a world without rationality

low identity + high trauma = useful idiocy as personal identity

it’s easy to see how so many have become so convinced that the post-rational, post-reasonable age is in full swing.

i’d like to show you some examples.

pay attention. there will be a test.

this is not confined to fringes anymore. it’s becoming mainstream practice at universities, workplaces, and political arenas.

this is boston city councilor tania fernandes-anderson in an actual council meeting.

all is not well.

maybe this is parody, maybe it’s not. i really cannot tell anymore. i’m not sure an awful lot of people can tell either. and increasingly, i fear this is the point.

people have become so subsumed and consumed by their ideas and ideals that that have been driven quite mad and what’s left behind are not even people, they are parasitic infections of ideology roaming around in human guise absent any sense, sensibility, vestige of rational capacity, or (increasingly) even any instinct for self preservation.

everything about this smacks of problem and this level of excursion from basic human capacity to grasp and adapt to environment, model reality, and even the survival of the basic atavistic drives to self preservation seem effaced, replaced by some manner of utterly haywire self-replicating self-delusion.

such delusion then manifests around the precepts of jihadi religion and the self-righteous conflict of “us against everything not us.” any deviation from these increasingly baroque hallucinations is experienced as intolerable oppression and personal attack because these low identity failures to conceive of viable internal personhood have placed all their fragile eggs in the basket of externalized identity to the point where tribal membership and slavish devotion to doctrine ARE the self and any contradiction is outright war.

reason has left the building.

what remains is one of the most unreasonable, unreasoned, and intractable human movements since mao whipped up the students into marxist fervor and tortured scientists in struggle sessions before marching them off to hard labor and frequent death.

this is not a good thing.

perhaps an instructive line of inquiry lies along the axis of “so how did we get here?”

i believe this has been somehting of a two part dance.

it began in schools and their mass adoption of precepts that erase and externalize identity and with parents who sheltered and cosseted children, drowning them in structure and depriving them of the struggles they needed to develop character and sense of self and self-worth. we have cultivated large numbers of people who are not “people with ideas” but “people who are their ideas.” i have written about this recently.

the issue with such people is that they have no balance and no core. they cannot stand alone. they have no meaning alone and no confidence or even anima outside their ideologies. they are cultist cannon fodder.

and this is the setup. low identity people are ripe for external manipulation and cults of “every bad thing that happens to you is structural oppression from some other group” is literally “scientology for intellectuals and pseudointellectuals” with “structural isms” playing the role of ancient aliens in volcanos clinging to you and making you sad.

“do you sometimes feel bad for no reason? it’s probably white privilege/climate change/structural fluffy bunny phobia!”

but that alone does not evoke this level of madness and outburst. it’s the tinder, but it requires a spark.

and the spark looks like this:

now before we go ripping off onto some sort of unitary actor/attack theory, i want to be clear about something: maybe yes, maybe no, likely both, and yes, i think A LOT of this is emergent.

but a lot of how it started was not.

the reality here is complex and intertwined.

let me esplain.

this process of constant stress, constant attack, constant bombardment with fear and trauma does work to brainwash people. you’re in a constant state of activation, cortisol overload, and being overwhelmed by the atavistic fear responses of the more primitive parts of your mind, responses that shut down rationality.

you get tossed from fear to anger to threat and back again over and over so rapidly that there is no rest, no time to think, no time to process or reflect. every time you pause, there’s somehting new. 2 things at once. 3 things at once. you get locked into an endless chain of “now” as stimulus response as you devolve into an anoetic consciousness dominated by anxiety, anger, and fear.

it breaks people quite completely to the point where their rational faculty is actually gone, fully inaccessible to them and they wind up driving around in a car by themselves wearing a mask and screaming at parking meters about the structural inequity of marginalized viruses until their pronouns wind up being “was/were.”

they wind up jumping into every new narrative because they are too riled up to do anything but respond to stimulus.

the outlandish, relentless propaganda of covid really took this to a new level. it was the opening salvo of an incredibly sustained barrage that has not let up an iota. you’ve felt it. we all have. “how can this much stuff be happening?” “how can these be such endless crisis all the time?” there has barely been a minute to catch your breath.

now the covid psyop was deliberate. we know that. the receipts are legion. intelligence and military agencies all over the world took over health messaging and took fear porn propaganda to levels perhaps never before achieved in human history.

and it got REALLY out of hand, likely far more so than was planned but once you rub the lamp, genies like this do not go back inside without wreaking havok and fulfilling your wishes in the most perverse of all possible fashions.

the confluence of authority stressors was simply too acute for much of humanity.

and much of humanity broke.

since that time, a fair bit of humanity has recovered. they have shaken off the excesses of the covidian dionysia and many are stronger in the places they were shaken and shamed.

but many are not. many will never recover. and they are all around us now, among us, anxious, addled, and irrational waiting with alert intensity for the next opportunity to be outraged. it’s their literal raison d’etre. they have become instantiations of indignation haunting the earth like specters seeking reasons to howl and assault the living.

there is no cohabitation with such angry ghosts. they do no seek succor. they seek rage. rage as purpose. rage as praxis. rage against the dying of their own minds.

it cannot be reasoned with or assuaged. there is no compromise.

attack has become identity.

now the interesting question that emerges here is “is someone doing this on purpose?” or “is this just happening as an emergent property of broken, low identity people?”

the answer, i fear, is “yes.”

there are actors and organizations that are deliberately stoking this and seeking to encourage tribal separation and violence. of that, there can be little doubt. the question is “are they effective and if so, how much so?” there is, i suspect less agency than many are wont to suspect because the simple fact is you really don’t need it and when you have an entire ocean of coke underneath you, it really matters very little where you toss the mentos. everywhere is foam.

once you have this much rage lightning seeking to ground itself, ideas like “nuance” and “balance” go begging and the medium becomes the message.

social media is a lunacy amplifier. it segregates and inflames.

i have spoken in the past about the holy trinity of clickbait

• fear

• anger

• self righteousness

the first two get your attention, but the last one is what makes you share.

the signal that spreads is "look at these idiots/this danger and look how superior/virtuous we are for calling it out."

it's just human nature.

the dovetail into the meltdown as identity crowd is pernicious as it engenders wave upon wave upon wave of response and counter-response until all of social media is a turgid sea of vitriol and half-considered flame war with identity duels to the death sucking all the air out of the room.

you don’t need to do anything to elicit it. it comes of it’s own implacable volition.

mostly, we’re doing it to ourselves in response to stupid people simply being stupid.

it’s easy to criticize and easy to throw shade, but this tendency comes for us all.

self-assessment test:

how did you feel when reading the “a world without rationality” examples up at the top?

be honest.

were they angering? threatening? upsetting? horrifying?

did they trigger self-righteous feelings? did it make you want to say to someone “oh my god, would you look at these fricking people?”

did you share them? (or plan to?)

that’s the impetus. it’s the viral carrier of memetic info-spread.

and ALL of us feel it.

all of us are prone to it. i am, you are, it’s just how it is.

this has some meaningful implications:

it means that if you rely on push information, you’re going to live underneath a firehose of rage spray. it’s what gets sent so it’s what you’ll get. that message becomes the medium of social media, the carrier wave, the modal meme.

anger. hate. fear.

the big news networks are even worse than social media because they are dying so they lie and outrage to distort the facts underpinning the mindscapes of their brainwashed followers and because pissing you off just makes you spread it further when you complain about it. it’s just memetic evolution to maximize replication.

so if you want real information, you need to pull it.

go look for it.

seek out nuance and detail and both sides of stories. what is floating by on the river of interactive internet discourse is NOT representative. it’s the acme of irritating antagonism spreading like angry dandelions. the world is not this vicious and vitriolic and it does not need to be. the world is being goaded into thinking it’s in a war of all against all because that’s the maximization equation for memetic spread and the attention economy has become hyper competitive. this drives horrorshow misperceptions of society and its denizens through pure frequency bias alone. unless you go looking for somehting else, it’s all you see.

cultivating a strong personal identity apart from your ideas and learning to consume this new informational substrate is the key to surviving and thriving within it.

it’s a literal cheat code to life.

know who you are and curate what you pay attention to.

that’s it.

do that and you win.

it feels like the tide is against us because the internet and media is ramping up the shrillness as we all pull away.

belief that it’s a plot (even when it is) just plays into wanting to grab the tar baby and fight with it again. that cannot be the way.

let it die. let it flail and fail. it’s just going to keep getting worse and more absurd and while sure, these useful idiots will become ever greater road hazards, so what? we don’t need them. of what use are low identity/high ideology rationality avoiders?

you cannot convince them. but you also do not need to tolerate them. they are not sacred madmen or divine bovines. tell them to get lost. you cannot reason with those who eschew reason, but you sure can mock them. and that works better anyway.

meme them until they cry then make memes about them crying.

allowing the mad to plague the sane and disrupt our society and civility is not civilization.

just remember, in the end, it’s not about them, it’s about us and and their increasingly wild hallucinations manifest to prop up reality avoidance will just keep alienating people at the margins. these movements drive themselves mad in ideological purity status spirals.

walk away.

just keep doing what you do and let them flame out alone.

this is a winning streak.

and take it from crash: