The Root of the Madness
Aug. 20th, 2020 01:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ecosophia
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.
A nation with no carry
Date: 2020-08-20 09:35 pm (UTC)That is why Sojourner Truth’s speech “Ain’t I a woman?” is so famous, and had so little effect at the time. The concept of Southern Womanhood and the delicate flowery qualities of artificially fashioned femininity were too well fixed in the minds of those opposed to the abolition of slavery for them to even see the laughable lie at the heart of their dearly-beloved ideal.
They were not mad. They were self-interested to the point of stupid blindness, but they were fully able to load a rifle and rationally fight the humanitarian tide in the halls of justice, legislation and the field of battle. And they continued long into the 20th century to fight the same fight on ever more unstable and sinking ground. Not until gay marriage became the law of the land did they know how very lost was their cause; yet they are still fighting to this day. Are they all mad or just of one-pointed mind? If it is madness to hold loyally to an ideal, how many patriots, oil-based capitalists and partisans are not mad? As for being self-interested, tell me who is not?
The Sufis say that nearly everybody is going around drunk. To be sober and know the truth is a difficult, lonely place to live. That is one of the meanings of the tale about the ‘changed waters’ cited elsewhere by a commenter. If some people are drunk on notions of the proper subordinate place for women and colored people to be locked down into and some are drunk on the idea that poor people are racist scum whose gonna volunteer to take away their ideal-liquor bottles? There’s no more Carry Nation to take an axe to our nation.
Surely you are not expecting to use Reason to change people’s minds? Reason is a whore to self-interest. You can try to pry people off their Ideal pedestals with crowbars of religion, bribe them off the plinth with money and status, or embroil the lot in a hot killing war that forces them to rely on their hated rivals for sheer survival. You can use drugs or dance or juicy dirty jokes or books and movies, plays and fervid imaginations, even prayer. But it is most unreasonable of you to expect to move people with the dry melba toast of Reason.
Re: A nation with no carry
Date: 2020-08-20 09:49 pm (UTC)Re: A nation with no carry
Date: 2020-08-21 02:02 am (UTC)Re: A nation with no carry
Date: 2020-08-21 02:26 am (UTC)Re: A nation with no carry
Date: 2020-08-21 02:35 am (UTC)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 one.