1. Fifty Shades of Paranoia
And Utopia
• Re: Fifty Shades of Grey: My Version
• A column dissection of an article by Lisa Solod
• Huffington Post

2. I bet if you asked fifty liberals to describe the goals of
contemporary American liberalism, you’d get fifty shades
of this column, filled with phantoms of paranoia and
utopian wet dreams. Like all liberals, Ms. Solod thinks
that giving up her and everyone else’s freedoms to a
controlling nanny government is liberty. She thinks state
control equals freedom. She is not unique, however.
Those other fifty liberals would all be nodding their
heads in unison.
Lisa Solod: I have fantasies. Oh, do I have fantasies.
They wake me up in the middle of the night; they keep me
from work; they interfere with my relationships. My
longing is unending. It consumes me. Sometimes I stand,
immobilized by my desires: So strong and overwhelming
are they that I am unable even to make a step forward.

3. This sounds an awful lot like paranoid delusion in search
of utopia.
Lisa Solod: My fantasies are those of domination and
submission but not in the bedroom: in the boardroom,
where those in power turn over control to those who have
none.
Ah – the benevolent dictator syndrome. That’s when a
hero like Joseph Stalin or Adolf Hitler takes control and
orders everyone’s lives – all for their benefit of course
(cough).
Lisa Solod: My fantasies involve our fearless leader
standing in front of Congress and announcing loudly that
they need to shit or get off the pot. The time for doing
nothing is over, long over, and if legislation is not made

4. to help the unemployed, students and the elderly, then
they will all lose their jobs and their benefits
immediately, perhaps retroactively.
Wait a minute – is she talking about America, with Food
Stamps, 90 weeks of unemployment insurance, mandated
student loans, Medicare and Social Security? Because if
those are all “doing nothing” she is either talking about
Zimbabwe, or someone should throw her up a rope and
pull her down out of the clouds.
Lisa Solod: That taxes will be raised on the very rich,
that the social security limit for taxation will be
increased, that the citizens they purport to represent will
have, at the least, the kind of benefits that they have. That
control will be held by the people who elected them.

5. Uh, Ms. Solod, giving up more control to some
omnipotent dictator and his governmental thugs is hardly
the same as “control will be held by the people who
elected them.”
Lisa Solod: I imagine a scenario where the Supreme
Court finally gets a clue and realizes Citizens United was
a disaster of a ruling; where they revisit it and end the
flow of huge and ugly money to our elections.
In fact very little money is spent on elections compared to
advertising campaigns for cars, soda, fashion, etc. The
fact that the population as a whole knows a lot more
about Kim Kardashian and Justin Bieber than it does
about Barack Obama and their member of congress tells

6. me that whole lot more money needs to be spent
informing voters in elections.
Lisa Solod: I fantasize about a world where we decide
that our defense budget is large enough, too large, in
fact, and that it will be drastically cut and those monies
deflected elsewhere: towards education, single payer
health care, the environment.
Uh-huh. That’ll make sense only when we can get all of
the leaders in the world to hold hands together at the UN
and sing Kumbiah.
Lisa Solod: A world in which we move to stop the
destruction of our world, in which we no longer subsidize
the oil companies, the larger agricultural companies, the
pharmaceutical industry.

7. Oil companies are not subsidized. Some small players
receive tax credits, meaning they get to keep more of
their own money instead of having it taxed away and
given as real subsidies to favored green energy
companies that go out of business a year later. And why
only stop subsidies for “large agricultural companies”?
Why not the smaller ones too?
Lisa Solod: My longing is palpable for a world in which
people actually think of the good of the whole before their
own personal happiness. Where people do not selfishly
imagine that they, too, will one day be rich and therefore
can be selfish, but conjure instead a life with meaning
instead of money.

8. Ah – collectivist utopia! Or is it heaven? I’m not quite
sure which.
Lisa Solod: I desire a world where no one goes hungry at
the same time someone else buys another mansion,
another car, another handbag. Where no one is beaten or
beaten down.
I’m beginning to think that this delusion is beyond the
capability of any utopia.
Lisa Solod: My fantasies are those of world peace, a
place where countries can co-exist and not endlessly try
and destroy each other, where stupid and misguided
racism no longer overrides common sense; where there is
a complete halt to ugly rhetoric, and lies are both caught
and challenged by the media.

9. Maybe you could start with yourself, Ms. Solod. Because
this column of yours is filled with ugly rhetorical
innuendo.
Lisa Solod: I imagine a world, in fact, where black and
white no longer exist but are overshadowed by nuance.
Where there is not one God's truth, but all mankind's
decency toward each other.
Now I’m not even sure if a heaven would suffice.
Lisa Solod: I think about a world in which a billion
dollars is not spent electing a president, but one in which
that billion dollars is put to good and kind use.

10. Yes – elections are such a messy bother. Why not just let
Ms. Solod be empress, and she will benevolently direct
everyone’s lives. (Won’t she?)
Lisa Solod: In my fantasy world, bankers do not win the
game by breaking all the rules while those of us who have
been honest and played fair suffer deep and abiding
losses.
Ah – populism. The primary strategy of us-versus-them
that every budding dictator embraces.
Lisa Solod: It is a world where those in power
understand the responsibility that goes with it. A world in
which we really do live by the late Rodney King's words,
in which Martin Luther King is not a relic, in which the

11. programs of the New Deal and The Great Society are not
relegated to history books and deemed uncool.
Just about everything wrong with American government
can be traced to the New Deal and the Great Society. But,
of course, to any budding, wannabe dictator they
represent increased control over people’s lives – just what
they desire.
Lisa Solod: In the darkest hours of the night, I create a
world where people march in the streets instead of
playing computer games, going to the drive-through,
watching reality television shows, sitting on their hands
convinced that nothing they do matters.
OK, now I am confused. I thought utopia meant that there
would be no need for marching in the streets.

12. Lisa Solod: Because I wonder: When will the world wake
up and realize that we are all on a television reality
show? That while we believe we are acting without a
script, the truth is that it is only our minor moves and
decisions (what to have for breakfast, what to wear)
which are really ours; that the larger issues that consume
us are being manipulated by the few and the powerful
who fashion our direction, even as we delude ourselves
into thinking we are in control.
Now I am really getting dizzy. I thought Ms. Solod
wanted somebody to take control and direct everybody’s
lives. Utopia is so confusing…
Lisa Solod: This is not the benign world of The Truman
Show and it is worse even than the Matrix meme that we

13. are all part of someone's game. Rather, we are all
Pinocchio, held up by Geppetto's strings and we live
under the illusion that we finagle the tenuous threads that
hold us up and keep us moving.
Ms. Solod seems to think she is controlled from the
outside, but doesn’t realize that she is in fact programmed
on the inside – programmed through the societal
conditioning of liberalism. She isn’t a puppet – she is a
robot.
Lisa Solod: But I have hallucinations, wet dreams, flights
of fancy that we can change course and save ourselves
from the inevitable, if slow and painful, decline that
comes with our disease.

14. Again, Ms. Solod thinks it is the world outside of her that
drastically needs to change, when it is she and liberals
like her who are locked in a prison of conditioned
liberalism that won’t allow them to change and live in
reality. Instead she desperately seeks a utopia where all of
her imagined evil monsters will be slain and everyone
will live happily ever after.
Lisa Solod: My fantasy life does not jettison debate,
difference, opinion or belief. It does not involve a world
of sheep grazing the same grass. In fact, it wishes for just
the opposite: a world in which people think before they
talk, read outside their beliefs and operate with the
overriding concern that everything they do has an impact
on the planet and each other.

15. Back to the confusion again. Ms. Solod has just lectured
us on length about giving up self-interest for collective
groupthink, and now she does a 180 and touts the virtues
of self-interest. (Somebody stop the world from spinning
– I want to get off.)
Lisa Solod: It is a world in which we are all separated
not by six, but by one degree of separation. Or perhaps
just a world in which we wake up and the past 30 years
have been a very bad dream and we get a do-over. And
this time we get it right.
So, the 1970s was utopia? Who’d a thunk it?!?
I have good news for you, Ms. Solod. The Nuclear
Counterarguments 22-Essay Series was written
specifically for you – and you are so ready for it. I can’t

16. give you a utopian “do-over”, but I can release you from
your liberal prison of paranoia…

17. • A presentation by deprogrammingliberalism.com
• Deprogramming Liberalism Slideshow Series © 2013