out of the blue: perceptive redshift (part 2)
the way out of the maze
this is part 2 of the redshift series. please read part 1 first.
while it’s certainly not true of everyone and one can never be sure how much one is deluding oneself, i suspect that most of those being pushed toward the rights centric assertion of self-sovereignty at the moment are aware that this is happening, especially those who were former centrists. i certainly am. mostly they are saying “i would like to be left alone” and so, the more incursions are made on their lives and livelihoods, the more they will begin to bristle.
i never trusted government a whole lot, but i did trust them to stay within certain bounds of misbehavior.
but then it overstepped them. everywhere. at once. 2020 was some sort of dinner bell to push endlessly and aggressively on all fronts in unison and 2021 made it worse.
obviously, this had been building for some time, but in 2020, it changed radically and i changed in response. i think a lot of us did. reluctantly, many of us went to battle because we simply could not abide what we were seeing.
but it’s not my identity and i never want it to be.
it’s what i am doing because it needs to be done i (and i suspect many others) would be glad to have it over and done with as well.
this is not a basis for sense of self that most pushing back crave. it’s a chore that needs doing, an augean stables that needs mucking out.
i am most assuredly more polarized than i was, but i also know this about myself. i can still see where i was and i’d like to go back albeit with some real changes to what power the state is allowed to have. it’s what i hold as a reference. i think (and hope) it still points fairly northish.
but i fear this is not so for many.
you can see it it in the “drift from position” measures. those wanting to be left alone may be driven to more active impulse by greater depredations, but the base desire is more or less the same. it’s just “this is a new way you have threatened or trespassed upon me, so i will find a way to stop it.”
but the folks succumbing to the authoritarian impulse of “rule by expert and ideologue” lack this sort of polestar. they have no idea how far or fast they have moved.
suddenly climate wonks think “have no car, eat bugs, set the thermostat at 62 degrees this winter, and rolling blackouts are normal” are mainstream ideas. ban fossil fuels, ICE cars, and triple the electric bill. it’s good for you. and OF COUSRE we have the right to impose this by force. you cannot have the life you want anymore.
suddenly public health thinks it can lock you down, mask you up, jab you with experimental drugs, close the borders, close the schools, abate your rent, and ban you from social media if you disagree. many openly envy china’s ability to ignore human rights entirely to do so. the NIH publishes racist screeds.
teachers unions are publicly stating that parents should have no say in what their children are taught.
burning cites is “peaceful protest.” peaceful opposition to such is treason most foul. they really believe it. i’ve seen it in friends. (see how that redshift reflexivity works? the more you misbehave, the more anything other than what you are doing looks like misbehavior) they have no idea how radicalized and tactically blind they have become.
these were unthinkable ideas to express in public (much less impose by fiat) even 5 years ago.
this is serious and extensive radicalization mostly driven and/or enabled by extremist experts that all lean one way. if you doubt this, realize that this was a real meme made and shared widely on social media by self-proclaimed “left of center moderates.”
imagine what the curvature of the event horizon of your cognitive dissonance raddled sensorium must be to twist nancy pelosi into being “right wing” and AOC the center and imagine it well because THAT is what you are really up against.
a few at the very top may understand and deliberately engage in the “accuse the other side of your own outrages” doctrine but even they are likely doing it in the deep belief that it serves some “greater good.” they still see their own radicalization as that of any who oppose them.
and there is no way to engage with it on its own terms.
how does one even speak to people so mazed in funhouse mirrors of other-abnegating self-regard that evidence of error becomes validation of belief and that their own wild radicalization serves as incontrovertible proof of yours?
how does one cross the vast and expanding chasm between increasingly charged parties repelling one another?
i’m not sure you can. there is no way to sway these people nor convince them to change. they sailed over that event horizon ages ago. in any event, technocracy was never really amenable to ideas like “stop oppressing me” in the first place.
don’t bother. you’re pushing on a string.
but the good news is that we do not need to.
these dictatorial departures from practice and reason justified with ever accelerating fabulism and accusation are not fooling the center.
each new outrage just pushes more people into the “wow, i need to defend myself from this” camp.
it galvanizes resistance.
it galvanizes action.
the path to success for those who would see their liberty regained and retained is in ignoring the extremists and embracing the “silent majority” as it is wakened by the whip hands assailing it: those who were “not political” but become so in self defense.
this is the true core and measure of a society: the reluctant warrior who never sought battle but will rise in defense of the right to self-determination and the pursuit of happiness.
that and only that is its ultimate guarantor.
direct conflict with the deeply deluded yields nothing. it only makes them more extreme and more delusional. the answer cannot lie there.
it lies instead in reaching out to the center and welcoming them to the new overton window from which the mud has been cleared so that as they peer through it, they join in the grand undertaking of peaceful but implacable rollback of the bureaucratic and technocratic state.
that is the wedge to tyranny, the poison splinter edging ever closer to the beating heart of of the republic.
let’s get it out.
the society we save will be our own.
I swing between "this is so crazy that of course we can fight it" to "the crazy people have so infiltrated the power structure that we're doomed." I think you're right on the why and *hope* you're right on the how.
The outrage online when I remark that parents allowed their children to be destroyed, and that two parents or the equivalent are sufficient to socialize a toddler into normal speech, and if their normal toddler now needs speech therapy they're entirely to blame.
This is the immensity of the problem right now. Complete utter morons who've abdicated every basic function to The State.