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John Michael Greer ([personal profile] ecosophia) wrote2020-08-20 01:59 pm
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The Root of the Madness

maniacIt 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. 

(Anonymous) 2020-08-20 06:58 pm (UTC)(link)
Some light criticism here, coming from someone who agrees that e.g. rural economic decline (something that has been accelerating over the past few decades) is a better explanation for Trump than overt racism (something that has been mostly in abatement for the past few decades.)

This post is interesting to me because it's an exact mirror of liberal accusations of contemporary conservatism. ("Post-truth" is the relevant search term for this variety of discourse, although in the aughts it would have been "reality-based community.") It seems everyone wants to be the lone voice of reality standing against the postmodernist hordes, regardless of which side of which decade's culture war is drafted to play which role.

Now, this doesn't mean that this isn't a real phenomenon. (Consider two political parties accusing each other of corruption - both can be correct.) The widespread appeal of this discourse itself, though, implies that ordinary bad faith, lying, and confusion may play a greater role than a total normative eclipse of Truth. (The corrupt country where everybody accuses each other of corruption still hews to some idea of that corruption being bad; if it weren't, they wouldn't call it corruption but taxes, rent, profits, or other legitimating term.) In particular I think the kind of evidence you point to here - "X says Y, I calmly explained that not-Y, X must be a post-truth post-modernist" - is a conclusion you see across a wide variety of this kind of discourse and is almost always wrong, and "that ways lies madness" conclusion if there is one.

[personal profile] robertmathiesen 2020-08-20 07:23 pm (UTC)(link)
I think you're quite right about the explanation, JMG! and that it will not end well. "Those whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad." also

(Anonymous) 2020-08-20 08:25 pm (UTC)(link)
Funny how these people have now invested all their hopes in creepy senile Biden, an unlikely saviour who has a serious rape allegation against him but the #metoo crowd conveniently ignore that.

I was talking to some Karens about Trump. They hate him but their main problem with him is the way he speaks.

"He speaks like a child"
"He can't use long words"

They loved Obama's flowery speeches in contrast. Funny how it's never about their actions, their whole focus is on who is the best smooth talker, as if that's the most important thing. 24 hour news channels have a lot to answer for.

Yes indeed.

(Anonymous) 2020-08-20 08:29 pm (UTC)(link)
Due to growing up with a neurotic mom, I've had these ideas in the back of my mind for years. I keep waiting for a "let them eat cake" moment that'll jolt people out of the trance, but nothing does it. Some kind of shock will happen and I'll think "Is this it? Will this do it?" but so far none of these things has shaken people awake. I remember in high school English we had to write one sentence about ourselves, and I wrote "I am the person who shivers in the dark as zombies pass by." But I didn't mean zombies; I meant everyone around. It's eerie.

[personal profile] violetcabra 2020-08-20 08:35 pm (UTC)(link)
An excellent and eerie point! From my experiences in suburban Massachusetts I would guess that about 20% of the well-to-do are mad in the way you describe. Another 60% go along with the crazed 20% while having personal reservations, and the last 20% have various degrees of hostility to the whole sweeping madness.

It's very eerie to wonder how the body count will tally and the endgame play out. If my estimate is correct, we're talking about approximately 4% of the population of the United States having descended into total madness or about 13 million people. What does a society do with that many people who have lost their minds?
open_space: (Default)

[personal profile] open_space 2020-08-20 08:40 pm (UTC)(link)
I had a minor mental breakdown that lasted for about a year when suddenly it became really clear that my mind was not me (yes, meditation can be overdone, quite easily in fact. Do not recommend!) and that the things that I had put there would fight back to stay there. Add to that an unhealthy habit of smoking weed and realizing that it makes you much more sensible to omens and divination and I almost popped. I hopped that served to clear some karma at least!

Realizing that what you thought real is not can be quite terrifying, I assume that is why their minds somewhat protects them to not see it. The problem is that what their minds are latching to is nothing but hot air sold as truth because there are interests involved that sustain that reality. I wrote a small thing on which I argue that since a big chunk of humanity has lost touch with Nature, the needs and experiences that Nature provides were not met and found escape in what I called the cyber-nature, the surrogate equivalent of what Life around them provides: awe, sustain, connectedness, respect, etc in debased ways. The problem with that is that you are attaching to something which is not fulfilling to those needs because it only emulates them, as you have argued before. If people are too deep into the cyber-nature everything inside them goes backwards and spills into their psyche and I argue that is what is behind the strong sense of attachment to this delusional type of thinking. To them, it’s their lives and environments that are collapsing in the same way that, say, for a shaman his world collapsed when his forests was destroyed.

If the situation around them slowly starts showing that their reality is not what they think (or scream) it is, on top of being worn down by the self imposed lockdown, because that side of the spectrum is the one that bought it to the extreme. Ooof. Have you noticed how many people on the internet fantasize with suicide and depression memes? And they laugh hard at them. If there is anyone in Zeta Reticuli, they will wonder if we decided to built a planetary sized popcorn machine.
Edited 2020-08-20 20:55 (UTC)

[personal profile] kevintaylorburgess 2020-08-20 08:42 pm (UTC)(link)
I have to deal with the overly privileged regularly, and I think there's another issue which helps to extend this into madnessland: the pervasive notion that when reality fails to do what you want it to, it's only because you didn't believe it enough. Of course this means that even entertaining the possibility you might be wrong about something is akin to failing on it, and once you go there it's very, very hard to be able to think about anything....

[personal profile] kevintaylorburgess 2020-08-20 08:59 pm (UTC)(link)
"I considered that possibility, of course, but I really think something beyond ordinary bad faith, lying, and confusion is involved here. Ordinary bad faith and lying are goal-directed -- people use them to try to achieve something -- and ordinary confusion is usually amenable to the repeated impacts of reality, e.g., "Something must be wrong, I keep getting whacked upside the head.""

I've sometimes wondered if the privileged classes might want Trump to win for some reason. Of course they won't admit to it, even to themselves, but that just makes the output look all the more like it's the ravings of lunatics.

(Anonymous) 2020-08-20 09:12 pm (UTC)(link)
What kind of lives would they be reborn into? If it's widespread, would it risk recreating similar circumstances to the present ones, so the people who killed themselves had another chance to deal with it?

(Anonymous) 2020-08-20 09:13 pm (UTC)(link)
The situation really is looking more and more like a cult the morning after the messiah no-showed. One might use the rite of gendarme summoning if such threats are credible. Rusty

[personal profile] kevintaylorburgess 2020-08-20 09:18 pm (UTC)(link)
I wonder if that's the point: make thinking impossible so that you never need to worry about what spending even just a few minutes of thought might reveal. This also explains the frankly shrill insistence progress is still happening: to those believers who've adopted the Christian Science Fallacy, to admit it's stopped is to admit to failure on the sole thing that matters.

Re: Yes indeed.

[personal profile] kevintaylorburgess 2020-08-20 09:20 pm (UTC)(link)
I think a lot of them will hold those ideas until the day they die. What'll do it is when sane people figure out how to marginalize and exclude the lunatics. I think we're getting there, but it'll probably take a few more years.

I want election week off work

(Anonymous) 2020-08-20 09:20 pm (UTC)(link)
I want to take that whole week around the election off of work. I work in a mostly liberal progressive environment and I remember all the people who called in sick and just acted crazy at work the day after the election in 2016. I want to avoid the inevitable meltdowns.

Turquoise Squamous Octopus

[personal profile] kevintaylorburgess 2020-08-20 09:23 pm (UTC)(link)
Suddenly the way that the privileged can insist that a working class neighbourhood where half the people are minorities is full of unrepentent segregationists while their lilly-white suburb is a bastion of tolerance makes sense: they've decided it is so, and mere reality won't get in the way of that!

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