Krugthulu brings to my attention some really weird shit I didn't know about, and some that I did. If you can't read it because of the paywall, don't worry, I'll give you the bonbons
We were all agog when a White House press release -- actually from the White House Science Office! -- claimed among the Resident's many great achievements "ending the Covid-19 pandemic." Uh, whaaat?
Then he said in a rally, "New York is a ghost town." There are about 8 million people living in New York right now who are walking around seeing that it is not. Campaigning in Pennsylvania, he repeatedly said that Pennsylvanians "can't go to church," whereas the people he was saying this to had probably mostly been to church last Sunday. The it got, if that is possible, even weirder:
On Wednesday, campaigning in Arizona, Trump went on a rant about California, where “you have a special mask. You cannot under any circumstances take it off. You have to eat through the mask. Right, right, Charlie? It’s a very complex mechanism.” As 39 million California residents can tell you, nothing remotely like that exists.
So what is going on here? These obviously aren't lies in the normal sense, that anyone is expected to believe them. Oh I don't know, maybe there are some chawbacons out in Wisconsin who think the bit about New York is just an exaggeration, but they know their hospital is filling up and their friend's grandmother died. And the California mask thing is just ridiculous on the face of it. Do people really believe that if Biden is elected their won't be any windows in their house? I have to doubt it.
That's the whole point. Membership in the cult isn't about any tangible relationship to observable reality, it's about abandoning the constraints of truth and reason. If you have read 1984, you may remember the climactic scene in which Winston literally sees that 2+2=5. Then he is freed and allowed to rejoin society. To establish your belonging, to become one of us, you must share the delusions.
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
2 comments:
Believing patent lies is an initiation ritual for joining this tribe.
I think that our evolutionary path conditioned us to expand from belonging to a pack of related individuals to a much larger "tribe" of unrelated people who have a common identity. This greatly increased an individual's odds of surviving and reproducing in the Paleocene. Conflict with other tribes cost a lot of lives, but it also cemented one's loyalty and dedication to his or her tribe.
A person could establish useful relationships with perhaps a thousand other people, and that would be enough. To go beyond that number you need rituals and symbols to identify tribal members that you don't know personally. Trump's rallies are basically religious ceremonies welcoming several thousand people into his personal Trump Tribe, also known as MAGA.
I think its hard for a lot of people to see themselves as members of a 330 million member tribe, most of whom look and act quite differently from them. Unfortunately, our survival now depends on seeing ourselves as members of a seven billion member tribe, most of whom we couldn't even talk to if we met them.
We ultimately need to acknowledge that we are distant cousins to every living thing on the face of the earth, and that makes them all family. Sadly, there are a few subgroups, like malaria parasites, who unwittingly became an unmitigated threat to other groups, especially to the homo sapien branch. It is a sad but necessary task to prune them from our tree.
When we start seeing 'life' as our tribe, then there will be hope that our species will survive its adolesence.
CP: Fantastically well said. Eloquent and true. Thank you!
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