Another “quick takes” on items where there is too little to say to make a complete article, but is still important enough to comment on.
The focus this time: The Delusion of Reality
First, a little mood music:
Carrying on…
The Left hold as an axiomatic position of faith, that there is an absolute truth that they conceive of and that they alone can implement:
“But the reason they’re so worked up is because both are laboring from the same melodramatic assumption: that all problems have a solution, that all questions have an answer, and that the right answer will save us.
“Why, in the name of all the gods, do even the most righteous of the self-appointed ‘edgies’ glibly accept this glittering axiom? Some of you swallow it so deep you feel soul-justified in sending death threats to the infidels. You are keeping us from the right answer! Heaven beckons, it’s only YOUR stupid team that’s standing in our way!
“What an absurd assumption. Why must there be a morally decent way to order a society of creatures who evolved through nature red in tooth and claw? Liberal blue-teamers who mock those who believe in intelligent design will argue for their answers with all the certainty of faith in a world that must somehow make sense. And libertarian atheists do just the same.
“‘There is an answer! There must be sense and meaning! And once I find an ideology that fits my feels I will fight myself into a foaming caricature!’
“I know a lot of smart cookies, people far better informed and more clever than I, on both teams, who power their big forebrains and their yaps all day long on the hot steam of this assumption.
“But bear in mind: some very intelligent people will also persist in believing their lovers still love them back, years after love has died.”
Of course, for the Left to implement such utopian delusions, they must reject reality and substitute their own catechisms of their secular faith…
And for this utopian delusion, they will reject reality, and scientific fact:
“This gives the lie to the root claim, which is that Jenner is ‘psychologically’ a woman. But how can he be, if he hasn’t been through the actual, specific, concrete experiences that would form such a psychology? The usual answer to this is a brute materialistic determinism: it’s all genetics and hormones—cited with no explanation of the mechanism by which one is genetically programmed to, say, want to wear lipstick and wear a dress, which is Jenner’s whole concept of what ‘being a woman’ is.
“But if this is determined by genes and hormones, isn’t the physical body even more so? Yet the presumption behind Jenner’s ‘transition’ is that it’s easier to change the body than to change the mind. Gender ‘dysphoria’ is defined as distress caused by the conflict between the sex one is physically born with and one’s mental self-image of one’s gender. And the universal assumption now in the field of psychology is that when there is a clash between the image in one’s mind and actual, physical reality, it is physical reality that needs to be cut to fit.
“At the very least, this is a confession of helplessness by the science (or proto-science) of psychology. But I’m afraid it’s worse than that. It is very likely a case of mass malpractice.”
But how to deal with it when it becomes doubleplusungood to ” think not only things that are wrong, but increasingly, things which are obviously, demonstrably true”?
One must understand that we are not dealing with the give n’ take of social normal change, or of anything derived from the so-called “will of the people”:
“Yet it feels like we’ve awakened to an ambush. A lot of Americans watched in shock while cultish mobs suddenly attacked the RFRA that Pence initially defended. But the groundwork for mass hysteria like this was stealthily laid for decades, and the minefields sown.
“Family breakdown led to community breakdown, which we can see in the decline of trust in society. Ignorance was cultivated in the schools through political correctness and squashing free debate. The academy’s disparaging of western civilization virtually wiped out respect for any serious study of history and civics, as well as for the Socratic method and the rules of civil discourse. Political correctness sewed confusion into the language, particularly regarding identity politics. Youth are now set to be programmed for conformity through the K-12 “Common Core” curriculum mandates.
“All of that and more promotes the semantic fog that allows for mind rape. It amounts to an act of “logicide,” to borrow a term from Meerloo, whom I will continue to quote below. To kill logic and reason that might stand in their way, wannabe dictators ‘fabricate a hate language in order to stir up mass emotions.’ Leaders in Indiana, Arkansas, and Louisiana have been unable to understand this tactic and are grossly unprepared to deal with it. So they simply surrendered. In effect, they joined the mob, further endangering everybody’s freedom.”
One must, also, understand that such ideas of “equality,” “tolerance,” and “liberation” are but high sounding excuses for totalitarian imposition:
“‘Equality’ is not the reason for what is happening with such mobs. It is the pretext for what they are doing. Like all such deceptions, its sole purpose is as a vehicle to transfer power from individuals to an increasingly centralized state. The fuel, as usual, is the emotional blackmail of people of goodwill, the uses of mass mobilization to exploit that goodwill, then, finally, to render all such goodwill meaningless.”
The solution? Freedom:
“Free expression is always the prime target of tyrants because it promotes logic, the search for truth, and friendship. America is exceptional precisely because it rejects the tyrants’ rule.
“Yet as our speech becomes more restricted, we end up more separated from one another and more susceptible to mass delusions. As Meerloo wrote: ‘Where thinking is isolated without free exchange with other minds, delusion may follow.'”
TTFN
