Sheep, wolves, sheepdogs

Jan 14, 2020, 10:46 AM (5 days ago)

to me, Lynn

What bugs me about the whole sheep/wolves/sheepdog thing:

1) It's typical consultant hackery pandering to the guys apportioning contracts. "Hey, yeah, I'm a SHEEPDOG-that's me! Give this guy a contract speaking to warfighters!" Dude, you're a midranking government employee working in a massive bureaucracy. Stop.

2) It presents as normal the situation where most of your fellow citizens aren't really citizens but idiotic herbivores or psychopathic predators. It's the way a woke centurion in 4th century Rome would see his fellow Romans. Not a healthy outlook. It promotes contempt for most of your neighbors and family.

3) Ultimately, it promotes self-contempt. If you're gonna go for it and say, we no longer live in a republic but in a massive human factory farm where sheeple are guarded by snarling sheepdogs and preyed upon by two-legged wolves, I can agree with you.

In that case, the question a dog will ask himself is "how can I be a better guard dog for my master?"

But a man will ask: "who is the farmer? Who holds the mortgage on the farm? What are we selling-milk, wool, or meat? How come my masters are so solicitous of those wolves, feeding them, breeding them, bringing them into the farm and slapping me on the snout if I get too rough with them? Most importantly-how can I become free, rather than being stuck on a chain guarding reeking, bleating ovids from equally stupid vicious predators, for someone who sees all of us as animals to be managed and profited from?"

Nobody ever hears the sheep-wolf-sheepdog analogy and says, wait, I'm none of these, and do not wish to be any of them. It's a cognitive trap designed to enslave those most dangerous to the farm's owners via a subtle flattery of their masculine egos.

Sincerely,

Baruch

Lynn Lockhart

Wed, Jan 15, 12:56 AM (4 days ago)

I have a few law enforcement friends on Facebook and I've seen that meme come up. It always rubbed me the wrong way, that they consider us sheep. It seems like the metaphor of people farming and domestication gives us a deep vein of understanding, with priorities being to crush masculinity and select females who breed well in captivity and both men and women having little attachment to offspring.

I think both of you make the obvious point that is unseen by most people, unseen that is, by those designated as sheep. I have flirted with it as a model for the postmodern tax farm as an expression of some accuracy, more accurate than not. For instance, the sheepdog analogy fits for every cop and contractor and military man who believes it, keeping in mind that sheep dogs are prone to kill sheep. It also fits the anarcho-tyranny we live under duplicitously, making the wolves more important than the cops/sheepdogs, because, the presence of wolves increases the dependence of the flock of human sheep on both the sheepdog and the shepherd. In the New Zealand massacre, for instance, you saw sheep behavior among the targets of the human wolves, as you did in Columbine.

Baruch has given the best analysis of this predation-domestication-harmony metaphor I have read—and yes, it is a cognitive trap. It also makes sense in terms of religious legacy, with the God of a herding folk being referred to as a good shepherd. In terms of the faceless government, heterogenous nation, NGO or municipality being by default, the shepherd, the people farmer, we have descended into that soulless well of despair in which the view of God has been affixed and vested and affrighted in government, specifically bureaucratic state. To me, this is where self-deification of the human collective merges with self-loathing in the muddled mind to form the perfect moral chattel for farming by their masters.

The deeper question I am interested in, is how the livestock raising culture of the Arуan races and cousin peoples, who have established the most militarily successful civilizations, always supplanting, conquering or ruling simple agrarian pyramid civilizations, has placed within our minds, perhaps only in our languages and faiths, the ideal of the deity as a shepherd, which must then make that deity a malevolent force to his flock: exploiter, killer, lamb-taker.

Is this tied in with the ruthlessness with which cattle herding and shepherd cultures out of the wastes and steppes, disposed of their settled enemies and came to rule them as essentially people farmers?

Could this be at the root of the real operating system behind almost every government, of elite oligarchic interests with little or no cultural, racial, religious empathy for their lower classes ruthlessly exploiting those who they supposedly serve and protect?

Of course, police have only ever served and protected their masters, never the sheeple who have been indoctrinated to seek their protection and assume their service.

As toxic as it is, I still find appeal in this self-fulfilling metaphor, simply because it is more honest and accurate than the lie of protection and service and the fact that I fit nowhere in the model, having left the fold, and evaded the wolves and dogs, hoping ultimately to avoid being placed on the master's table as stringy mutton.

What sentiment I harbor resides with the wolves.

Since I was a boy listening to a "good shepherd" sermon at Immaculate Heart of Mary church in Baltimore County, I have suspected that any shepherd must be evil in regards to His flock. But, lacking the heart of a wolf and the loyalty of a dog, I have sought to slink into the shadows. If I have a totem, it is neither canine or herbivore.

Thanks, Baruch, for this insightful analysis of our psychologically self-propagating bipedal meat-farm.