brains are breaking right now. you can hear the shrieks and sputtering and smell the burning wires.
that’s what cognitive dissonance does because it is first and foremost a defense mechanism.
if you hold a view with sufficient strength and commitment, especially if this is a view you have woven into your identify and proudly promulgated to others, hectoring and posing and portraying it as virtue, letting go is no mean feat.
the dogma has become you and you have become reliant upon it for support and structure. those who mutter in their madness the same phrases over and over as they rock back and forth upon the ground are not trying to convince you.
they are trying to convince themselves.
they will bend fact and ignore plain reality to protect the fictions upon which they have predicated their lives and legends.
they will distort and disavow anything they must to keep this piece of personal ego intact and safe from challenge it cannot, in fair contest, withstand.
this goes treble for those who have learned to embrace the heretofore maladaptive and societally maligned anxiousness and neuroses that have been so in vogue these last two years yet seem to be slipping once more out of fashion.
it is how they wind up muttering mantras such as these and seeking support groups of likeminded lamentation.
it’s getting ugly out there.
there is, simply put, a class of people here who do not want to go back. this purported crisis has given them meaning and elevated their long simmering social fears and barely suppressed panic/safety seeking instincts into what they mistook for virtue.
the fact that others followed them in this mistake allowed it spread and has given it range and duration previously unimaginable.
all perspective was lost to hobgoblins and we surrendered to the neurocracy: rule by the most neurotic; and those who have been atop this newfound karentopia would like to stay there.
but it’s not going to happen. it’s unraveling rapidly and the middle that should have kept this in check is waking up and coming to its senses. while the madness of crowds descends all at once, it ends one by one, first as a trickle, and then as a flood.
no longer are people ready to sacrifice their children by claiming they are resilient to everything that has been cravenly heaped up them while, in the deepest of ironies, pretending that a disease to which these selfsame youth are near perfectly resilient and do not contract or spread in any materially dangerous fashion poses them unprecedented mortal danger.
we fed them to jackals to save them from bunnies.
and this is now too big to hide.
and so the normally quiescent and busy middle are stirring to action, and they have had it with the neurocrats and the karentopians.
the world is going to be taken back.
and this will make for some tough sledding for the denizens of denial.
they have been accommodated and coddled in a fashion that was the very height of unhealthy. and it’s been squirting out all over the place. (best i can tell, yes, this is real, but it’s just 1 example among 10,000)
this is not helping.
this is not concern.
this is not empathy.
this is taking a paranoid schizophrenic and prescribing them a handgun and then telling them to shoot at the voices. (and then forcing us to live in the house with them while they do)
people have been gaslit and harangued into thinking this is normal.
this is not normal.
“hey, let’s move at the speed of our most maladjusted and anxiety raddled members and indulge their every phobia, maladaptation, and night terror!” said no society that was not in the throes of eating itself.
ever.
this alliance to anxiety and has metastasized throughout society from obesity to agoraphobia and OCD to germaphobes. we have indulged outlandish persecution fantasies and elevated bizarre identifications and ideologies all claiming “this is healthy.”
it’s not.
and pretending it is is not being an ally. it’s being an enabler.
it is not being understanding. it is appeasing an aggressor into further mental illness and misanthropy.
it will not and cannot sate them. it will only make them worse, ever hungrier, ever more out of control, and ever more performatively demanding and odious.
this instinct to coddle and to acquiesce only serves to dig the hole deeper and make its recipients more desperate and more dangerous.
you can no more deny your way to mental health than comply your way to freedom.
and it’s time we talked straight to these people both about covid and about the rest of the appeasement industrial complex.
it is our accommodation that is sinking them deeper into pathological perdition.
and it’s time we stopped.
The other issue with the "children are resilient" mantra is that resilience is no excuse to mistreat anyone. Just because someone will bounce back from a black eye doesn't mean I should punch him in the face.
As a Nazi put it when being interviewed by Milton Mayer for “They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45”:
“‘I was nothing. Then, suddenly, I was needed. National Socialism had a place for me. I was nothing—and then I was needed.’”
Mayer also describes the ingredients that had been thrown in the pot to create the conditions for mass formation psychosis:
“Crisis is our diet, served up as exotic dishes and dishes ever more exotic before we are able to swallow, let alone digest, those that were just before us.”
These people feed on crisis and anxiety because it gives their lives meaning; without it, they are, as the Nazi confesses, “nothing.” They have no identity outside of the mental illnesses they have cultivated in response to the behavioral psychologists’ Pavlovian incentives and punishments.
As Einstein says:
“The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it.”