Group Psychology On Display

Nostalgia for the Mud

Jim Kunstler

“Resentful childless harpies unconsciously longing for domination. Why else worship at the altar of Hamas? Why else would it be so overwhelmingly female?”— Dr. Jordan Peterson

Wasn’t it cute how the youngsters who “occupied” Columbia U’s Hamilton Hall — and were busy smashing things up inside — demanded restaurant-grade meals sent in to avert “starvation and dehydration” amongst their dauntless ranks? You could imagine a colossal mommy breast with three hundred nipples descending from the sky over upper Manhattan to nourish them back to action. “Feed me. . . !”

It turns out, actually, that at least half the troops inside were not students at all, but rather semi-pro activists paid up to $7,000 each by George Soros’s Open Society Institute and other overtly insurrection-themed orgs, so you’d think that the troops could afford to load-up their ever-ready backpacks with Cliff bars and bottles of Smart Water. The order-in food and beverage gambit suggests we should understand that this is not so much politics as the acting out of a game — which is exactly what you might expect of people who spend more time on video screens than in the real world — in which something like a half-time intermission for refreshments is de rigueur.

Alas, they were not obliged with Doordash servings of Alitcha (“Ensemble of potatoes, carrots, collard greens, and cabbage baked in turmeric,” $22.30) from the nearby Massawa Ethiopian bistro, or Firecracker Chicken from Junzi Kitchen over on Broadway and 113th Street. And then, when the cops came to roust them out into the big buses now used as paddy-wagons for such events, the occupiers were heard to whine, “I have finals and I need to go home!” You’ve got to wonder how they’ll make out when “Joe Biden” drafts their ass to go fight the Russians out on the Ukrainian buzzard flats, about which the White House is just now sending out early signals.

It has been observed that a clear majority of the pro-Hamas activists are young women — which makes sense considering that they are the largest demographic evincing mental illness on America’s social landscape these days. Thus, they are marching in support of a sect that specializes in the rape, mutilation, and murder of young women like themselves, or at least treats them as chattels, hidden under black bag-like garments. The group psychology on display has more occult angles than any movie by the Wachowski sisters.

Among the marching Columbia students who are not paid outside activists, a few are apparently Jewish, such as spokesperson Johanna King-Slutzky (actual name, hat-tip Alex Berenson, who ID’d her), the winsome creature who complained about the lack of order-in meals at Hamilton Hall. Another observer on “X” who styles himself @J9_ATX identified the syndrome in play as “oppression envy,” among women seeking compensatory validation for occupying such a privileged niche on Planet Earth as a cushy Ivy League college — featuring international cuisine stations in the dining halls — while their third world sisters trudge through the burning sands of Al-Kufra carrying water-jugs on their heads as they dodge the odious “wind scorpions” of the region.

Higher Ed in the USA was already chugging down the suicide track before this spring’s eruption of pro-Hamas fury. The college loan racket (government-backed) had the perverse effect of pumping up tuition costs beyond what even many pretty well-off families could afford, while loading up young people with life-wrecking obligations (debt which “Joe Biden is now shifting onto the creditors, US tax-payers). Decades of DEI have filled the faculties with incompetents and assorted malcontents teaching fantasy curricula with no real-life value, and burdened the schools with cadres of overpaid diversity busybodies and thought-police. Diversity college presidents are very publicly failing to cope. The whole rotten train is going off the rails.

I’m not at all sanguine that the society we are becoming will need this vast infrastructure for babysitting young adults who could otherwise make themselves useful and productive on-the-ground in lines of work that actually keep civilized life going. This is too self-evident now to belabor, though there is an awful lot of confusion about what kind of society we might become.

The campus Hamas zealots ironically (and tragically) represent exactly the sort of rough medievalism that the citizens of Western Civ countries would be chary of sliding into. You’d have to sadly conclude that many young people really can’t take much more Modernity, and are now pretty avid to opt out of it, even as they gaze into the magic, glowing pixels of their iPhone screens.