on.’

Hearing this account for the first time, even Roy T. Hardy, her lawyer, who had thought himself beyond shock after representing England for five years, is clearly taken aback…..

‘Sorry? For what I did?’ she interjects, incredulous. ‘All I did was stand in the pictures. Saying sorry is admitting I was guilty and I’m not. I was just doing my duty’

……it is impossible to empathise with her, for she is such an unsympathetic character……”

More of the same at Drudge on England’s interview with the German news magazine, Stern.

My Comment

I read this report with interest for two reasons.

1. It substantiates, as many other reports have done since then, my early (July 2004) insight that there were pictures of women being abused that were being deliberately held back and that the key to understanding Abu Ghraib was that it was a deliberate policy.

2. It also vindicates the argument of an essay I contributed to “One of the Guys” (Seal, 2006), a piece called “The Military Made Me Do It,” that England got the benefit of double-standards that treated the women torturers as somehow victims themselves.

I was sympathetic to England, as far as she – and others low down in the pecking order – were made scapegoats for the military and government elites who actually developed the policy. I was also sympathetic about the class bias shown toward them (shown in  phrases like “trailer trash” that are used in this report as well).

But I thought England could still have behaved better than she did. I compared her to Joseph Darby, the whistle-blower, who did his duty despite all the dangers of being seen as a “snitch” by his colleagues. Both were about the same age. I thought England benefited from a double-standard exonerating the young women torturers.

I suggested in the essay that England’s sex was really as much an advantage as it was a disadvantage in the prison where she was a guard (female-deprived).

Another point of vindication: many journalists treat the story of Abu Ghraib as primarily a story about America. I find this somewhat narcissistic. The story is about the victims. To my mind, putting England and her colleagues at the center of Abu Ghraib adds a second injury to the victims.  And, as this report illustrates, the perps are rarely worthy of it, even as psychological case studies. Most evil is done by depressingly ordinary people.

A final point. I recall that some journalists made the culturally obtuse decision to interview the raped women, completely forgetting the consequences to the victims of such media exposure. Sure enough, some of the interviewed women ended up dead.

I have to wonder at journalists with so little imagination and compunction for the subjects of their stories…

‘Subjects’ are also subjects in the other sense – they have their own voices.

All this adds to my belief that the mediacrats can be as big a problem as the kleptocrats.

The Neurolinguistic Programming of Reality

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“An excellent example of globalist
redefinition of a common term
is the use of the word “state” in place of “country”
. When the media and leaders
refer to a country like Iran as a “state”
this has the same or similar effect as the
British globalists referring to the United States
as “the colonies”, which is off-handed at best.
This type of redefinition of terms is
designed to belittle the conception of a
supposed and/or perceived enemy by making
them appear less important and smaller in perspective
to the aggressors. Most soldiers would be
more willing to attack a “rogue state” than an “enemy
country”. The actual usage of this type of
terminology actually creates a mass perception
that the said country has already been assimilated
into the globalist empire and is simply acting out of
turn and is deserving of punitive damage whether
compensatory or offensive or both.
However, the true modus operandi
of the globalists is essentially Hegelian
in nature. Time and time again as a
species we can observe the workings of “thesis,
antitheses and synthesis”.

An excellent example would be the attacks on
the World Trade Center of 2001.
Thesis: “terrorists are a continual threat
to our liberty”. Antitheses: the
attack on the World Trade Center. Synthesis:
the Patriot Acts and Office of Homeland
Security, also known as: the loss of liberty
in the name of security…….

There are many conclusions to be drawn when
looking at the cycle of empires, but one
stands clearly: ruling is a science, and it
involves coercion whether via induced
suffering, psychological
torture and/or destabilization….”

— Max Mitchell, “Foundations of War:
Terminology of the New World.”

Bill Blum on the Obama Cult

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Bill Blum at the Anti-Empire Report:
“The praise heaped on President Obama for his speech to the Muslim world by writers on the left, both here and abroad, is disturbing. I’m referring to people who I think should know better, who’ve taken Politics 101 and can easily see the many hypocrisies in Obama’s talk, as well as the distortions, omissions, and contradictions, the true but irrelevant observations, the lies, the optimistic words without any matching action, the insensitivities to victims.  Yet, these commentators are impressed, in many cases very impressed.  In the world at large, this frame of mind borders on a cult.
In such cases one must look beyond the intellect and examine the emotional appeal.  We all know the world is in big trouble — Three Great Problems: universal, incessant violence; financial crisis provoking economic suffering; environmental degradation.  In all three areas the United States bears more culpability than any other single country. Who better to satisfy humankind’s craving for relief than a new American president who, it appears, understands the problems; admits, to one degree or another, his country’s responsibility for them; and “eloquently” expresses his desire and determination to change US policies and embolden the rest of the world to follow his inspiring example.  Is it any wonder that it’s 1964, the Beatles have just arrived in New York, and everyone is a teenage girl?
I could go through the talk Obama gave in Cairo and point out line by line the hypocrisies, the mere platitudes, the plain nonsense, and the rest.  (“I have unequivocally prohibited the use of torture by the United States.” — No mention of it being outsourced, probably to the very country he was speaking in, amongst others. … “No single nation should pick and choose which nation holds nuclear weapons.” — But this is precisely what the United States is trying to do concerning Iran and North Korea.) But since others have been pointing out these lies very well I’d like to try something else in dealing with the problem — the problem of well-educated people, as well as the not so well-educated, being so moved by a career politician saying “all the right things” to give food for hope to billions starving for it, and swallowing it all as if they had been born yesterday.  I’d like to take them back to another charismatic figure, Adolf Hitler, speaking to the German people two years and four months after becoming Chancellor, addressing a Germany still reeling with humiliation from its being The Defeated Nation in the World War, with huge losses of its young men, still being punished by the world for its militarism, suffering mass unemployment and other effects of the great depression.  Here are excerpts from the speech of May 21, 1935.  Imagine how it fed the hungry German people.
———————
HITLER:
“….. Germany, too, has a democratic Constitution.  Our love of peace perhaps is greater than in the case of others, for we have suffered most from war.  None of us wants to threaten anybody, but we all are determined to obtain the security and equality of our people……….
The German Reich, especially the present German Government, has no other wish except to live on terms of peace and friendship with all the neighboring States. Germany has nothing to gain from a European war.  What we want is liberty and independence.  Because of these intentions of ours we are ready to negotiate non-aggression pacts with our neighbor States.
Germany has neither the wish nor the intention to mix in internal Austrian affairs, or to annex or to unite with Austria.
The German Government is ready in principle to conclude non-aggression pacts with its individual neighbor States and to supplement those provisions which aim at isolating belligerents and localizing war areas…….
Germany is ready to participate actively in any efforts for drastic limitation of unrestricted arming. She sees the only possible way in a return to the principles of the old Geneva Red Cross convention. She believes, to begin with, only in the possibility of the gradual abolition and outlawing of fighting methods which are contrary to this convention, such as dum-dum bullets and other missiles which are a deadly menace to civilian women and children.
To abolish fighting places, but to leave the question of bombardment open, seems to us wrong and ineffective. But we believe it is possible to ban certain arms as contrary to international law and to outlaw those who use them. But this, too, can only be done gradually.  Therefore, gas and incendiary and explosive bombs outside of the battle area can be banned and the ban extended later to all bombing.  As long as bombing is free, a limitation of bombing planes is a doubtful proposition. But as soon as bombing is branded as barbarism, the building of bombing planes will automatically cease.
Just as the Red Cross stopped the killing of wounded and prisoners, it should be possible to stop the bombing of civilians……
The German Government is of the opinion that all attempts effectively to lessen tension between individual States through international agreements or agreements between several States are doomed to failure unless suitable measures are taken to prevent poisoning of public opinion on the part of irresponsible individuals in speech, writing, in the film and the theatre.…… [1]

— End of speech excerpts —

How many people in the world, including numerous highly educated Germans, reading or hearing that speech in 1935, doubted that Adolf Hitler was a sincere man of peace and an inspiring, visionary leader?

NOTES
[1] The entire speech can be found at: http://members.tripod.com/~Comicism/350521.html

Is Madoff’s Ethnicity Relevant?

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Dr. Phyllis Chesler comments on the Madoff fraud,at Pajamas Media (originally published at Jewcy).

“Yes, of course, Madoff’s betrayal is unforgivable. He has gutted an entire generation of Jewish philanthropic wealth, destroyed trust within the Jewish philanthropic world but, far more important, impoverished widows, orphans, and the elderly and, in so doing, endangered and shamed the Jewish people at a time when we have many real, not merely neurotically imagined enemies.……..

In the Middle East, graft and nepotism make the wheels turn. Everyone is on the take. Beggars aren’t beggars, entire civil services are staffed by one or two clans. I could tell you a thing or two about corruption in southern Asia today, let’s say in Afghanistan, that would make Heller’s Catch-22 seem like child’s play. Everyone, from the President on down is on the take and opium is a most abundant and attractive cash crop. The Afghan drug lords are addicting, infecting, and murdering entire global populations with their poppies as are those who buy and sell the heroin. No one holds the Afghans accountable. But woe to the Jewish nation that has harbored, abetted, profited from, or has even been fleeced by Madoff, the greedmaster.”

My Comment

This is an interesting commentary from just after the Madoff story broke and it makes some good points.But I think it’s on shaky grounds in one or two other places..

I’m  posting it today because I recently posted two pieces that some might see as critical of the Jewish people. Mind you, I don’t.  I see criticism of Madoff or of US Israeli policy as simply criticism of a conman and of international criminality.

On the other hand, I also don’t think religion or ethnicity is irrelevant to that criticism, any more than religion or ethnicity was irrelevant to criticism of George Bush (hmmm…did I hear any voices raised to protest the attacks on fundamentalist Christianity, whites, Anglos, Wasps? No, I think not).

And  is there any let up whatever in the criticism of Islam (Islamofascists), Muslim extremism, jihadis, violent Middle Easterners, etc. etc? None whatever. Doesn’t the color black get dragged into discussion of crime in the ghetto? Didn’t the phrase “Hindu extremism” pop up in discussions about Godhra?

It seems pretty natural to me that people would point out the religion or ethnicity of conmen, especially when the con men are relying on both to play their con game.

Neither Right Nor Left Nor Stupid

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Increasingly, I find that I fit neither left nor right, as it’s conceived in the United States.  I’m not even a libertarian.

I’m not surprised.

People have a relationship to language that I find puzzling and foreign to me. Even repugnant. It’s an instrumental view. It’s also a very fundamentalist and dogmatic view.

Words are much more complex than that.  To fit our narrow ideologies into them, we have to drain them of their power, their ambiguity, their richness – all the ways in which they don’t mean what we say. They never do. And bless them for that. Bless them that they always escape us. As experience always escapes us.

I am not a progressive, if progress means latching on to every idiotic scheme that flatters its manufacturer’s vanity at the expense of hard-won experience.

I am not a conservative, if conservatism means mistaking your own prejudices and ignorance for immutable truths.

I am not a libertarian, if liberty is a theory that you force on the reality of freedom and unfreedom.

I am not a pragmatist, if pragmatism is simply opportunism disguising itself as prudence and state craft.

I am not an extremist, if extremism is driving a good idea into insanity by literalism.

I am not a moderate, if moderation means selling your conscience to mass opinion.

Large parts of public debate are simply stupid, in the broadest sense of that term.

First, they are stupid, because many of the people engaging in them aren’t smart. Sorry.  It’s just so –  they aren’t people who’ve subjected themselves to any discipline besides saying whatever they think at the moment, unrestricted by expertise, criticism, reality, history, memory, conscience, or anything else.

Journalists simply aren’t true professionals in many respects and don’t have standards equivalent to the legal or medical profession. The IQ necessary to practice journalism of any kind isn’t that high. Writers generally tend to be smart people, because it takes a high level of intelligence to sustain an argument through the length of a book or through a good academic paper. But most journalists write little reports of 5-8 paragraphs – most of it on the order of “he said,” “she said,”  and “then so and so did” – and sometimes they don’t even get around to doing that.

Second –  public debates have become stupid, because there’s too much chatter going on. And the quality of things tends to deteriorate when the quantity goes up. Good ideas get taken up by dumb people and at the end of it, the good idea isn’t recognizable any more as good…or even as an idea. It turns into a slogan, an idiocy, and it tends to produce idiocy even in intelligent people who take it up.

Third – public debate is stupid because ideology tends to make us stupid. It requires us to strait-jacket our thinking, to look through a particular lens, to read only our side sympathetically, to pick winners and losers competitively.

Words have their own destiny. They are not our pawns or hostages.

Report of Extensive Rapes and Beatings at Irish Church Schools

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In the news:

“After a nine-year investigation, a commission published a damning report Wednesday on decades of rapes, humiliation and beatings at Catholic Church-run reform schools for Ireland’s castaway children.

The 2,600-page report painted the most detailed and damning portrait yet of church-administered abuse in a country grown weary of revelations about child molestation by priests.

The investigation of the tax-supported schools uncovered previously secret Vatican records that demonstrated church knowledge of pedophiles in their ranks all the way back to the 1930s.

Wednesday’s five-volume report on the probe — which was resisted by Catholic religious orders — concluded that church officials shielded their orders’ pedophiles from arrest amid a culture of self-serving secrecy.”

— More at AP

My Comment

This is sad and horrible. And not the first time for the Catholic church, as this HuffPo article on mission school abuse indicates and this piece on the abuse of Canadian Indians. And in other churches, some in India

(I’ll add a link here to a recent case).

Last year, I posted the debate over Satya Sai Baba’s alleged pedophilia. I say alleged, because when I actually read through the charges and counter-charges, there weren’t as many documented ones as I’d originally believed and some of the accusers didn’t seem credible. But it’s impossible to judge sometimes, because wealthy patrons can blow smoke in your eyes by dragging things out, publishing misleading PR releases that pass for news, and intimidating witnesses.

Alice Miller has written movingly about the abuse of children (she referred to a much broader category of abuse, not sexual abuse or beating, but things like verbal intimidation, humiliation, and the use of children to fulfill adult emotional needs that haven’t been met). For her it is the foundational trauma on which all adult wrong-doing is built. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but we should pay a lot more attention to how we treat children. If this had been done to prisoners, there would be have been an international outcry, and human rights groups would be descending en masse,

But when it’s done to children it just doesn’t seem the same thing..

But my interest here is in propaganda and mind control, not cruelty per se. I want to know how these sorts of things go on for so long (sixty years) without a public outcry.

Thirty thousand children went through this system.  These were well-funded institutions, in which most of the funds were used by the members of the orders and very little went to the children. Does this sound a lot like the behavior of states?

Churches, states, and corporations – when organizations become too large, their main thrust is self-perpetuation. And the people whom they were set up to serve (followers, citizens, consumers) become fodder in that process.

Add to that a powerful ideology and you understand how criticism can be hobbled and monstrous injustices committed without a word of protest.

On a personal note, I attended a Catholic college in India for my undergraduate studies. The nuns came from all over the south. Perhaps because the young women who attended were from relatively well-to-do backgrounds (running from middle-class professionals to wealthy business families and land owners), I don’t recall coming across anything like this. There was one rather unstable young woman who developed a crush on a nun and gushed about her interminably in purple prose, while the rest of us were trying to get through our reading for the night. But it was hilarious more than anything else.

Among the nuns I knew, the one who struck me as truly good through and through was young and rather child-like and simple in her ways. There was not an ounce of anything abusive, mean, or narrow-minded in her. She laughed all the time, I recall, and her chubby cheeks and round eyes could have been those of a small child. Whenever I was ill or having problems, she’d make me up a little soup, as she did for everyone. When she wasn’t working in the nursery, she worked a lot in the garden. She lived among flowers and children and music. She died in her twenties, a few years after I left.

Do Wise Latina Women Judge Differently from White Males?

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There’s a lot of discussion in the blogosphere about likely Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s remarks in 2001 when she was an appeals court judge.

““I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” said Judge Sotomayor.”

(Published by the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal)

At The Volokh Conspiracy, Jonathan Adler finds the implication of her remarks troubling. He suggests that they go beyond simply stating that each individual’s perspective matters to negating the existence of an objective stance altogether.

Ho hum. This is such a tired battle. No one ever seems to say anything new or insightful. It all seems to boil down to a power struggle. Those upholding objective standards claim they do so because indeed standards are “out there” – i.e. objective.

Those arguing for identity as the trump card claim that the objective standard merely disguises power relations and the (white, male) identity of the powerful.

Can I say anything new? I don’t know, but it’s worth a try if only to spare myself future boredom reading the reasoning on both sides of these kinds of debate.

Back later with more.
******
OK. Here’s how I see it.
Experience always alters perception, so, to that extent, Sotomayor is not saying anything inaccurate.

I think the part that bothered Adler is this one (and I can see why): He says she “quotes approvingly” law professors who have said that “to judge is an exercise of power.”
Again, note the problem with reasoning in the social sciences here. There is an elision, a gap, in which changes in meaning are lost.

To say something is an act of power is not the same thing as saying it’s only an act of power. Moreover, power has a connotation in today’s political lingo that’s inherently negative.

Supposing then you were to substitute the word “will,” for the word “power,” what then?
Sotomayor would then be saying that people’s experiences influence the way they think, which informs their judgment. Their judgment is as much an act of will as it’s the logical conclusion of reasoning independent of the actor who performs it.

Instead of discussing power relations (politics), we’d end up in a much more fruitful arena, exploring the relationship between our will and our perceptions and reasoning. We’d be in the territory of cognitive science and philosophy. And we’d be much more likely to come up with something useful.

And all from looking at our language a bit more critically.

Of course, I have no idea whether that’s what Sotomayor meant. I’m just saying that a nuanced reading of words might be a place where both sides of the debate could start.

Instead, the debate ends locked in what I think I’ll label a Catholic (God is all-knowing*) versus Protestant (God is all-powerful) polarity, with judge substituting for God.

* I originally wrote all-rational, which seems to have led to a misunderstanding. I meant “reason” (as in ‘right reason’ rather than Reason, as in Enlightenment rationality)

R. D. Laing On The Absurdity Of Normal Men

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Psychoanalyst R. D. Laing on Normality:

“From the moment of birth, when the Stone Age baby confronts the twentieth century mother, the baby is subjected to those forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father, and their parents, and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities, and on the whole this enterprise is successful. By the time the new human being is fifteen or so, we are left with a being like ourselves, a half-crazed creature more or less adjusted to a mad world. This is normality in our present age……

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man.

Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.

Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.”‘

“The Politics of Experience” (New York: Ballantine, 1967), pp. 58, 28.

My Comment

Laing is making an extreme statement, I realize. But there are insights in what he writes, as well, for instance,  when he says that habits are imposed on us early in life  to make us conform to certain ways of thinking and acting – habits which alienate us from our conscience and from our authentic self.

That’s close to the teaching of “mechanical man” in Gurdjieff’s writing.

The Hindu teaching about “vasanas” or sense impressions (that we cultivate) seems close too. The vasanas.drive us (through cause and effect) into mechanical action. The emphasis here is less on external conditioning as on our own unconscious role in creating mechanical patterns.

In Christianity, the closest teaching is the one in the Gospel about casting off  the “old man” and putting on the new. The “old ma”n conforms to the outward appearance of things; he’s driven by the “old Adam”. I take this to mean biological urge (one form of habit and enslavement), but surely it must also include conventions formed by society and by state, although we have to distinguish between these types as well.

Couldn’t that be why one of the teachings of the Gospel – a controversial teaching – is that the love of God comes before love of parents and family? And that it can bring a sword between family members?

If we set aside the theology for a moment, isn’t that close to Laing’s comments about our need to escape our family conditioning, a conditioning imposed on us often in the name of love?

All these traditions are very dissimilar and we can’t gloss over the differences, but the underlying phenomena are not that far apart, either. Laing’s conclusions can be  indiscriminate, but the questioning of childhood conditioning seems very useful.

Those are my thoughts, anyway, coming from my interest in how and why people become deluded or propagandized.

Paul Volcker Praises the Grace of Government

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The Bureau of Economic Analysis released the Q1 ’09 GDP numbers.

The annual rate of decline came in at the expected 6.1%  (a decline of 6.3% in real GDP).

Calculated Risk has an optimistic assessment of the Q1 numbers.

The optimistic case rests on the following:

  • Declining residential investment contributed more to the GDP slump in Q1’09 than in Q4 ’08 and will likely come to an end by Q2’09, in keeping with its role as a leading indicator of recession.
  • Simultaneously, the contributions of lagging indicators (like unemployment, declining investment in equipment & software, and declining non-residential investment) have increased.
  • The over-weighting of lagging indicators in the decline of GDP signals the end of recession.
  • Real personal consumption expenditure (PCE) was up in positive territory (2.2%) in Q1’09, where it was negative (4.3%) in Q4’08.

Mish Shedlock is less optimistic. He says that the Q1 ’09 rise in PCE is either an outlier  or temporary, and will be followed by another dip in 2010-11 and more trough for a few years.

Meanwhile, former Fed chairman Paul Volcker, head of Barack Obama’s economic team, thinks the economy is “leveling off,” according to this Bloomberg report.

Highlights of what Volcker is reported to have said:

  • Bernanke is “doing a great job”
  • the economy is functioning “by the grace of government intervention”
  • a strong recovery is “going to take a while”
  • “systemically important institutions” are going to be kept afloat
  • the expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet to more than $2.2 trillion as of last week will likely lead to inflationary problems in 2-3 years, but not immediately
  • Glass-Steagall (repealed in 1999) isn’t likely to be resuscitated but proprietary trading and commercial banking activity should be kept apart (Lila: how?)
  • no regulation of hedge funds is likely but in the case of those that get too big capital requirements and a cap on leverage might be imposed (Lila: this is vague and opens the door to selective regulation)
  • regulation of executive compensation isn’t likely but there could be a “quid pro quo” for federal aid. It would have to be a “culture of exchange” with Wall Street (Lila: more weasel words that allow for selective regulation).

Altogether, I thought Volcker’s comments were evasive, inadequate, and temporizing.

Indian Business Students Drive Sales Of Mein Kampf

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“Sales of Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler’s autobiography and apologia for his anti-semitism, are soaring in India where business students regard the dictator as a management guru.
Booksellers told The Daily Telegraph that while it is regarded in most countries as a ‘Nazi Bible’, in India it is considered a management guide in the mould of Spencer Johnson’s “Who Moved My Cheese”.

Sales of the book over the last six months topped 10,000 in New Delhi alone, according to leading stores, who said it appeared to be becoming more popular with every year.

Several said the surge in sales was due to demand from students who see it as a self-improvement and management strategy guide for aspiring business leaders, and who were happy to cite it as an inspiration.

“Students are increasingly coming in asking for it and we’re happy to sell it to them,” said Sohin Lakhani, owner of Mumbai-based Embassy books who reprints Mein Kampf every quarter and shrugs off any moral issues in publishing the book.

“They see it as a kind of success story where one man can have a vision, work out a plan on how to implement it and then successfully complete it”.

More at The Telegraph, UK”

My Comment

April 20 was Hitler’s birthday and I suppose the anniversary provides the justification for stories like these.  Mein Kampf is a book that I’ve never read myself and haven’t felt curious enough to read, either . It’s apparently selling briskly to Indian students, not for its anti-semitism but for the inspiration it provides management students.

More mischievously, the article goes on to insinuate a link between Gandhi and the Nazis.

There was one, but nothing that would please any Nazi-hunter. Gandhi was not unusual in seeing the European war as intra-imperial and seemed to think that satyagraha would work on the Germans as well as it had done on the British.

He went so far as to advise  Jews to let themselves fall before the Nazis as a kind of sacrificial gesture that would turn the consciences of their oppressors. Many scholars have – unsurprisingly – reacted to this with repugnance, but the advice was more a symptom of Gandhian quixotry than anti-Semitism – conscious or unconscious.