The Self-Destructive Matrix

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!