Impervious to Suffering
Todd Hayen
Can I be so bold as to say I may have figured something out? It is probably something all of you already know, as I can be a bit slow on the uptake. I keep hearing from the sheep-types that they really don’t care if we lose all of our freedoms. They don’t care about losing privacy because they don’t have anything to hide, they don’t care about losing free speech because people should be punished for saying bad and/or dangerous things (and they have nothing to say that would be considered bad and/or dangerous).
They have no fear of the government getting too much control because there will never be a reason the government would want or need to control them. They don’t fear communism or fascism primarily because they don’t know what those two ideologies clearly mean, and besides, that would never happen in a free society—which they are ready to give up anyway.
Of course, to all of us shrew-types, we practically lose our cookies thinking about living in a society where basic freedoms have been stripped away, or where the government, or any other authority, has power over our movements, our money, and our fundamental existence. When we hear someone say, “I don’t care how much control the authorities have, I have nothing to hide, and I do nothing wrong, therefore it is not something to worry about for me,” we blow a gasket.
Don’t they know?
Don’t they know that when the control over the masses surely does take effect it won’t matter a tinker’s damn if they “have nothing to hide” or “don’t do anything bad.” Oppression comes in many flavours, and its primary purpose is not to punish wrongdoing, but rather to keep people, in a very general way, compliant and under control.
Control sets the tone of the behaviour of a society. A good example of this came about during the Canadian Trucker’s Convoy. People who donated to that cause ran the risk of having their bank accounts frozen. (I was one that this happened to.) Was donating to a “cause” such as the Trucker’s Convoy a “bad thing”—was it against the law, was it criminal? In a free society, protesting (peacefully) and standing up against any sort of injustice an individual finds abhorrent is one of our fundamental rights as citizens of a free country.
However, punishing people who do something the government does not approve of sets a bar that indicates what is acceptable and what is not. People seeing friends and family being punished for contributing to a cause such as the truckers convoy, will categorize their activity as the activity of “a bad person”—whereas before the punishment was laid upon them (the freezing of their bank accounts) these same people would have had no trouble wearing a pussy hat and marching against Donald Trump.
They find what the government did (freezing accounts) as “reasonable” and they tell themselves that whoever contributed was a “bad person” and deserves to be reprimanded.
There is no better word for this than indoctrination: people are being taught what is right and wrong, and being taught what the punishment is for being wrong. It is much like training a dog, but not with positive reinforcement (although there is a lot of that going on as well) but with negative reinforcement.
Needless to say this negative punishment starts out mildly. And this is the thing I figured out—people don’t know yet what the real punishment is going to be for wrongdoing, and for straying away from the desires of the agenda. They have never experienced real suffering at the hands of their captives, so they don’t know what is in store for them. None of them have lived in North Korea, or Soviet Russia, or Nazi Germany, or Mao’s China. None of them know what it means to live a life in any of these environments where you don’t have to be a criminal to be seriously persecuted and physically punished for just being.
Well, neither have the shrews (more than likely anyone reading this is a shrew). So, what gives? This is the part I have not yet figured out. I have a few theories, but most of them are rather lame. One theory is that shrews are more aware of history and world events than their sheep brethren. I can’t imagine that this is as true as it would need to be to have any sort of impact. But I have noticed that the shrews I have met are very well informed about totalitarian regimes—current ones and past ones. Shrews seem to be more well-read than the sheep-types—history (as mentioned), philosophy, psychology, biography, classic literature, etc. Maybe there are a few Nora Roberts romances in there, but not many.
I am sure there are lots of shrews who haven’t read a book since High School, but that doesn’t seem to be the truth. It isn’t book reading altogether either, it is just information, awareness, and understanding that seems to be prevalent. Combine that with common sense and critical thinking, and you may have a viable formula there for shrew-ness.
Like I said, I don’t think I have that one figured out yet. But I do think there is some viability to the idea that the sheeple don’t really know what they are handing over to the agenda. They don’t know what politically inflicted pain feels like. And they are rather certain that this sort of pain is not down the pike.
Of course, there are always strange anomalies to these theories. Why are the same people obsessed and terrified that Trump is going to make this oppressive, fascist, totalitarian world for them, where they will all, if they are lucky, writhe in pain on the streets, deprived of food, water, and any sort of decency in life?
This is strange, for sure, as it makes no sense that if they are so terrified of this happening with Trump, they can’t see it with Carney in Canada, Merz in Germany, Macron in France, Xi Jinping in China, and Starmer in the UK. Of course, they have no problem seeing it in Putin of Russia. But Zelenskyy of Ukraine is the hero of all time. Go figure.
So, I guess I was wrong. I haven’t figured this out at all. Oh well, back to the drawing board.
Todd’s new book The View of the Shrew launches later this month, and is available for pre-order, or you can enter a draw to win a free copy by signing up to his mailing list here.
Todd Hayen PhD is a registered psychotherapist practicing in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He holds a PhD in depth psychotherapy and an MA in Consciousness Studies. He specializes in Jungian, archetypal, psychology. Todd also writes for his own substack, which you can read here
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I think the ultimate key is humility. Only humble people will approach the Truth; prideful people think they already know it and their minds cannot be changed. One has to admit that they do not have God’s infinite perspective and therefore are likely wrong in some way . . . there’s more to learn. Sure, there are prideful people who will align with shrews, but that is only because they were indoctrinated into it and “know” they are right.
Comment pending .. for no explicable reason !
Annie’s got a point , obligatory formalized education has always involved a huge amount of indoctrination , at this point in History one might almost call it an induction into a Cult.
My experience talking to People on the streets during the horror of the last 5 years has been that those most likely to be propagandised were more likely to have some form of higher education , to be trained to respect so called established authority, and to listen to and read officially Government sanctioned sources of information .. Almost everyone I Know with a University degree , did as they were told and dutifully went and got Jabbed and Boosted .
I Strongly recommend People read Jacques Ellul’s “Propaganda, the Formation of Mens Attitudes” circa 1966 .. His Sociological Study of the Phenomenon bares that out..The most educated people in Society are the most likely to fall for well crafted Propaganda.
During the wretched period between late 2020 and the end of 2022 in casual conversations in Supermarkets , and on the Street i found that check out Workers, Store Packers, and chronically unemployed layabouts Were more skeptical of official narratives than My better educated friends.
The dumbing down of the educational system.
Been going on since 5th September 1973.
That was the day at my school when out went the mortar boards amd black gowns for the masters and in came a batch of recently “qualified” right-on “teachers”.
Poor Mr Elcombe was so put out, he became a missionary in darkest Africa and the new librarian called us pupils “You guys”
Better question is where are you guys, been missing since like forever
I took the dictionary on “shrewd”: clever, cunning, smart, sober, prudent, judicious. Ok.
Let me tell you ‘shrewd’ guys one thing: If you are so smart, stay the f… out of the way from our pubs.
Our pub culture you will leave as is with all its noisy, smokey, pool playing, under the table deals, its hookers and its card players, and its professional bartenders and doormen!
We have freedom and know what freedom is, but I am not sure you do!
We’ve all already been pigeon-holed by the PTB’s minions who have taken note of what we comment on, and where we go (our phones are tracked 24/7, and our online activity, and who we talk to is also noted – in what Snowden revealed years ago – is a full take on all our data- as you say it won’t matter if you’re most obedient citizen on the planet, control means they can act against you at any point – infact its even more likely that they will because you have proven to them that you are compliant.
A good citizen is someone who stands up for freedoms and rights, rights our ancestors fought and bled for – a goo citizens is, someone who gets behind a worthy cause, to fight injustice – injustices committed by governments and big corporations, against the small man/woman on the street – by not standing up we only hurt ourselves – as corporations and governments will think they can do it over and over again and get away with it.
A sheep watches television and reads the newspaper. Listens to the radio. Hangs out with others who do the same. They’re mind controlled by power.
A shrew doesn’t do the above and so isn’t.
As my grandad once said. It was worse before television.
One can watch tv and read newspapers and still be ok, critical thinking is the key
I assume that you have chosen to liken ‘Us’ to shrews because the word is close to shrewd, but actually shrews are little rodents that live to eat, lower on the comparison scale than ‘sheeple’. As far as I know owls are the only birds with two front-facing eyes. They have excellent vision and hearing, and they fly almost silently. A better choice for ‘our’ category I think.
As for the poor, deluded and indoctrinated ‘sheeple’, I wonder what will happen when things do start to touch their lives. I have a feeling that they are so exceptionally, arrogantly, rudely, and angrily defensive because welling up from their unconscious or subconscious is fear that we may be right. So when they realise that we were right all along, they will obviously remain angry with us, probably turning things around so that they were right all along. They are also likely to turn all that anger and suppressed belief onto the psychopathic perpetrators who they have trusted. That is an interesting thought. It would mean the weight of opposition would topple the technocratic agendas.
I love owls and the nursery rhyme dedicated to them:
There was an owl liv’d in an oak
The more he heard, the less he spoke
The less he spoke, the more he heard.
O, if men were all like that wise bird.
A wise old owl lived in an oak,
The more he saw, the less he spoke
The less he spoke, the more he heard,
Now, wasn’t he a wise old bird?
Just two slightly different versions of the same rhyme, choose whichever you like
You need to re-educate yourself on “Nazi Germany”… it’s not the mainstream lies we’ve all been indoctrinated with.
I feel your frustration, as many here do as well. Laughter may be an outlet where conversation with the wilfully or, even worse, truly ignorant fails.
Can’t beat a good meme.
Short, sharp and spot on.
As long as they’ve got their 88inch TVs, devices, booze, prescription drugs, SUVs, overseas jaunts, wall to wall sports and grease laden fast foods, they’re as happy as pigs in shit.
Also powerful guns with large bullet magazines.
Oops, missed that one.
I think the key lies in both TV watching/brainwashing by the daily “news” and in habitual tribalism.
Generations of perfecting methods of industrial skooling, mixed with media programming docile subjects, and already (apart from environmental toxins, for example) you’ve got a formula for socially engineering sheeple. However, I don’t think data or information primarily accounts for critical awareness surviving such onslaught upon our full humanity. We’re not just indoctrinated but conditioned in behavioral patterns of fear and obedience, reward and punishment, in ruling institutions of education. And with the digital (c)age revolutionizing media mind control, the disembodiment of our souls merging with machines draws closer.
Empathy is crucial to the formation of shrews. Its cognitive correlate could be called wonder, the desire to know that never stops learning from awe of being alive. But its heart and soul is compassion, the root of understanding others of our own kind, and thus ourselves. The basic movement of truth is moral, moving us beyond egoistic self-interest to consider reality from independent perspectives, an expansionist ethic defiant of the dumbing down that comes from being cogs in the machine.
People become impervious to their own suffering because they’re impervious to others. The root of the word com-passion means to suffer with, while that of idiocy means to be confined to one’s own private world, irrespective of reality beyond oneself. Locked down and lost to means of communication which keep us in solitary confinement, we are all the more prone to doublethink of divide-and-rule incomprehension, like left-right manipulation of truth subordinated to manufactured identity.
Powers that be want to destroy our humanity. Real resistance grows from solidarity with others in the freedom and fullness of living.
The main attack on western democracies over the last decade has not been technology, it has been immigration of unvetted third-worlders, many of whom have a culture of using violence to navigate the streets.
Don’t get me wrong, the term immigrants includes lots of good people, but there are different groups under the “immigrants” banner; one group are the qualified workers, another group are the unvetted people from war zones, and there are more. I know a Chinese student attending a UK university – a member of another immigrant group – and he was stunned by the number of immigrants in the UK.
China would never let that percentage of immigrants into their culture, they know it would start to destroy their culture, as it has in most of the Europe.
Han China did that for Tibet and Xinjiang. Mao did the Cultural Revolution on the Han single-handedly. Proto WEF = Satanic.
I don’t think this attitude of indifference is about “training” or “indoctrination” at all, I think it’s innate and it’s the default and only a few statistical outliers, because of nature or nurture or some combo, will deviate from the norm
if you think of those wildlife documentaries, which at one point in my life I was actually rather addicted to, you will remember scenes where lions or wolves are hunting some sort of ruminants, maybe not necessarily SHEEP, but the principle is always the same
once the pack of predators has isolated the weak member of the herd and closes in for the kill, the rest of the animals that have escaped the threat for this time go back to their tranquil grazing, “nothing troubling to see here”
we can’t obviously know how a sheep or water buffalo might rationalize such obliviousness to the awful fate of their erstwhile comrade, making no move to rescue the unfortunate individual though a concerted mass charge would probably succeed in driving off the attackers
perhaps though they tell themselves something along the same lines, “well, of course old Kwame deserved to get eaten, he wasn’t an upstanding citizen of the savannah like the rest of us, he had it coming!”
Unlike us, wild predators cannot hoard after a kill that seems likely to offer satiety. The herbivores and other animals have adjustd to this fact.
Anthropomorphic descriptions mean nothing. Herd animals don’t “feel” anything for others, others than mothers with nursing young (and that’s hormonally driven, not emotional). If there is a threat, instinct drives a fight or flight response. Once the threat is gone, it’s back to grazing, no thinking involved.
People, OTOH, are very emotional creatures, who tend to be irrational when faced with cognitive dissonance. It’s easier to fool someone than it is to convince him he’s been fooled. All manner of protective barriers go up in the mind when faced with, “maybe I’m wrong about this.” Denial, anger, projection, and even violent rejection of evidence that doesn’t fit a familiar POV shows a lack of critical thinking skills and humility.
The point you are not seeing is that it is not about naivety. The sheep does what everyone in a community is expected to do. Conform to majority beliefs. The shrew thinks for itself.
Where this goes wrong is when “the media” publish ideas from a minority. Which then quickly become majority beliefs. Who is prepared to disagree with the printed word!
This world is a popular entertainment where we walk onto the stage, blink in the lights, rage against the sufferings of fortune then depart as if we were never here.
Zelenskiy is the drug dealer of all time. (He recently renamed himself, by the way, now called Volodimir Cocainchuk.)
Leave the sheep – they still do not understand anything as usual. Trump and Putin will not create a totalitarian world, quite the opposite: they will create something so spectacular, such a change in the fate of humanity that everything before, it will seem a pale, insignificant memory. Not that they’re going to create it — they’re not going to create anything, but they’re going to be recorded in history as the faces that were (oficially) at the top of the Great Transition to a Better Future, different than the one of the crazy liberals. (“The cost of transition.”)
Unless the opposite was planned, and they, together with the European “far-rightists”, are not planned for the bad heroes, the “new Hitlers”, the existence/rise of which “should never again be allowed”, and the plan is against this background to reign the UN/WEF liberal transgender diversity climate digital utopia.. But if not, Todd, here’s how it might start /part of the script/: https://e4everi.wordpress.com/2025/06/09/summary/
Some historical bearing which came to mind on reading your excellent article, Todd.
“At the Council of Trent, which sat at Trento in northern Italy during the generation after Luther, the Roman Catholic Church presented itself as a societas perfecta, as a law-based church, whose laws were obligatory for its members in conscience. This self-understanding was reflected in the legal and philosophical thinking of the time, which had begun to portray the state in the same terms, that is as a perfect society whose citizens internalize the laws and constitution of the state as the demands of conscience. In other words, through the criminalization of sin, the basis was created for a new way of feeling citizenship as a command of my conscience. The Church laid the groundwork by abolishing, or, at least diminishing and making permeable the frontier between what is true and what is commanded; and, on this ground, the state was later able to claim an allegiance founded on conscience.”
Quoting Ivan Illich in chapter 5 of Part I, ‘The Criminalisation of Sin’ in The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich’ (2005) by David Cayley
AND also…
“Through the idea of Christian love and the Incarnation, the darkness to which I allow entry into me by betrayal and unfaithfulness, not to the gods, or to the city’s rules, but to a face, a person, acquires a completely new taste, the experience of sinfulness, an experience, a state, in front of the infinitely good, a confusio, but also the possibility always of sweet tears, of the expression of the sorrow and of trust in forgiveness. This entirely new dimension of very personal, very intimate failure gets changed through criminalization, through the conditioning of forgiveness by the act of legal remission. Through this criminalization, the individual sinner feels himself obligated to seek, above all, forgiveness of the crime, and to deal with the deep sorrow and hope in God’s mercy as, so to speak, a psychologically secondary issue. With this legalization of love, which finds its expression extremely strongly in the period of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the individual is open to a new type of fears, to new shapes which darkness takes — the fear of demons, the fear of witches, the fear of magic, the hope in science, the hope in alchemy and astrology. This new world of what in my index cards for subject matter I call unidentified flying objects, which, of course, is a very modern way of expressing it, is an almost inevitable condition created through the criminalization of sin and is constantly exploited by politicians to affirm the power of the state.”
Quoting Ivan Illlich in part 2 of the 5 part audio series ‘The Corruption of Christianity: Ivan Illich on Gospel, Church and Society,’ created by David Cayley. The programme was first aired on Canadian radio in the late 1990’s.
Archived audio here https://www.davidcayley.com/podcasts/2014/12/11/l4blwrtes6tcxusa0assdpcu65n87w
Transcript here https://static1.squarespace.com/static/542c2af8e4b00b7cfca08972/t/5f55110264c7ed68b8b82e50/1599410434476/corruption2.pdf
‘“The religion of a man,” he writes very simply, “rests on the names that induce him to act jointly with others.”[142] At the moment, what seems to induce joint action in Western societies is the promise of a revived modernity – whether it’s the hyper-equality of the woke, the renewed greatness of the American republic, or the repristinated objectivity of trusted news – all promise to take us back to some reliable foundation, and none recognize a displaced God – what Bruno Latour calls the “crossed out God”[143] – in this foundation. “Modern man is not so much godless as polytheistic,” Rosenstock suggests. “His life is split between many gods – or ‘values,’ as it has become fashionable to call them.”[144] But these “multiplex deities” all stand behind, rather than before us. We want to get back to them and are, therefore, Rosenstock says, pagan.’
Quoting from David Cayley’s first piece of writing about Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888 – 1973), published on 2.6.25
https://www.davidcayley.com/blog
It’s simple. The dominant media tell them to fear Trump authoritarianism and so they do, whereas the others mentioned are never portrayed as authoritarians by the MSM. They can’t see through it because they don’t think for themselves but let the media and authorities tell them what to think and simply regurgitate the narratives.
One has to be as brave as Greta to look the truth straight in the eye and fight for freedom.
Authoritarianism arises from the need to preserve order due to popular discontent with economic and social policies. It predates modern politics. Normally we can rely on a sufficiently large slice of the population being happy enough to drown out the complaints (the notion of ‘democracy’) but if situations arise where the population complains too much and social engineering efforts like propaganda just aren’t working then you apply the stick. (This works by having a cadre that thinks they’re special because they do the (dirty) work of the masters. They’re usually people who aren’t smart enough to realize they’re disposable, just like anyone else.)
There are people who see the game for what it is. Something goes wrong with their upbringing or education and they end up swallowing the wrong pill.
Western middle class will only feel suffering when they suddenly can’t buy essentials any more. Frog boiling made them numb but not yet gone. Looking at their voting behavior in polls (IF one can believe those!) they are begging for a real crisis.
Losing their churches and getting lost in atheism, green communism or other religions made them spirituality less = near dead. Next life they might be lucky to be born elsewhere, because the West has become a poor landing site.
Thanks Todd. On the question of what makes a shrew a shrew, I’d say in my case it was always a part of me. I questioned reality from my earliest memories and was laughed at for it by my parents and numerous siblings. I remember a discussion at school when I said to a classmate that the whole world could just be in my imagination and she wasn’t real 😬 – not a good way to make friends. I no longer believe it’s all in my head but it’s a good way to get started once you embark on this quest for truth. Questioning reality is, in my increasingly less humble opinion, essential for shrewdom. Someone tells you a nonsensical non-fact about a scamdemonic pandemonium and of course you won’t believe it because disbelief was always waiting in the wings.
So cool that you were that aware at such a young age! You were right, too, in my opinion; this IS all an illusion—all of it (including ourselves!).
It took me a little while to become a shrew. I always questioned stuff, but typically did not question health things the government was tagging. Strange enough. But I figured it out pretty quickly with the help of a lot of “already shrews”…like you probably!
Ah, the security of the true believer.
In 1995 I sat with Israeli Forestry and the local Palestinians round our campfire, and no-one was hostile or antagonistic to anyone.
Except when the settler shot and killed Yitzhak Rabin :
the first native-born Prime Minister of Israel. And the Israelis split into two camps, extremely hostile to each other.
Dude, you were one of them when it came to 911, Vietnam and other periods where our liberties were being curtailed in favor of the group think.
Stop being such a pious person.
You’re as guilty as the rest of us.
The past is full of horrible things that make this look like child’s play. Why do we have so many nostalgia cultists forgetting that?
I am DEFINITELY as guilty as the “rest of us”…why do you think I think otherwise? What did I say to make you think I am pious? Good lord, that is the last thing I think!!!
Various unprecedented NATO and US and UK public access documents of the military on the topic of next-generation warfare (the brain as battlespace) since ca. 2000 as discussed by David. A. Hughes (Substack) and Sabrina Wallace and Amin Jabbi among others show that “this” (presumably 2025?) is NOT child’s play.as regards curtailment of liberties.
What would have been the correct reaction to the curtailing of liberties?
Violent child abuse, covering the full spectrum of emotional, physical and sexual degradation, at the hands of your parents can ironically be a doorway to the ability to identify controlling tyrannical abuse on the part of any of society’s institutions. Once you have done the difficult and painful therapeutic work of honestly acknowledging and coming to terms with the abuse of those most entrusted with your care and nurturing, you can easily see, identify and acknowledge the same dynamic in other “cherished” institutions. Reading, learning, introspection give the understanding even greater depth.