Douglas Murray and the Hypnotized Mind
The world as seen by the blind
To understand what goes on in the heads of Douglas Murray and the other clowns who are currently running around on a podcast blitz to save Zionism and the postwar consensus, consider this: apparently you can use hypnosis to tell a subject that someone has left the room when in reality that person is still there, after which the subject literally cannot see that person: he’s invisible.
Similarly, to Murray, the obvious atrocities in Gaza, as well as the substance of certain criticisms of the postwar consensus, are quite literally invisible. When he is forced to think about these things, his mind bounces off that particular thought structure as if it hit a force field. It cannot go there. If pressed, for the brief instant of contact with the thought structure, his mind immediately and automatically conjures up rationalizations, no matter how absurd and incoherent. This is the outward expression of the repelling force field keeping him from seeing, the hypnosis rendering the thing invisible.
This explains why he and others like him think the entire internet (as manifest in the comment sections) must be wrong, evil, even psychopathic: if people tell you that the person is right in front of you, but you can’t see him, you must conclude they are insane, when in fact you have been hypnotized (or self-hypnotized) to not see.
Looking at it from the perspective of the “invisible man” also explains the comical meta-nature of the “debate” on Rogan, which ran in circles arguing about experts, credentials, conditions for expressing an opinion, straw men etc. That’s what a mind guided by the “repelling force field” does, because it literally can’t access the substance: it’s invisible. You cannot, for the life of you, go there. (Another splendid example of this dynamic is Jordan Peterson’s recent exchange with Rogan, where Joe casually brings up the suffering of Gazans, which Peterson simply ignores, as if he didn’t hear it at all. Perhaps that’s because it is the “invisible man”, and so he literally doesn’t perceive it.)
We shouldn’t look at this form of hypnosis as simply a result of external brainwashing. After all, hypnosis always requires a degree of consent, of willing participation by the subject. Hypnotists also need to work with existing belief structures. This is a reflection of the basic law of the universe that free will cannot be violated infinitely: the devil doesn’t brute-force; he tempts, traps, deals. So what’s the internal state of Murray and the rest of the gang that facilitates this sort of hypnosis?
The “hypnosis” that renders the Gaza atrocities and cracks in the postwar consensus invisible is reinforced and motivated by the extreme levels of internal pain that would be unleashed were Murray to admit his errors in judgment. His whole inner world would collapse, causing a massive identity crisis that only an orientation towards a deeper reality, apart from material markers of success or comfort, could bridge and heal.
To realize one has been hypnotized to ignore crucial aspects of reality, that one has built an entire persona around it, and to realize this persona now has to go, is akin to death. Hence the concept of spiritual death and rebirth, of resurrection.
It’s not just about the pain of being proven wrong. True, nobody likes that, but there’s a moral dimension to it as well: to recognize one has participated in and facilitated evil is pure terror; it opens the floodgates to Truth, to an overwhelming beam of love entering one’s Being suddenly and irresistibly, shining a bright light on the world, our place in it, how we fit into it.
Existential moral crisis can unleash transformative power, and while such enlightenment can lead to bliss undreamed of, it always comes with an equal amount of suffering necessary to open the gate and melt away all those illusions: those lies you believed to protect your material well-being, the mask, the “persona” (in Jungian terms). The lies you told yourself to shield you from the unbearable light, a light you know deep down will upend your life, your priorities, what you mistake for you when in fact it’s just part of an identity you developed over time that helped you live in this madhouse without going mad, and perhaps even thrive in it, or so you thought.
But it’s not you. There is another part of you: hidden, shy, tortured by the tyranny of the fake persona. This part loves Truth and apprehends love above all else, truth and love being intertwined as they are. This love for truth can give the courage to break through, against all odds, even while upending your world and catapulting you to square one. The good news is that the terror, the fear of this process that maintains the hypnosis, is often much greater than actually going through it. The fear, lingering in the background, powering the fake self, is therefore the real enemy. All of this is an ongoing journey that never quite ends, with its own traps and tribulations.
Murray looks precisely like someone in such a hypnotized state, building walls around core aspects of his persona, in this case walls made of smug, condescending arrogance and contradictory non-arguments - all of it blatantly obvious as seen from the outside. It’s literally fake and gay.
Perhaps we should be grateful for such clear examples of the human condition: the fake persona and the deep rationalizations that come with it can be very sophisticated, hard to spot, and difficult to separate from the Real Self. Not so here: it’s no coincidence that Murray couldn’t even name
much less talk about his ideas, or that he and his ilk jump on the most ridiculous straw men, sputtering postwar consensus talking points as if they were hard features of reality, or that they instinctively seek to police discourse about the very things that are invisible to them.The fake persona seeks to make the world equally fake so that it conforms to its illusory “reality.” If certain things are invisible to it, every hint of them, every mention of them must perish to keep up the illusion. No contradiction, no incoherence is off-limits, no rhetorical device too absurd, to carry out that task. What gives it away is that the fake persona can’t touch the substance because you can’t grasp what you can’t see, and so the discourse descends into a more or less sophisticated game of nervously scratching the surface while frantically running up and down, the mind disturbed and terrified by a reality in which more and more people are pointing at the invisible, while making fun of you for not being able to see it. And so, “just asking questions” becomes kryptonite because questions direct attention and focus.
Like an autofocus camera not getting a hold because there is no object to latch on — which is disturbing and painful to witness — these people desperately want to look away from the invisible, towards the hardened thought structures they have built and walled in, feverishly dancing around them with their shrinking number of fellow travelers: a mad dance of smug, blissful ignorance, drifting towards the abyss.
The man is right in front of you, Douglas. He has never left the room.
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Gorgeous article. One could also refer to map making to account for people's blind spots. Just as a person can be hypnotized to be blind to what's right in front of their nose (Orwell reference....:), the same person can construct (or have handed to them) a map of the world that simply doesn't include the invisible man. Try as they might, they scour their map upside down and inside out and the invisible man isn't in it, therefore the invisible man does not exist.
I note too that several comments seem to project exactly what you said, obliviously. One scoots right past the invisible man to want to argue about the talking points that make up their map. The other implores you to a) imagine horrible things that never happened, to b) put that into your map, and c) then proceed to reason from those imagined things that didn't happen. QED!
Look... I'm sorry if this is "regurgitating zionist talking points", or whatever, but what exactly do you want Israel to do in this situation instead?
If your position is that the troubles of distant countries are none of our beeswax and we shouldn't care one way or another, I suppose I can't argue you out of your priorities, but there was no realistic way to conduct a war against Hamas that wasn't going to inflict civilian casualties, and every alternative (including the OSS or returning to the previous status quo) was going to involve some other variant of human rights violation. What do you want from them here?