A significant minority of people in our competitive society are selfish and stealthy manipulators.

Traditional psychological therapy focuses on the neurotic, the person who suffers from a surplus of self-deprecation. Manipulators torment others with an excess of hidden aggression and the desire for control. They are often overlooked and only in recent years have the problems faced by their victims been more adequately addressed. I think the reason for the neglect of this issue is that manipulators just aren’t good customers. After all, they usually don’t seek psychological help because they think they don’t need it. The manipulator has little interest in the error in his or her ways.

In his writings and interviews, psychologist George Simon, author of In Sheep’s Clothing: Understanding and Dealing with Manipulative People, has tried to help victims of manipulation identify and understand the tactics of people who are covertly aggressive. These are people who are “at heart fighters.” Although Simon doesn’t mention it, I believe the rise of competitive careerism and sports competition among women, both of which cultivate aggression, has led to a true epidemic of female manipulators. That’s not to say men don’t use the art of tormenting others with smiles and stealth too or that female manipulators haven’t been around for thousands of years.

Many manipulators have charm and likability; they often are socially popular. They use these skills to bring others under their control. Some have an insatiable drive to dominate. They have no problem complimenting with smiles one minute and stabbing in the back the next. They have no problem praising you and then destroying your career. They have no problem using an arsenal of covert and artful tactics to get what they want or to punish those who displease them. Their consciences, at least when it comes to subtle deception and bullying, are weak. As long as their crimes are undetected, they are untroubled by them.

It can be fatal not to understand this personality type. For the innately compliant and submissive, a relationship with a manipulative person can lead to exhaustion, defeat, intense self-doubt and depression. Victims describe the effect as similar to slow poisoning by a noxious gas. They are suffocated by an invisible toxin. Arm yourself with knowledge of this poison. Otherwise, this type may unexpectedly take you off guard in the workplace, friendship, romance and family relationships. Simon writes on his blog:

There’s hidden power in manipulation tactics. That’s just one reason why the tactics are so effective. The tactics are inherently powerful persuasion tools, which is why manipulators use them. But the persuasive power behind them eludes easy detection.

Because the power behind manipulation tactics isn’t easy to see, it’s  important to understand personality, character, and the ways some folks operate in this world. Once you know certain people are, and how they generally operate, it’s easier to discern what they’re probably up to when they engage in their tactics with you.

The stealthy power of manipulators often comes from their insight into the character of their victims:

Manipulators gain advantage over you by knowing what makes you tick. So, they know just what tactics to use to play on your sympathies or create doubt in you.  But you gain power back when you know who they are and what they’re up to. You gain even more power by knowing what to say and do in response to their tactics. Actually, the less you say, the better. Too many folks erroneously believe what traditional psychology told them: mainly that manipulators don’t really know what they’re doing. That’s why victims often waste time and breath trying to get their abusive partners to “see” what they already see.

The key to empowerment in manipulative situations is in the doing, not the saying. Dismissing the tactics as just that: stealthy attempts to get you to cave-in or knuckle-under, and then standing firmly on principles of respectful conduct is where the power is.

The word “gaslighting” has become part of the popular lexicon. That’s because more people are the actual victims of gaslighting in their private lives and, of course, by manipulators in government and popular culture. Simon writes: Read More »

“DISCOURAGEMENT … is no part of penance. It atones for nothing, satisfies for nothing, merits nothing, impetrates nothing. It does not make us more careful next time. On the contrary by dejecting us it makes us at once more open to temptation and less masculine in resisting it. But on the contrary there is much good in not being cast down. We shall be less teased with the imperfection in ourselves, and more occupied with the infidelity to God. To fall and not be out of spirits with it is not only to keep the courage we had, but to gain more. It is the humblest course, and on that account the must acceptable to God. It is the most reasonable, and therefore has the greater blessing.”

— Frederick Faber, Growth in Holiness, or The Progress of the Spiritual Life

Madonna della Loggia, Botticelli

Litany of Humility

O Jesus, meek and humble of heart, hear me.
From the desire of being esteemed, deliver me, O Jesus.
From the desire of being loved, deliver me, O Jesus.
From the desire of being extolled, deliver me, O Jesus.
From the desire of being honored, deliver me, O Jesus.
From the desire of being praised, deliver me, O Jesus.
From the desire of being preferred to others, deliver me, O Jesus.
From the desire of being consulted, deliver me, O Jesus.
From the desire of being approved, deliver me, O Jesus. Read More »

“[IF] there can be a sign of a society inverted, and of the moral order of the world reversed, it is the putting of woman out of her proper sphere — the domestic life — where she is sovereign, and the putting her in that sphere where she ought never to set her foot — the public life of nations. To put man and woman upon an equality is not to elevate woman, but to degrade her. I trust that the womanhood of England — to say nothing of the Christian conscience which yet remains — will resist, by a stern moral refusal, the immodesty which would thrust women from their private life of dignity and supremacy into the public conflicts of men. This, again, is a part of the lawlessness of these days, and shows a decline of the finer instincts of womanhood, and a loss of that decisive Christian conscience which can distinguish not only between what is right and wrong, but between what is dignified and what is undignified both for women and for men. This clamour about women’s rights may be taken as one of the most subtle and most certain marks of a lawlessness of mind which is now invading society.”

— Henry Edward Manning, The Four Great Evils of the Day, 1871 Read More »

VIDEO link.

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“NOT to will those things which are actually taking place, is to have a will opposed to the decree of God, to Whose Providence whatever is done is subject.”

— St. Thomas Aquinas

“GOD does not want sacrifices, the prophet Samuel told King Saul, but he does want obedience to his will: “Doth the Lord desire holocausts and victims, and not rather that the voice of the Lord should be obeyed? For obedience is better than sacrifices; and to hearken, rather than to offer the fat of rams. Because it is like the sin of witchcraft to rebel; and like the crime of idolatry to refuse to obey.” The man who follows his own will independently of God’s, is guilty of a kind of idolatry. Instead of adoring God’s will, he, in a certain sense, adores his own.

“The greatest glory we can give to God is to do his will in everything. Our Redeemer came on earth to glorify his heavenly Father and to teach us by his example how to do the same. St. Paul represents him saying to his eternal Father: “Sacrifice and oblation thou wouldst not: But a body thou hast fitted to me . . . Then said I: Behold I come to do thy will, O God.” Thou hast refused the victims offered thee by man; thou dost will that I sacrifice my body to thee. Behold me ready to do thy will.”

— Saint Alphonsus de Liguori

The Japanese produced great art — for the Japanese

FROM The Dispossessed Majority by Wilmot Robertson (1972):

Liberal dogma to the contrary, such popular goals as universal literacy are not necessarily conducive to great literature. The England of Shakespeare, apart from having a much smaller population, had a much higher illiteracy rate than present-day Britain. Nor does universal suffrage seem to raise the quality of artistic output. When Bach was Konzertmeister in Weimar and composing a new cantata every month, no one could vote. Some 220 years later in the Weimar Republic there were tens of millions of voters, but no Bachs.

Great drama, which usually incorporates great poetry, is the rarest form of great art. Art critics and historians have been at some loss to explain why great plays have appeared so infrequently in history and then only in clusters — fifth-century (B.C.) Athens, late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, seventeenth-century Spain and France. The answer may be that conditions for great drama are only ripe when artist and audience are in biological as well as linguistic rapport. Such rapport, unfortunately, is bound to be short-lived because the era of great drama is usually accompanied by large-scale economic and material advances which tend to soften national character, sharpen class divisions and attract extraneous racial and cultural elements from abroad. To the great playwright a heterogeneous or divided audience is no audience at all.

Not only high art but all art seems to stagnate in an environment of brawling minorities, diverse religions, clashing traditions, and contrasting habits. This is probably why, in spite of their vast wealth and power, such world cities as Alexandria and Antioch in ancient times and New York City and Rio de Janeiro in modern times have produced nothing that can compare to the art of municipalities a fraction of their size. The artist needs an audience which understands him — an audience of his own people. The artist needs an audience to write up to, paint up to, and compose up to — an aristocracy of his own people. These seem to be the two sine qua nons of great art. Whenever they are absent great art is absent. Read More »

HERE’S a list of more than 300 rock stars who died prematurely, with an average age of death at 37. The list is old, ending in the late 90’s, so it’s only a snapshot.

The number of premature deaths of die-hard rock fans from drugs, drinking and suicide is incalculable.

FROM How to Root Out Hidden Faults by Fr. James F. McElhone:

Too many persons are satisfied with mediocrity. They are neither good nor bad; they are ordinary, commonplace; and they remain so through their own fault. Let us glance over the various kinds of mediocrity and then determine whether or not we are ordinary, Some are mediocre in general. They have a lukewarm, careless attitude about everything. Their standard is ordinary in regard to spiritual things, studies, manual labor, to the proper attitude in recreation. Read More »

ITALIANS are said to be returning in large numbers to the ancient gods of Rome.

Neophytes are encouraged to firstly, “set up a space dedicated to the deities in your home so that you can begin to offer to your gods”, and secondly, to “ritualise following the main holidays that are remembered by the Kalendarium”.

“The Roman religion is fundamentally a collectivist and convivial religion, it does not leave much room for individualism and personalism which often led – and still leads – to condemnable superstitious practices,” adherents are told.

On 10 February 2024, an eclectic group of enthusiasts from the Communitas Populi Romani assembled near the ancient Roman Forum to express their devotion to the deities Juno, Jupiter and Apollo.

A relevant quote from Henry Edward Manning, D.D. in 1861:

In truth, when the intellectual become pantheists, the simple will become polytheists. They need a more material conception than the refined unbelievers, and they impersonate and embody, first in thought and then in form, the object of their worship. And what is this but paganism simple and pure?

FROM How to Root Out Hidden Faults by Fr. James F. McElhone:

ENVY IS THE FEELING of sadness which we experience in contemplating the prosperity of others, in so far as we regard this prosperity to be our own loss. There is no question that we do have temptations to envy. We are somewhat inclined to rejoice at the failures of others and to be sad at their success. Others achieve riches, honors, dignities, renown, reputation, praise, applause, success; we see what they have accomplished and we are tempted to envy. Others have qualities of mind and through their use become more or less successful, and we are tempted to envy. Others have qualities of soul and reach certain or higher degrees of holiness, and we are tempted to envy. It should be remembered that what those others have, we regard as our own loss. It is hard for us to rejoice whole-heartedly at the success of others; it is easy for us to feel glad at their failures.

Envy will try to show itself in some of the following ways:

Do | feel sad at the prosperity of others?

At their success in games? In athletics?

Do | rejoice at their failures?

Do | envy the riches of others?

Do | envy their honors? dignities? power? renown? reputation? Do | envy the applause given to them?

Do | envy another’s intellectual qualities?

Read more.

“DURING economic depressions when the Elite Class can no longer enjoy their monopoly over financial capital and the ‘lower class’ can no longer be subsidized by a shrinking economic surplus, the two classes join in a coalition to plunder the [Middle] Class. When this happens the resulting form of government is called Fascism because it involves takeover of the government by elitist corporations who form a coalition with the Lower Class to commit crimes against the Middle Class.”

— From a review of Covert Covid Culprits: An Inquest Chronicle by Karl Haemers (See review below book description)

A SERIES at Tradition in Action on Nazism is, despite TIA’s errors on the crisis in the Church, well worth reading. It begins:

In 1931 and 1937 Alfred Rosenberg, the theoretician of Nazism who had such a great influence over Adolph Hitler, ordered the scholar Otto Rahn to make a careful study of the ruins of the Castle of Montségur, the citadel and temple of the Cathars. This castle was the last refuge for the Cathar heresy that contaminated Southern France in the 11th and 12th centuries.

At about the same time, Heinrich Himmler, the supreme commander of the SS, reconstructed the Castle of Wewelsburg, near Paderborn in Westphalia, Germany. In its gothic basement, he placed a black marble altar emblazoned with the silver letters SS. This altar was meant to hold the object that the heads of Nazism were expecting Otto Rahn to find at Montségur: the mysterious Grail and an ancient stone book that contained the compendium of the Gnostic tradition. In this sinister chapel, the SS, elite troops of the National Socialists, would meditate on the book of Otto Rahn, Lucifer’s Court in Europe.

These strange facts reveal that, different from what the general public thinks, Hitlerism was not above all a political movement.

Read more.

“WHEN we read the Lives of the Saints, and find that persons, who were in the ordinary walk of life, practiced extraordinary virtues, we are inclined to think that they were not exposed to great temptations, or that the misfortunes they met in the world, made them give themselves up unreservedly to God’s service. Such interpretations of the actions of the Saints are shallow and false, for they ignore this great fact,—that there is no condition or state, however humble, in which man has not to combat against the evil inclinations of his heart, and that corrupt nature alone is strong enough to lead him to sin. But in such a Saint as Casimir, we have no difficulty in recognizing that all his Christian energy was from God, and not from any natural source; and we rightly conclude, that we, who have the same good God, may well hope that this Season of spiritual regeneration will change and better us. Read More »

MARCH 8 is International Women’s Day. This Communist feast day, like all feminist propaganda, ultimately celebrates the degradation of the female sex and the interests of the powerful.