What You See is What You Grok. Or Hallucinate.

A note to myself in the margin says "What you see is what you grok." I've never actually read Stranger in a Strange Land, so I only know the word on a second hand basis. According to Prof. Wiki it has to do with deep understanding -- so deep "that you merge with [the knowledge] and it merges with you":

It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science and it means as little to us as color does to a blind man.

From context, I always thought of it as analogous to Polanyi's tacit knowledge:

All knowing, no matter how formalised, relies upon commitments.... A knower does not stand apart from the universe, but participates personally within it. Our intellectual skills are driven by passionate commitments that motivate discovery and validation.... Tacit awareness connects us, albeit fallibly, with reality. It supplies us with the context within which our articulations have meaning.

So literally, what we see is what we grok, the purpose of this blog being to grok the entire cosmos from top to bottom, inside and out. Some people (and philosophies) grok very little, while others grok in a completely insane way that has no basis in reality. Regarding the latter, I'm thinking of Joe Kennedy's response to the the President's SOTU. Here is what "we see," according to Joe:

"Russia knee-deep in our democracy. An all-out war on environmental protection. A Justice Department rolling back civil rights by the day. Hatred and supremacy proudly marching in our streets."

In reality, only the last is more than a hallucination, but I don't think he's referring to Antifa or bitter witches marching on Washington. More:

"This administration isn’t just targeting the laws that protect us -- they are targeting the very idea that we are all worthy of protection. For them, dignity isn’t something you’re born with but something you measure."

True, dignity is not something conferred by the state if we manage to escape the abortionist. Rather, we're created with it. Big difference.

Other targets of this administration include "the gender of your spouse. The country of your birth. The color of your skin. The God of your prayers." Kennedy is a Catholic. Neither the God of his prayers nor conservatism attacks the gender of anyone's spouse, so long as it is a spouse and not some novel, logophobic redefinition imposed by the state.

In any event, either leftists actually believe these things -- i.e., they are hallucinating -- or they are just cynical lies for the purpose of manipulating their low watt base. I have always suspected a combination, with cynical manipulators at the top -- the One Percent -- and the mob simply taking directions from above. However, due to the nature of the conscience, which has a way of persecuting us for lying, many people at the top convince themselves that the lies are true.

For example, if you take a speech by Bill Clinton from 20 years ago, or Hillary Clinton from 10 years ago, they are among those who target the gender of your spouse and country of your birth. In other words, like most people, they defended traditional marriage and understood that it is bad for the country to import millions of uneducated and unskilled people from shithole countries. Were they lying then, or are they hallucinating now?

Wow. I hadn't actually heard Kennedy's talk and am reading the transcript for the first time. It's even worse than I thought. Let's stipulate that someone is hallucinating, either them or us. But as Scott Adams helpfully explains,

if you are not experiencing mass hysteria, you might be totally confused by the actions of the people who are. They appear to be irrational, but in ways that are hard to define. You can’t tell if they are stupid, unscrupulous, ignorant, mentally ill, emotionally unstable or what. It just looks frickin’ crazy.

The question is, how do we know we aren't the ones who are hallucinating? Like so:

One sign of a good mass hysteria is that it sounds bonkers to anyone who is not experiencing it. Imagine your neighbor telling you he thinks the other neighbor is a witch. Or imagine someone saying the local daycare provider is a satanic temple in disguise. Or imagine someone telling you tulip bulbs are more valuable than gold. Crazy stuff.

Being that I am -- back off, man -- a clinical psychologist, this is my stock in trade. In other words, either the patient is somehow out of touch with reality, or I am. But I'm not the one paying the patient to talk to me, so there's that. However, how does that explain all these left wing psychologists? Easy. Change is hard. People would prefer to have their hallucinations confirmed and not confronted.

Ever noticed that Fridays tend to be rambly posts? It must be because I have more time to get lost in my thoughts. But Bob, it's Thursday. True, but until you just said that, I thought it was Friday. In any event, I have no pressing work to do, so I'm in the slack zone.

I want to try to wedge another point into this jumble, a brief aside in the biography of John Paul II that arrested my attention, that "the Holy Spirit can work his will by darkening as well as enlightening people's minds."

I'd never heard this before, but I grokked it right away. It makes total sense. However, it raises a new problem, which is to say, how to distinguish between a lie or hallucination on the one hand, and a Spirit-sponsored, providential endarkening of the mind on the other? I don't know that there is any surefire way, and perhaps we don't need to know, since we still need to confront the lie either way.

But now that I'm thinking about it, there is a kind of intoxicated lying that goes too far, and is too stupid to blame Satan. Satan is subtle. Sophisticated. For this reason, it is impossible for me to believe that he is the author of, for example, Joe Kennedy's fatuous hallucinatory blather.

Another point: hallucination is a term of art, and it is not necessarily helpful to conflate schizophrenic hallucination with whatever it is that leftists such as Kennedy engage in. Leftists may be out of touch with reality, but it doesn't mean they are hallucinating per se. What then?

Bion referred to the process as hallucinosis, or "transformations in hallucinosis," in contrast to "transformations in thought." The former occurs when emotionally-tinged mental content cannot be contained, which is to say, transformed into thought. Instead, it is projected (in what is called unconscious phantasy) into an external container. It creates a "domain of nonexistence," or a "mental world where what is nonexistent 'exists.'"

Moreover, it brings about a kind of "'freedom' that is really an enclosure and a restriction." It feels free, because, via this process, the person has indeed "freed" himself of the painful content. But the person is now persecuted by his own projected mental content.

Along these lines, another thought has been rattling around in my head for the last few days. That is, we all know about the left's incessant virtue signaling, which is done to conceal the signaler's lack thereof (for example, Hollywood predators who are the loudest feminists, or leftist professors who see everything in terms of race while accusing others of racism).

Perhaps even more problematic than virtue signaling is "intelligence signaling" (for lack of a better term). But now that you have the term, you will notice that so much of leftist hivethought is no more than a vacuous exercise in intelligence signaling. And like virtue signaling, it is motivated by its unconscious opposite, which is to say, intellectual insecurity, stupidity, and imitation.

Put conversely, intelligence signaling is a way for these vapid morons to fool themselves into thinking they are among the cognitive elite.

To be continued...