Here is a paradox to ponder (not an orthoparadoxical complementarity that is in the nature of things, but a genuine absurdity): the same elites who are living in their ideological simulation of reality -- AKA the Matrix -- are responsible for destroying this Matrix.
Take California, where the elites who are destroying the state boast the support of two thirds of the voters. Everyone can see the deterioration, whether we're talking about crime, homelessness, poverty, schools, the border, unemployment, cost of living, virtually every metric. Our elites promise more of the same, and win every time.
Analogously, it's like an autoimmune disorder, with our elites pretending to defend the body while actively working for its destruction.
The above thoughts occurred to me while reading today's offering by Z Man (https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=25054):
Long before the Covid panic, it was obvious to many on the dissident right that the main problem in the West was a core of true believers. These are fanatics who are immune to facts and reason, driven by a desire to pull the roof down on society. On every issue, they seem to come down on the side of the society wrecking option (emphases mine).
Something so systematically irrational must be operating by its own implicit logic. In other words, it isn't mere chaos we're seeing, but rather, quite ordered and even predictable.
Analogously, a patient comes into therapy because his life is a wreck; it makes no sense, and yet he keeps making self-defeating choices that result in frustration, pain, and disappointment.
The task of the therapist is -- or used to be, anyway -- to not only help him make better choices, but to first identify the deeper unconscious structure that is pulling the strings and causing the problems.
Consequences that may appear unintended on the surface are actually intended by an unacknowledged center of agency. It's called self-defeating behavior, or repetition compulsion, or acting out, and is essentially a closed circle, so there's no Learning From Experience.
This deeper structure is like a personal matrix; it's a reality tunnel that both organizes the world and repels threats to it. We all know about the problem of "confirmation bias." In individuals it works on a retail basis, whereas a collective ideological Matrix does so on a wholesale basis, cutting off huge swaths of reality. But just because reality is denied, it hardly disappears. See Afghanistan for details; or monetary inflation; or the consequences of the anti-police movement.
This wholesale Matrix reminds me of something Mr. Moldbug says in his interview with Tucker: how is it that all of our elites just happen to believe the same crazy things? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsGbRNmu4NQ&t=4485s)
Why, for example, do both Yale and Harvard -- not to mention almost every other elite university -- embrace the same totalitarian wokeness, e.g., "diversity," affirmative racism, microaggressions, transgenderism, feminism, etc.? Based on pure chance, you'd think that one of them would stumble into liberalism, or traditionalism, or libertarianism, or realism, but no: strict uniformity -- simultaneously crazy and rigid.
I didn't actually get past the first paragraph of Z Man's essay. In the second paragraph he points out how, since the onset of Covid,
the true believers have shifted positions, often contradicting yesterday’s deeply held position, without explanation. The cult leaders seem to have moved along an authoritarian scale, which at least provides some rationale for their actions. The rank and file believers, however, have flitted from one position to another like a murmuration of starlings.
So the matrix is both flexible and rigid: it doesn't make smooth, bottom-up transformations based upon new evidence, but operates in a discontinuous top-down manner -- as in how the communist party went from anti-Hitler to pro-Hitler overnight. How did they manage the cognitive dissonance?
It's easy once one accepts the logic of the left, which is only Aristotelian if it works toward the desired end. If it doesn't, then so much for Aristotle:
Within hours of Biden being installed, they shifted to swearing that these vaccines were a perfect defense, an impenetrable defense, against Covid. If the bulk of the people were vaccinated by spring, the pandemic would be over as we would quickly hit herd immunity or pretty close to it. Everyone could go back to normal. The skeptics with whom they agreed just minutes ago were now QAnon conspiracy nuts. All good people would be vaccinated and only the crazies would refuse.
Am I exceeding the limits of fair use? Nah, there's no rules in blogging! Z Man makes the same point I'm making, only in other words:
There you see the mind of the true believer at work. Theirs is not a world of facts, reason, and a vast area of uncertainty, as it is with normal people. Instead, their world is those inside the walls and those outside the walls. The walls are an abstraction created by the good people who lead the faithful.... those outside the walls are the bad guys, the undifferentiated other that is always at war with the faithful.
Both the woke and the normal must "deal with reality," except the former "need a constant stream of reinforcement" to keep it at bay. Thankfully for them, social media provides an instantaneous network to shore up any holes in the Matrix. In the Olden Times it was much more of a top-down structure imposed by Big Media, but now every leftist is free to participate in his own subjection. Progress!
It is not an accident that the hardest thumping crazies on the Left are also intensively on-line, obsessed with things like Twitter. Social media is their tether to the collective.... Like a fish in a school, the believer gives herself over to the collective whole.
This essay (https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2021/09/13/some-hard-truths-about-secular-colleges/?utm_source=The+Catholic+Thing+Daily&utm_campaign=4027752b0b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_12_07_01_02_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_769a14e16a-4027752b0b-244304881) mentions an editor who no longer recruits Ivy League graduates, being that they are likely “'well-practiced in remaining silent when it costs something to speak up' against prevailing campus ideologies." These children are both bullies and bullied, just as there is no tyrant like a professional Victim.
Who wants to hire dysfunctional children "who are coddled and encouraged to nurture grievances, while normal kids are attacked and educationally abused”?
Back when I was a neo-Freudian I believed that anxiety essentially resulted from unconscious conflict between desire and reality. Now I believe it results from a disconnect between who we are and who we ought be. In other words, now I have a teleological explanation, whereas before it was a backward-looking explanation -- as if an unconflicted animal is the ideal!
12 comments:
Who could have predicted these Unintended Consequences?
"California will continue to be hostile to businesses, break the middle class’ back with taxes, and waste precious time and resources imagining that it can impact the climate. Fire, drought, and blackouts will be allowed to ruin a once-golden state, housing and just plain daily living will grow ever more costly, and the homelessness problem will remain unresolved.
"Under another year of Newsom, and probably four more after that, the well-documented flight of companies and residents will accelerate, leaving California with an hour-glass economy made up of the extremely rich and the desperate poor, the latter forever serving the former. Apparently that’s exactly the sort of society Democrats inside and out of California want."
College:
"college is a low-level but more or less reliable intelligence exam. If you are a genius (especially if you are male), you may fail the exam; likewise, but with less assurance, if you are a complete dunce.
"The college rewards a kind of tepid to warm verbal facility, and a self-satisfied inability to discern the difference between a political slogan and a potent enunciation of permanent truth; the colleges graduate people by the millions who think they are thinking, when their “thoughts” are more predictable by far than those of truck drivers stopping at a diner and talking about politics or sports or money or family life.
"In this sense, the vast majority of students have their degrees not from Ohio State or Georgetown, but from Stepford University (Ohio State campus) and Stepford University (Georgetown campus). And employers like the ball bearings they buy from Stepford."
"I dream that someday soon, people will notice that the colleges have become less than worthless; that by a half-diligent application the graduate leaves the college stupider than nature ever intended any grown person to be, not only failing to see the truth, but upholding absurdities and follies with a fervor to make Torquemada look like Milquetoast..."
"The politics of blue states come down to the fact that a majority of voters there have been persuaded by the culture industry that no matter how incompetent, mendacious, and narcissistic are liberal leaders, the only alternatives to them are demons and tyrants."
About our telos beyond the Matrix, Ratzinger:
Man's full "hominization" presupposes God's becoming man; only by this event is the Rubicon dividing the "animal" from the "logical" finally crossed forever and the highest possible development accorded to the process that began when a creature of dust and earth looked out beyond itself and its environment and was able to address God as "You."
It is openness to the whole, to the infinite, that makes man complete. Man is man by reaching out infinitely beyond himself, and he is consequently more of a man the less enclosed he is in himself, the less "limited" he is.
Re. the vote, Our elites promise more of the same, and win every time.
Or "win," as the case may be. With each passing year, I am less and less convinced that they win anywhere near as often as it seems. Considering all the shenanigans leading up to the recall, the only way for our side to win would be to cheat harder than they do. Which, considering we by nature tend to loathe cheating, is not very likely.
Soap box and ballot box have failed.
as if an unconflicted animal is the ideal!
Well, it is if you're a leftist...
Why do two thirds of Californians not understand that Gavin Newsom is now newly emboldened, just gonna double down on the undocmented, homeless, effeminate godless cancel culturing techie liberal academie wokie gayness? Maybe because two thirds of Californians are undocmented, homeless, effeminate godless cancel culturing techie liberal academie wokie gays!
We must make them illegal.
However, and/or disclaimer however, if we are indeed living in a simulation, then never mind. This was all just part of the plan.
You can see why it is always incumbent upon Dems to frighten their base with hallucinatory denunciations of conservatism so as to insure that what cannot go on will go on a little longer. Only reality can arrest the decline, the question being how much longer our elites can hold out against it.
I imagine a world where both conservatism and progressivism are just considered things, like corporations. Or tools, like chainsaws. In the hands of the right people, good things can and even will happen with such creations. But with the wrong people...
And then there's concentrations of power and who it is that power games attract and tend to reward, at the end of the day.
Still, some say that all CEOs are good and that all lumberjacks are evil. Now am I suggesting that we get CEOs together in a room full of lumberjacks? I'll leave that for you to decide.
The rank and file believers, however, have flitted from one position to another like a murmuration of starlings.
Although I understand Z Man using a murmuration of starlings as an illustrative example, I think it is a slight against murmurations of starlings, due to their mesmerizing beauty if you are fortunate enough to view one. I wouldn't have been opposed to, say, using a migration of wildebeests crossing a river as an example.
"It's easy once one accepts the logic of the left, which is only Aristotelian if it works toward the desired end. If it doesn't, then so much for Aristotle"
And those times the Aristotelian seems to work, is only there for our benefit - so long as they benefit from it at our expense.
They've taken a different path, centuries in the making, from Descartes deciding that he was a more reliable judge of reality, than reality, to Kant saying we could never really know reality, to Hegel saying that worrying about what was and wasn't real was a foolish obsession over 'mere Aristotelian contradictions', which required only skillfully convoluted wording to resolve into a new more useful reality.
Or as Bloom put it in his Taxonomy on educational objectives that's been used to train our teachers for nearly 70 years: "a student attains `higher order thinking' when he no longer believes in right or wrong".
What could possibly go wrong? Aside from what you'll find from looking at every aspect of our reality today, that is.
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