too crazy to see

examining the big lie

i stumbled upon this on twitter yesterday.

i had never quite put this together this way, but in retrospect, i've had this exact experience numerous times, especially (but certainly not exclusively) with friends on the left.

“this policy mandates X."

"no, no, that cannot be true, that's too crazy to believe!"

"here is proof of X in writing."

"you're misinterpreting."

"how?"

"well, it's just an outlier! that cannot be widespread policy!"

when you actually show people, for example, the "children's books" about sex toys and bondage or the fact that taxpayers are paying to "support" male rapists as "women" and then putting them in women's prisons where they go on to commit rape, they simply cannot see it. it's too far outside their mental model. the brain just blocks it somehow or makes it seem like it must be hyperbole or "disinformation."

cognitive dissonance is a helluva drug.

when you show them that "yes, the pfizer studies were faked, the drug they shipped was not even the one they tested, and the CDC deliberately suppressed collection of adverse events and the FDA suppressed cheap, effective treatments to allow EUA's on lucrative ones that did not work," again, they outright cannot see it.

it slides off of them.

deep down somewhere they are sure they can "trust the system" and simply are not willing to face the wilderness of perspective change and new thought required to stop doing so.

somewhere embedded deeply, even atavistically in human cognition lies a vast set of macros that we use to “see” the world around us.

we cannot take in all the data or process it. mostly, we focus on a few things and expect other things to be mostly the same.

this is called “normalcy bias” and it basically rejects perception in favor of “things like that don’t happen” because perception is so messy and error prone.

it’s adaptive, evolved.

this helps you focus.

this is a classic test on such selective attention.

try it yourself. it’s interesting.

but the issue with “normalcy bias” are the “gorilla moments” when something truly unusual and unexpected happens, something way outside your cognitive model and with which you have no prior experience or predictive matrix.

it’s a cognitive loophole. things get “too crazy to see.”

this is the human phenomenon upon which "the big lie" is based. do something sufficiently outrageous, and no one can believe it.

they cannot even perceive it.

their mind makes up a story to explain it away.

try reading this. does your mind immediately flip to “that must be fake?” mine does, and i’m an online conspiracy cat…

past a point, it’s just a self defense mechanism. it’s the same reason we don’t see violence around us because if we truly did see it, then we’d have to do somehting about it. easy to let your eyes soften and slide off and just get on with the day feeling OK about yourself.

it’s why it’s so hard to get anyone to care about the uighurs or 100 other similar cases.

admitting a truly awful outrage is occurring and then failing to act = moral culpability.

i have had i don’t know how many conversations where people just cannot believe a state would take away a parents kids for refusing to give them puberty blockers or even more aggressive “gender affirming care.”

it’s still just too insane to countenance and oddly, this makes bad behavior that’s 5% off norm easy to spot, but push it out to 80% off norm and suddenly it’s past perception and even if you do see it, you’ll want to not see it to avoid having to take a stand. it’s unthinkable.

it’s strange stuff and has become a sort of zero day exploit for the truly lunatic to move unseen and unmolested among the rest of us doing truly lunatic things.

but overton windows do shift and ours is shifting hard. people are seeing. they are waking up and once in motion this is going to keep going, on and on because every thread you pull loosens 5 more and every awakened sleeper arouses the one next to them.

the integument of trust in technocracy has been cracked and now it's time to let everyone see what was really inside.

it's a gradual process but an inexorable one.

be patient, it takes a while for the mass of humanity to adjust to a new perception of reality and illusions hurt when you shuck them off. you cannot change it all in one day. but it does happen.

we just need free speech and free information.

this is the underpinning of all else and all this change.

and THAT is why, whatever issue is nearest and dearest to you, why in this election we must all be one issue voters on ending censorship and speech suppression.

the society we save may be our own.