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The Root of the Madness
It occurred to me yesterday, while mulling over various symptoms of our ongoing national nervous breakdown, that there's a very simple explanation for it all: a very large number of people in our well-to-do classes have accepted the New Age notion that they create their own reality, and taken the next step -- the step that leads to madness -- and convinced themselves that they create everyone else's reality too. Do you remember, dear reader, the aftermath of Trump's election in 2016? A great many of his opponents immediately insisted that those who voted for him could only have been motivated by racism. I originally put that down to Democratic propaganda, but it was more than that. When I pointed out to people who were spouting that particular line that they were wrong, and offered them a good deal of evidence that they were wrong, they didn't argue or challenge the evidence or anything -- they just got a thousand-mile stare in their eyes and insisted again that the people who voted for Trump could only have been motivated by racism. It was eerie.
It took quite a while for me to realize that these people thought that they, not Trump voters, got to decide why Trump voters voted the way they did. The reality that Trump voters are human beings, with their own values, needs, concerns, and motives, simply didn't exist for these people. The bleak economic landscape created by policies that benefit our well-to-do classes didn't exist for them either, and articles that talked about that harsh reality -- here's a recent one, and here's another -- made no impression, because that wasn't the reality they chose to live in.
I had another brush with that during the debate I had here on Dreamwidth with Michael M. Hughes, one of the leading figures in the soi-disant "Magic Resistance." One of the points I tried to make in that discussion was that the magical workings he was teaching people to do were bunny-slope stuff, inadequate for the purpose he had in mind. His response was to insist loudly that no, they were powerful magical rituals. At the time I was baffled, because they weren't; there are plenty of technical details that you put into a magical working to make it powerful, and his had none of those; furthermore, he was limiting himself to techniques that can be used by complete beginners, which again is a pretty fair demonstration that we're talking about the bunny slope. I realize now that he seriously thought that his workings were powerful because he said they were.
Take a look across the battered and smoking wasteland of our national consciousness and you'll see the same thing over and over again: a good many members of the comfortable classes have lost track of the fact that they don't get to decide what the universe will be. Violent rioters and arsonists are peaceful protesters, for example; why? Because we say they are, that's why.
I was about to write the words "that way lies madness," but we're much too far along the curve for that. A significant fraction of the well-to-do in today's America have lost their last fingernail grip on reality and are insisting that the universe is whatever they want it to be. Since reality doesn't know or care in the least what they think about it, this will not end well.
Adjacent Behaviors and Cars
(Anonymous) 2020-08-21 08:46 am (UTC)(link)I think this also comes into play with gender equality for Boomer women. Arguably this was the first generation for the equality experiment, and sometimes that was misinterpreted by women and men as putting women above reproach.
Finally, I first encountered this level of cognitive dissonance bordering on madness in regards to American community infrastructure being built for cars rather than humans. Our conception of the world is shaped by the infrastructure we are born into, and I am too young to remember what America was like before auto and tire companies bought up public transit systems and shut them down.
Thus, as a young person when I pointed out that there are cities in Europe and Asia where most people get around via infrastructure not involving cars, and autos are just a side helping of urban transit allowing for the rich to flex their toys, I'd get that thousand-mile empty stare. Then they'd address a straw man, as if I'd instead claimed "You are not allowed to get anywhere" and so they'd reply "Well, I might have to get somewhere, so I need a car."
Re: Adjacent Behaviors and Cars
Re: Adjacent Behaviors and Cars
(Anonymous) 2020-08-21 07:32 pm (UTC)(link)