11-21-2017, 12:13 PM
Now that Charles Manson is dead, we may be able to ask ourselves whether he killed more than the victims of the Tate-LaBianca murders.
The Manson was everything wrong about the counterculture, with mass murder added. Manson was of course a criminal with delusions not only of his talent as a singer-songwriter but also that he could start a great crime wave, "Helter-Skelter".
His cult adopted the anti-establishment garb and superficial rhetoric of the Boom counterculture. Manson took the role of a Silent mentor, if in a perverse way. He used the ways of the criminal upon people that he could get to become True Believers in himself and his cause. Kill white people, leave rhetoric of the Black Power movement, and let black people get blamed. The Manson cult failed at convincing people that black people did the crime.
Charles Manson is a prime example of a sociopath. There were some very confused people who joined their cult, and Manson had answers for them -- the wrong answers, to be sure, but answers for people who had found none. He found young adults with problems and gave them a bigger problem.
He disgraced the counterculture as nobody else could. After Manson, the Boom Awakening became largely a celebration of indulgence. We may have a great divide between early-wave Boomers who often got all the advantages, and later Boomers who, born in the 1950s, got experiences unlikely to lead to any coherent objective. Note well that we have yet to have a President born in the 1950s.
The Manson was everything wrong about the counterculture, with mass murder added. Manson was of course a criminal with delusions not only of his talent as a singer-songwriter but also that he could start a great crime wave, "Helter-Skelter".
His cult adopted the anti-establishment garb and superficial rhetoric of the Boom counterculture. Manson took the role of a Silent mentor, if in a perverse way. He used the ways of the criminal upon people that he could get to become True Believers in himself and his cause. Kill white people, leave rhetoric of the Black Power movement, and let black people get blamed. The Manson cult failed at convincing people that black people did the crime.
Charles Manson is a prime example of a sociopath. There were some very confused people who joined their cult, and Manson had answers for them -- the wrong answers, to be sure, but answers for people who had found none. He found young adults with problems and gave them a bigger problem.
He disgraced the counterculture as nobody else could. After Manson, the Boom Awakening became largely a celebration of indulgence. We may have a great divide between early-wave Boomers who often got all the advantages, and later Boomers who, born in the 1950s, got experiences unlikely to lead to any coherent objective. Note well that we have yet to have a President born in the 1950s.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.