Are we really in a war? Much of the political muck sounds polarized and divisive. Red and blue, right and left. And center sounds so good, so balanced. No one likes to be extreme.

As an Orthodox Jew, the idea of ideological warfare is a lot easier to swallow. We are, after all, the world’s oldest counter-culture. Living in another culture while preserving your own is like standing on a down escalator- if you don’t walk up, you’ll end up being dragged down.

It’s a lot easier to grasp that there’s a war on if you know the players. One of the biggest players from the left side is the PLM. The idea of the PLM is best explained in a fiction book State of Fear by Michael Crichton:

“Has it ever occurred to you how astonishing the culture of Western society really is? Industrialized nations provide their citizens with unprecedented safety, health, and comfort. Average life spans increased fifty percent in the last century. Yet modern people live in abject fear. They are afraid of strangers, of disease, of crime, of the environment. They are afraid of the homes they live in, the food they eat, the technology that surrounds them. The are in a particular panic over things they can’t even see– germs, chemicals, additives, pollutants. They are timid, nervous, fretful, and depressed. And even more amazingly, they are convinced that the environment of the entire planet is being destroyed around them. Remarkable! Like the belief in witchcraft, it’s an extraordinary delusion– a global fantasy worthy of the Middle Ages. Everything is going to hell, and we must all live in fear. Amazing.”
“How has this world view been instilled in everybody? Because although we imagine we live in different nations– France, Germany, Japan, the US– in fact, we inhabit exactly the same state, the State of Fear. How has that been accomplished?”

Evans said nothing. He knew it wasn’t necessary.

“Well, I shall tell you how,” he said. “In the old days– before your time, Peter– citizens of the West believed their nation-states were dominated by something called the military-industrial complex. Eisenhower warned Americans against it in the 1960s, and after two world wars Europeans knew very well what it meant in their own countries. But the military-industrial complex is no longer the primary driver of society. In reality, for the last fifteen years we have been under the control of an entirely new complex, far more powerful and far more pervasive. I call it the politico-legal-media complex. The PLM. And it is dedicated to promoting fear in the population– under the guise of promoting safety.”

“Safety is important.” [Evans said.]

“Please. Western Nations are fabulously safe. Yet people do not feel they are, because of the PLM. And the PLM is powerful and stable, precisely because it unites so many institutions of society. Politicians need fears to control the population. Lawyers need dangers to litigate, and make money. The media need scare stories to capture an audience. Together, these three estates are so compelling that they can go about their business even if the scare is totally groundless. If it has no basis in fact as all.”

Further examples abound

I amend the paradigm only slightly, or include another “L”- Learning centers. Public schools in America are by nature in favor of big government. Teacher’s unions (to whom all the teachers- who teach your children- are beholden), teach their young students what politicians, the law, and the media reinforce. They pressure their children to get into “good schools” that teach way too much epistemology, and convince them to commit subtle shades of fraud.