The zeitgeist has passed me by
Actually, I’m not sure I ever was fully with the program, even when I was young. But in the last couple of years, as I watch the world from my perch here at a computer in New England, I’ve become more and more estranged from whatever passes for public opinion these days, particularly with the younger generation. Increasingly, it feels as though we are speaking from such different basic premises that it’s almost as though we’re not using the same language.
In particular, what so many young people seem to find offensive is very different from what I find offensive. Tiny little slights that my generation would shrug off are considered nearly hanging matters. It’s easy to call them “snowflakes” and other pejorative labels, but that’s the easy way out. Something deeper has gone on: a re-ordering of priorities, definitions, and values. And that’s in addition to, and connected with, their tolerance of leftism and all that goes with it.
It’s not that we haven’t discussed all of this before on this blog; we have. And it’s not that everyone in the younger generation has gone over to the other side on this, either. But so many have, and they are so often the ones who in earlier times would have been – at least, might have been – the best and the brightest. Now they are going, or have already gone, down the Red Guards path. Do they even know that piece of history? If they do, can they connect it to themselves now? And if they did connect it, would they care, or would they consider that this time their cause is so obviously righteous that any resemblance is illusory?
I’ve already lost a few friends of my generation, too, although most have stuck by me. For some who are still friends, I feel their increased discomfort around me. I don’t think I’m imagining it. It’s a source of tension and grief for me. And of course, there’s a gulf between the younger generation and me that’s similar. No one in that group has stopped talking to me altogether, but the gap is widening day by day and whatever ways I’ve attempted to bridge the gap, they don’t seem to have altered things significantly.
But it’s not just about family and friends. It’s about the culture at large. A lot of older people say they don’t care about that because in a while they won’t be around. I don’t have that attitude. However long I will or won’t be here, I care deeply. I care what happens to this country, to the world, to the human race.
And since music seems to be on my mind often lately, here’s the song these reflections conjure up for me. I have little doubt that Simon and Garfunkel are not on the political right (Simon wrote it, but in this clip they both perform it). But how far to the left they fall on the political spectrum is irrelevant to me in terms of this song, which seems to fit either side of the political realm at the moment. I doubt very much that was the original idea; Paul Simon has said of the song, “I don’t write overtly political songs, although American Tune comes pretty close, as it was written just after Nixon was elected.” But one of the good things about art is that its meaning and purpose is not limited to what may have been in the creator’s mind at the time:
That line “we can’t be forever blessed” makes me think of this quote attributed to various 19th Century thinkers: “It has been said that a special Providence watches over children, drunkards, and the United States.”
Let us hope so.
“Now they are going, or have already gone, down the Red Guards path. Do they even know that piece of history?”
No, they don’t, or they would have never uttered the phrase politically correct. I was appalled when, in the 90s, I first heard a young woman say, “I know it’s not politically correct,…” as if that phrase meant rude, and she knew she was somehow transgressing.
Surprised you didn’t mention Simon’s shameless pilfering of Bach.
It would probably help a lot if those kids could travel and see the world. Have their eyes opened for them. At the moment, that isn’t an option, unfortunately.
Still, if they grow up without a modicum of respect, are convinced that they are always in the right and believe that virtue means being offended at the drop of a hat, then they might not learn anything.
In any event, Truth will soon be a four-letter word. (Actually, it already is.)
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/increasingly-facts-are-considered-racist/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first
“I’ve already lost a few friends of my generation, too, although most have stuck by me. For some who are still friends,”
A little over a year ago I reconnected with my best friend from childhood; we grew up together since age 8, graduated HS together and then even attended college for two year together. At one point he was dating my cousin. We then lost track of each other. Reconnected for our HS 30 year reunion, then lost track again. It was really great to hear from him. He’s retired in AZ and while having a regular job also worked as a semi-pro musician. Through his help this past fall we recorded a song together remotely (Who’ll Stop the Rain… CCR) Over the past 5 months he became increasingly hostile in terms of some of my exchanges on politics and Covid topics on FB. He obviously has a definite left POV. The final straw came late January when he proclaimed that his good friend and mentor had died of Covid. He then publicly on FB blamed me for his friend’s death. He claimed that since his friend had been a Republican somehow what I was posting about the virus caused his friend to not be careful. Now, I never met his friend, was not connected with his friend on FB; I have no idea who this person even was, yet it became my fault his friend died. I wrote him an email asking if just because we have evolved to different views on topics is that any reason to throw away 60 years of friendship. Never heard back. Apparently for the other side it is a justifiable reason to get rid of people in their lives. It’s a worldview I find hard to fathom.
There is very little reason for optimism for the future of this country. Disunion is, in my opinion, the best option. Civil war and/or soft authoritarianism are the others. In many important ways we are already in the early stages of soft authoritarianism.
Like Neo, I have noticed an increasing unease and unspoken tension with friends and family who know my views. Such is entirely to be expected. Though I have decided to cease openly discussing political matters (outside of a few online venues, such as this one), my silence isn’t sufficient for many in my left leaning social circle (which is about 90% of my social circle). ‘Silence is violence’ after all.
And yet, I will not become a Green Grocer! Right after our Reichstag Fire on January 6, when the axe (all too predictably) started coming down hard, I considered it, brooded over it for sometime. If I could successfully pull it off (which is doubtful), it would make my day to day life much easier, much more peaceful. But I couldn’t stand the self abasing insult to my own dignity. Reading Natan Sharansky’s recent essay also helped crystalize my choice as well. Our society is becoming less free at an accelerating pace. There is little I can do about this reality. But I will not contribute to it by imprisoning my own mind and conscience, even if just for show. As long as I maintain my freedom of thought, I am still free in one of the most profound ways.
“In particular, what so many young people seem to find offensive is very different from what I find offensive.”
Is any of this stuff different in substance than the “political correctness” of the 1990s? It seems the same to me, just involving young people and grownups who are more infantilized.
I mean, look at the whole mess at the New York Times. The executive editor at the Times is Dean Baquet, a black man whose daddy was a restaurant owner and who, himself, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. If there was ANYONE who should have had the moral authority to stand up to the little snots working at the Times, it should have been Dean Baquet.
Mike
It is the result of the 50+ year Gramscian March through our institutions—educational, entertainment, news, politics.
The “Love Generation” of Woodstock infamy raised their children to be even more stupid about responsibilities as well as rights.
The sad thing is that they will not even miss the lost freedom that they have squandered, and will be happy to sink back into the slough of “not exceptional”. They will happily welcome their China overlords, so long as they are dished out “free stuff” and drugs.
WTF did our brave patriots suffer and die for, from Bunker Hill through Gettysburg and Bellow Wood and Iwo Jima and Iraq and Af??
What a bunch of whiny racist losers coming into power.
As Toynbee wrote long ago: “Great civilizations are not murdered, they commit suicide.”
MBunge:
The “triggers” are far more trivial than back then.
Frank:
I actually wrote about the origins of that tune in a previous post, including a video.
There’s no “shameless pilfering” involved. Musicians do that all the time. What’s more, Simon has acknowledged the debt.
The short answer is, you aren’t mentally ill, but an increasing number of people around you are. Universities and other institutions for the haut bourgeoisie have become factories for mental illness. The young people have it the worst, which is why I take the snowflake cries for more mental health services seriously.
The short prescription is to hold on to reality, and don’t let the crazy people around you drive you crazy. And be very careful.
The long (long and highly abstract) answer is
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/12/psychopathy-origins-totalitarianism/
James Lindsay has been on fire. I don’t know anyone else who has looked as systematically and analytically into the social dynamics by which things we are pushed into a condition where we are forced to profess and act upon things that are not true. Being an atheist to begin with might be an advantage here.
Lindsay is getting to the emerging observation that the heart of the CRT/social justice enterprise is people who are pathologically preying on mental illness and doing their damnedest to produce more mental illness. This is a particularly sensitive point. I suspect that is the reason Amazon just acted to remove a book on transgenderism that was getting too much attention.
Lindsay does a good job of defining the mutual operations of a para-logic and para-morality that are well evolved to make reasonable people subject to it anxious and paranoid.
What Lindsay doesn’t say is the reason that this illness has become metastatic. The short answer is, the credo of the New Religion is helpful, even instrumental in keeping the Democrats’ urban electoral coalition together and thus keeping the Party in power. (This analysis follows anthropologist Marvin Harris’ views on “Cultural materialism,” which says, in brief, that there are always underlying material considerations for any belief system.) Keeping the components of the coalition obsessed with their own grievances as all coming from a common (straight, white, male Republican) enemy, and making those injuries unassuageable have that happy benefit of keeping them 1) politically united and 2) distracted from the vast economic inequality within the Democratic Party, where it is most severe.
Neo, my apologies for my snarky remark about Simon and Bach. There is no shame after all in reusing a public domain work especially when putting different lyrics to it to make the point.
“Herzlich tut mich verlangen” [Passion Chorale] usually attributed to Hans Leo Hassler (1564-1612), adapted and harmonized by Bach in the St. Matthew Passion. By my count, only the first eight bars of the melody are the same. The next 8 bars are where the Bach gets really interesting.
It is set in English to “O Sacred Head, Sore [or now] Wounded,” which is a hymn about the Crucifixion. It might have been very saddening for the Left to see Nixon elected (or re-elected in a landslide, no less), but to use it in a peaceful political context seems a bit self-dramatizing and narcissistic.
Of course a lot of artists and theater people are self-dramatizing and narcissistic. Speaking of which, have we talked about Meghan Markle recently?
Yes I also feel very estranged from public opinion these days. The gap is especially obvious when talking with Millennials and Gen Z’ers – there are often big unspoken differences in assumptions about the world and people in general between us. It makes me feel very, very old. And I’m not that old.
Even as recently as ten years ago I feel like my views and political opinions were well within the public mainstream albeit on the conservative side. I haven’t changed since then but the Overton window has shifted so far so quickly that I feel very much like a dissident these days. To express even the most basic traditional value in public these days feels dangerously close to the border of acceptable speech.
Of course a lot of this is an illusion since most people’s opinions haven’t changed but when your views have been systemically driven out of the public square, it’s hard not to feel like a radical social outlier.
So when I’m inevitably condemned and cancelled, I just hope that my contacts and assets accumulated over a lifetime will be enough to get me into one of the nicer federal gulags. 😐
How so many people can go through a lifetime and not have the ‘tragic’ view of humanity, I don’t get.
Basically, most aren’t up to what it takes to think. Thinking about, say, a social issue just brings up all sorts of evidence, viewpoints, etc., and the result is a confusion of thoughts. Not being able to formulate a defensible position leaves one vulnerable to the comfort of group think, not think think.
You’ve captured my sentiments exactly. A conservative living in the ultra red enclave of Martha’s Vineyard, even my guarded remarks are tells of my political leanings. Yet, over the years, there have been occasional opportunities for candid exchanges of views. I have watched that slip away over the past 4 years in the face of the rabid ochlocracy that has terrorized the market of public opinion, cheered on by irresponsible Democrat leadership intent on demonizing all conservatives as enemies of the state and abetted by a technocratic oligarchy looking to align itself with the new order. We now have people in significant positions of power, in politics and without, waxing poetically and longingly about the efficacy of a one-party system in China. I majored in Chinese studies and am well aware of the terror associated with the Red Guard during the Great Cultural Revolution; the tearing down of the ancients, the struggle sessions and the re-education camps. I lived in the Soviet Union from 1987-89 and saw what the Bolshevik Revolution had wrought. It breaks my heart to have to say to friends: “We defeated the Soviet Union to become the Soviet Union.” Yet here we are. A generation so marinated in Marxist ideology that they are blinded to reality. I agree with Ackler, Natan Sharansky’s recent essay is a rallying cry. Rational people who care deeply for our Republic must speak out and forcefully. The forces arrayed against us will continue to drive us inexorably toward a soft totalitarianism until we push back. BTW – Thank you for hosting this blog which I happened upon less than a year ago. Your posts are refreshing.
I can’t say I’ve lost friends. Possibly I have a tighter definition. But I have lost acquaintances who might fit in a looser definition.
I did civil rights work in MS in the Sixties. I was kidding a couple of long-lost colleagues that I was one of the few in such work whose next gig was as an Infantry officer with Airborne quals. End of that engagement. Didn’t count them as friends in the first place, under my definition. And here’s the deal for me; they were personally unpleasant upon my explaining my life stage. So, I don’t miss them.
But I had enough communication with them to see they were believers or promoters of the lies.
As to snowflakes: I don’t think H. Sap’s most recent adolescents are that weak. Can’t possibly be the case. They know two things; pretending to be shattered by whatever it is gives them power, and they’re supposed to be that weak (some think) to be highly evolved so perhaps they try to convince themselves.
In this environment, I am particularly glad my granddaughters don’t take no crap.
It is particularly painful to witness this Pravda Presidency being ecstatically extolled by the Pravda Press, this after the same malicious media ran a 24/7/52 demonizing its political opponents for four years. (And it continues to do so with even greater ferocity, if that were possible.)
In America.
And then see decent people, intelligent people, fine people be persuaded by this kind of brainwashing.
It’s more than demoralizing….
Anyway, FWIW (on the subject of election fraud):
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/03/the_sovereign_crime_of_industrial_scale_vote_fraud.html
H/T Powerline blog.
Last night I was reading an old Roger Ebert review about “The Limey” and ran across this line:
______________________________________
When Wilson gets off the plane from London, [Californians] might as well take their zeitgeist and stick it where the zeit don’t geist.
______________________________________
Which is good, hard-boiled advice, but tough in real life. I lost a lot of social connections when I changed politically.
The young don’t impress me. Sorry to be repetitive, but I hear a mess of nonsense from the old as well. The most obnoxious cretin in and among our Facebook circle is a man born in 1949. He has three post-secondary degrees, all of them from quite selective institutions.
“…painful to witness…”
Moreover, since no price was paid for the extraordinary, systematic and multi-dimensional perversion of justice perpetrated by the criminal gang of Obama/Biden/Comey/Clapper/Brennan/Rice/Lynch/Jarrett in the Russiagate catastrophe (i.e., catastrophe for the USA and the rule of law)—and it seems that no price WILL be paid—then the perpetrators, no doubt congratulating themselves on their “victory”, will be emboldened (have already been, actually) to plan and perpetrate, with the priceless assistance of their sycophantic media zealots, more crimes in the future.
Which is precisely what has transpired…. And they are now running the country.
Glenn Greenwald with another magnificent, if exceedingly depressing, magnum Opus:
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-do-big-media-outlets-so-often
H/T Powerline blog
(And yet, one must, somehow, have faith that ultimately, justice will triumph…and good sense will prevail.)
Dear RedPixel,
Keep the faith. You aren’t alone. I live around the corner. We should have a beer and shake our heads at the local MVY lunacies, because it is always 1974 around here. But some of the young people are discovering deliciously forbidden names like Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell and carefully signaling to each other that they…dissent. It’s the fogies you have to look out for.
Rgds
“Rational people who care deeply for our Republic must speak out and forcefully.”
I feel that, but I often get demoralized myself.
Not that I’m really “afraid” of any financial or social consequences. I’d rather be a wandering vagabond with no friends than be told what to think.
But I’m just surrounded by so many people who don’t even care, that’s the problem. They just want to acquiesce, to go along with the current fad, to keep the peace.
If I “spoke out” more, my acquaintances would just scroll past my posts with an eyeroll. My family members would just tell me I’m crazy and change the subject.
Is it worth the energy?
I’m coming to terms with the fact that the Zeitgeist has passed me by and that a new generation is increasingly taking over.
I stand out due to being unapologetically Deplorable. I won’t change and I watch the world with disquiet. I’m not at all convinced this new generation has a clue but the baton has been passed and there are limits to what I can do. I hope that things are not as dark as I fear. I also hope the new ones can learn fast.
There may well be a Darwinian moment approaching.
I share most of the feelings and thoughts described here, not surprisingly. But lately I’ve been having another one that really bothers me: I’m not sure I can love this country anymore. By that I don’t mean “is it worthy of love?” but rather: on the elemental personal level, am I still capable of feeling that love?
When I moved from left to right long ago, the realization that I did indeed very much love this country, in spite of its many flaws, was a significant factor. Up until quite recently–the last few years–I still felt that way, and can remember saying it a few times to leftist acquaintances as they vilified it. But now…I still love the place where I live, but the country as a whole…when I look around it I feel revulsion for the predominant culture and those who thrive in it.
As for friends–well, when I said “acquaintances” above, I was including a few people who used to be fairly close friends. Not much left of the friendships.
A few days ago a woman I know who’s about my age (70-ish) took to Facebook to express her horror at what she’d seen on the Grammies. I don’t know exactly what it was (I don’t watch the Grammies), maybe something to do with the notorious WAP “song”, but she called it indecent and offensive and said CBS was going to hear from her. I wanted to tell her “Don’t give them the pleasure. They rejoice in offending old white people like you.”
My wife and I live in Florida. Today, we walked into a local bakery/cafe. No one inside was wearing masks. We left ours in the car.
We speak truth in public without lowering our voices for fear of offending someone.
When your geographic location become too much to deal with, there are still places where the insanity has been held at bay.
Re: Grammys…
Mac:
The Grammy viewer ratings this year with WAP dropped over 50% from last year. I’m not so sure CBS is rejoicing to lose audience, including old white people.
–“TV Ratings: Grammy Awards Hit Record Low, Down Nearly 53% Compared to 2020’s Show:”
https://variety.com/2021/tv/news/grammy-awards-ratings-2021-1234930898/
Our side may be dispirited and understandably so, but we are still half the country. Even if they can steal an election on us and deplatform us wherever they can, they can’t make us watch their shows … yet.
No doubt the zeitgiest has passed me by as well but then, as it’s unworthy of respect, contempt is appropriate.
I too have recently noticed that the lyrics of a number of songs by liberal writers of yesteryear are especially insightful when viewed through a conservative prism.
Many do “grow up without a modicum of respect, are convinced that they are always in the right and believe that virtue means being offended at the drop of a hat” and deserve everything that’s going to befall them.
Like Oblio, I find James Lindsey’s thoughts over at New Discources of interest. I agree that mental dysfunction is endemic on the left. Once abandoned, common sense, which for the most part rests upon reality’s feedback, leaves people rudderless and, a ship without a rudder travels as the current dictates.
“Yet here we are. A generation so marinated in Marxist ideology that they are blinded to reality.” RedPixel
Indeed. Reality will present them with the opportunity to reexamine the left’s premises. Those who refuse to embrace that opportunity… will suffer the consequences. Whether consequence is imposed from the right, a natural result of disastrous policies or from China, consequence is coming.
“then see decent people, intelligent people, fine people be persuaded by this kind of brainwashing.” Barry Meislin
For brainwashing to be persuasive… it must resonate.
“There may well be a Darwinian moment approaching.”JimNorCal
The nature of reality is that, when ignored… it imposes consequence.
Some time back, I lost close acquaintance over bathrooms for the non-binary. It appears I had missed the phenomenon of the folks exploding messily on the sidewalks and in public transportation.
My point, that they’d been using public restrooms up until now with no problem went right by her. They were in a real fix and I was cruel not to want to do something about it.
She was not dumb. Or, perhaps I should say she had made more than the average good life choices, was well-read and a multi-tasking musician.
She is not one of a kind, in my circle of people I know to one degree or another.
Some of the most incredible things come from them. As, having studied White Fragility, one said there’s no way you can vote for Trump and be a Christian.
I keep saying, there’s a NEED to believe such things, whatever that need is, which overcomes the rational processes we are born possessing and, presumably, expect and are expected to use. They can’t be that dumb. But they are so certain they will cut off friends and family who don’t Get It.
I sure Do Not Get It.
JimNorCal, Geoffrey Britain:
The most likely consequence I see up-and-coming is the current economic bubble bursting.
I can’t say how that lands, but it won’t be good for the Biden administration.
“The most likely consequence I see up-and-coming is the current economic bubble bursting.”
Sure, that’s likely first and most noticeable for us.
But consider being a citizen of Taiwan. Or a citizen of an unlucky American city if miscalculations occur about US military/political weakness.
Neo: “However long I will or won’t be here, I care deeply. I care what happens to this country, to the world, to the human race.”
All this past. year, I’ve struggled to understand what is happening, and like some of you, see James Lindsay, Glenn Greenwald and others on the not-as-authoritarian left coming closest to explanations. John McWhorter, too, who denies being a conservative but seems to come close. It doesn’t matter, they know what it is, know that it must be resisted. If that’s even possible, this late. We should have been fighting it ever since Political Correctness first took hold.
It’s so painful to see family members, even and especially those who treat you kindly, being swept up in it, and just as painful to see your country falling apart. It looks like this American experiment has failed, or at least is failing, and it’s tragic not only for us but for the rest of the world. An Israeli I know emailed me after the election that he was terrified over the results and has had trouble sleeping ever since.
I hope history will show that this is a period of temporary insanity, recovering our principles eventually to become a stronger and more serious country, and not that we are evolving into another version of the PRC. Or is this what happens when religions lose their power and as humans search for meaning, find it in cults? I wish I knew.
shadow:
Solzhenitsyn would say it’s worth the effort even if you get no response from others.
Maetenloch:
Greetings once more!
As I reluctantly tell my children and grandchildren, there will never be another fair national election, which will lead to a one-party country, which will lead to a dictatorship. Only question is the timing of it. Therefore, I grieve for them. And feel selfishly blessed that God has allowed me, an old octogenarian, to live in this exceptional nation for as long as he has. For 235 plus years He has blessed us, but I fear the end is in sight.
Frank:
That’s fine – no apology needed. Here’s the older post, by the way.
Oblio:
I don’t subscribe to the “mental illness” theory at all. The people I know who are fully onboard seem otherwise well-adjusted. No doubt there is a group who are not, but that’s not what I am seeing. There is something else going on here – susceptibility to propaganda and groupthink. It might be cognitive laziness, or just not being exposed to other information, or the need to conform. None of those are mental illnesses.
Are they happy, integrated, kind, with plenty of emotional reserves, secure, open-minded and ready to extend compassion to people they don’t understand? Or are they brittle, anxious, neurotic, defensive, and quick to judge on the basis of someone else’s hot take or rumor? The urge to shut out troubling information and the need to follow groupthink and conform suggest more the latter.
My experience on deepest blue Martha’s Vineyard is more the latter. Or when I read alumni FB page comments from my Ivy League college or my prep school, you see a lot of evidence of people who are out of balance, and thinking back on it, always were in real life, too.
I know it is a shocking proposition, and hard to accept. I have been slow to come to it. Maybe if we call it “psychologically wounded,” it will resonate more. There are a lot of wounded people out there. Lindsay is quite insightful about the role of people with misplaced sympathy being drawn into other people’s soap opera, and so enabling and expanding it.
I think the anxieties afflicting (privileged) white liberals (actually progressives) in particular are real and profound. That is why surveys show they have the greatest commitment to the Woke Religion, and now why they are the most accepting of using violence to drive social and political change.
Oblio:
First of all, lack of those traits is NOT an indication of mental illness.
Secondly, they are quite happy and well-adjusted, for the most part.
In addition, the vast majority of people in general resist information that challenges their belief system. And conformity is a basic and normal human trait as long is it’s not extreme and highly anxious. I’ve never personally been high on that score, but that is somewhat unusual.
Oblio, neo:
I take neo’s side on this. I know plenty of liberals/progressives and I don’t find them mentally ill. I rather wish the “my opponents must be mentally ill” argument would die no matter who makes it and we could move on to the more difficult arguments about the merits.
Personally I consider “psychologically wounded” to be the human condition.
Humans are pack animals by evolution. Behaving as a pack animal is not mental illness. Though it sure can be ugly.
What’s going on is a villainous exploitation of pursuing evil ends by claiming “morality” and “ethics” (and “human rights”) as one’s goal and purpose.
IOW reframing normalcy and basic decency as “evil”, “racist”, “contemptible”, “reprehensible”, “selfish” and “criminal” so as to achieve political (masked as moral/ethical) ends; that is, to achieve power, or at least—should this not be achievable—to be as destructive as possible regarding the status quo (which is defined as “evil”).
IOW to recast the destruction of individuals, of society and—ultimately—of a country as a distinctly moral imperative.
This is nothing new.
(My own view is that this is a dangerous, even fatal, “built-in” weakness of societies/groups/peoples who hold messianic worldviews but in a vacuum—that is, in the absence of grounded—i.e., God-based—beliefs. More clearly, perhaps: if one takes “God” out of the messianic “equation” and replaces “God” with anything else, no matter how (theoretically) beautiful, satisfying, edifying, convincing or charismatic, but especially no matter how “perfect”—then it’s a recipe for dystopic disaster.)
Richard Nixon is a saint compared to some of the politicians today.
They have no sense of history because they have not been taught it. It would reveal to them both the bad and good sides of human nature, an immutable condition. The old Leno gambit of questioning young adults on the street about basic knowledge, revealed the appalling ignorance of so many of them. Meanwhile China produces six times the number of graduates in STEM majors. We will be left in the dust.
huxley: Thanks for that good news about the Grammies. Though that doesn’t mean that the people at CBS don’t like the idea of spitting on old white women.
Re progressives and mental illness: I agree with Neo and huxley. Most of the ones I know are as stable and healthy as anyone else, more than many. I can think of a couple of exceptions, one rather striking, but they are exceptions. And they are quite intelligent, certainly above average. What strikes me above all about them is that they are absolutely close-minded where politics and related matters are concerned. And part of the absoluteness of it is that open-mindedness is a significant part of their self-image. So that, in a sense by definition, they can’t be close-minded.
Long ago I heard some artist justify some nutty thing he was doing as valid art by saying “I am an artist, therefore what I do is art.” So progressives implicitly say “I am open-minded, therefore what I think is open-mindedness.”
Now you know how your grandparents felt in 1969 amidst all the social and political upheaval, with the spectacle of Woodstock playing in the background.
The USA has been devolving for the entirety of our lives.
Koyaanisqatsi is upon us.
Re progressives and mental illness: I agree with Neo and huxley. Most of the ones I know are as stable and healthy as anyone else, more than many.
“Mentally ill” v. ‘not mentally ill’ is a coarse way of categorizing people. Senile dementia, schizophreniform disorders, severe cognitive / intellectual deficits, and a few odds and ends (manic-depressive behaviors) encompass a low-single digit share of the population, and such people are not to be found among the propagators of the cancel culture. You have a larger fraction of the population who are difficult people and a trial to their families, but they’re only ‘ill’ in a metaphoric sense. Psychiatrists and psychologists put clinical labels on them – in some cases for convenience and in some cases because the guilds of these clinicians are eager to claim as much territory as they can (except when the cultural dynamics amongst the chatterati requires certain pretenses, as it does in re homosexuality and in re ‘transgenders’).
‘Stable’ and ‘healthy’ are not instructive terms here. They might be sensible if their decisions had a palpable impact on their lives, but that’s seldom the case in contemplating public affairs.
What you’re looking at is the emotional investments people have, emotional investments which are influenced by vectors of class, race, sex, domestic life, sundry cultural affiliations (South v. north, evengelical v. generic Christian v. secular), cohort, and bits of personal history (e.g. having had a lengthy episode of unemployment). In particular, though, you’re looking at how a certain professional-managerial type looks at the rest of us and looks at his ancestors. Most of these people have more liberal education than the rest of us, but they didn’t learn much from it; the history they know is mostly a set of caricatures. They skew young, but plenty are older; once young fools, they are now old fools.
Alvin Gouldner’s The New Class and Thomas Sowell’s Vision of the Anointed elucidate some of the problems we are facing. I have to say though, that it’s an amazement to me how the possessors, purveyors, and propagators of this have managed to sell their tripe to a formerly resistant vernacular public. I’m also amazed at how blatantly coercive, intellectually crude, and mendacious their methods are nowadays.
Art Deco: “once young fools, they are now old fools.” Indeed. As I observed more than 15 years ago:
https://www.lightondarkwater.com/2004/08/sunday-night-journal-august-29-2004.html
I see the room takes the other side of the proposition. Well, it’s not the first time that has happened, and I suspect it won’t be the last.
Art Deco—yes, the description was crude, so your criticism is just. It was an intentionally low resolution way of describing how people get caught up in endless and self reinforcing feelings of disorientation, anxiety, fear, and anger. Lindsay thinks such feelings are being cultivated by the truly pathological. Dramatizing stories of trauma, even fictional stories, is part of the method. Hence the endless supply of trauma hoaxes which are yet instantly believed as reifying an existing anxiety.
huxley—yes, being psychologically wounded is part of being human. I guess I would distinguish between being wounded and then healing enough that you do not lose functionality and holding on to wounds, cultivating them and never healing, and then using the wounds as a reproach to the world.
Perhaps the sample of my own experience is unlucky. One can never know. I am absolutely not suggesting a Soviet-style medicalization of disagreement.
But I do wonder: how many of the apparently happy and well adjusted people we know have medicalized themselves through prescription medications against anxiety, depression, and other psychological conditions? Based on the sales numbers, I believe that is extremely widespread and has been since before the days of running to the shelter of Mother’s little helpers. Add to that people who self-medicate with alcohol while presenting a jolly face to the world.
When the Woke campus snowflakes present their lists of demands, they almost include a request for enhanced mental health services. They say they are suffering. I think we should perhaps believe them.
Woke go “wah!” We be suffering!
“There is a balm in Gilead”
https://youtu.be/okl2XbTM7xM
Oblio:
There’s a difference between the mindset of the people who are driving this – the activists – and those receiving it. It is sometimes a rather big difference, actually. The latter people, the receivers or followers, tend to be more moderate and less politically involved. For the most part, the ones I know have always been quite well-adjusted and happy and are not taking meds. There is no correlation in my experience between any of those negative traits and people who sign on to this kind of thinking for any number of reasons. If anything, what I’d say they have in common is a lack of curiosity about what the other side thinks or why, and a satisfaction with their own lives and accomplishments.
Leaders of the left and far left are different, I think. Or they often are – more driven, more troubled. But not always. I happen to have known some far leftists in were in academia and were amazingly well-adjusted, happy people with great home lives. They were more into the abstract, theoretical underpinnings of far leftism but were definitely leftists and were among the most well-adjusted and happy people I’ve ever known.
Sometimes leftists are following in a family tradition, as was true for example of David Horowitz. He of course had a wakeup call later on.
Back in the 1980’s there was a “Satanic panic“ and witch hunt for sexual predators and devil worshippers in day care centers. “Show me on the doll…” implanting false memories, hypnosis, believe the children..
People’s lives were destroyed and wrongly sent to prison. It eventually abated, though I’m not sure how.
Here’s to hoping the current mania about racism, sexual identity and ‘reimagining’ law enforcement is more like that episode than a tool to implement a communist revolution. Or, maybe the witches won.
Neo,
I don’t doubt your description of the people you know. I thought we were talking about the distinctive Geist of the Zeit as being characterized by people (especially young people) who fly off the handle at the slightest check and rage on people for having the temerity to disagree politically.
Mental illness, apologies to our hostess, can have a pretty broad range of behaviors. Some might consider stamp collecting a good start on the road to institutionalization.
But here’s a thought experiment: Let’s say a guy is convinced the moon is made of green cheese. Can’t be convinced otherwise. I exclude a faked moon landing, since that would serve an existing paranoia and distrust.
What does this belief, this delusion, do for him. I submit it rarely, if it’s his only flaw in viewing objective reality, serves him or another part of his personality.
OTOH, believing that republicans are white supremacists, while equally delusional, serves the believer’s….what? You don’t have to believe something to profess it as a way into a club.
But whether it’s CRT, instant offendedness, OrangemanBad, Trump killed half a million people, it appears people BELIEVE and cannot be convinced otherwise.
I have to think the true believers BELIEVE because they need to. It builds their self-image into something they find laudable. It makes them superior. Which leads to the question of why whatever and whoever they are is inadequate to their needs. Aren’t you already compassionate? Haven’t you done….? Generous? You’ve always been sympathetic to the underdog, it’s not new. You’ve resented the bad guys all along, right? Tried to right wrongs as you saw them? Got a decent education, spend some time in reading.
What is deficient that this complex of irrational political and social beliefs is necessary….when it didn’t used to be? What requires you to be so hostile to people who, not so long ago, would have appeared to you as normal? How does this serve you?
If we finally convince our friend that the moon is not made of green cheese, his primary concern will likely be, “Crap. How many people did I tell this to?”
You, you true believer, what do you lose if you find you’re wrong and have been, and have been most hurtfully and angrily?
There is such a thing as spiritual illness, too. Maybe that’s what’s going on. I’m easily persuaded that that’s part of it, maybe even the entirety.
Christ asked the invalid at the pool, “Do you want to be healed?” Not everyone does. Quite aside from the necessity of first recognizing that one is in fact unwell, there must further be the will and desire to be rid of the ailment, though health can come at a certain price.
Phillip. I agree. My question is what the price is. What do you lose by being healed? Do you go back to where you were, or where a normal person would be if you’re healed? What was the problem with that? Were you so deficient?
Neo things have gotten so much more insane than the Obama years, that they seem mild in comparison. At least Obama was pro-free speech and said so. We were not fans of Obama of course but wow, who could have known things would go the way they have. Obama did open the door for a lot of this madness of course but it is still astonishing.
I do think there are young people who aren’t on board with the “woke” but they are likely not the ones going to universities or into teaching or the media. At any rate, I know how you feel about old friendships being strained. It is worse than ever. I have people worrying I am now QAnon because of the insanity of the anti-Trump media painting QAnon as a bigger deal than it is. At any rate, hang in there! There are many people alarmed by what’s happening and over time, I’m hoping they find ways to speak out.
Richard, I was thinking of how people get into ruts sometimes, even with their infirmities – emotional, psychological, spiritual, what have you. On a spiritual level in particular, one may think of what one would have to let go in order to be saved, essentially, or in order to fulfill the will of God, and might find oneself just too tied to one thing or another. It might be a particular vice or sin that gives one just too much pleasure to dispense with, an addiction essentially. Or a habit of life that is going to be a stumbling block down the road to spiritual progress. Or it could be a strong desire or ambition with which one simply doesn’t want to part and can’t be reconciled to the fact that this needs to be set aside in order to follow the way of the Cross.
My priest describes it as that situation when the abnormal, through long habituation, has in the end become a person’s new ‘normal’. People can in a way get comfortable within a routine, even if it may be pretty messed up objectively. ‘Better the devil you know’ sort of thing.
Phillip
That seems close. But my view is that these are new devils. CRT is new to most folks. What is it that causes them to take it on as if it’s God’s revealed truth when, maybe last month, they first heard of it?
Why is it God’s revealed truth that HCQ, of which they never heard and know nothing and probably cannot pronounce, is not safe or efficacious?
Why, being challenged on such issues, to they come close to exploding in anger?
Somewhere, there was a hole in their personalities/souls/selves which, it would seem, is fulfilled by such irrationality and anger. But most of them seemed to be getting along….
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The ‘Limey’ was a great movie. I really miss Ebert! Peter Fonda played so well the classic tone deaf elite individual that just did not ‘get it’. Brilliant and so realistic.
One of the advantages to living down under is that our movie theatres are open and they are showing a lot of British, Aussie and New Zealand films. I would like to recommend ‘The Dry’. I good slow burn film that will get your mind off the current state of the States.
Australia gets it and has pronounced that the emperor has no clothes. They are straight forward on reporting about the lack of mental acuity Biden has, and how incapable he is in acting as president. It is refreshing to see a media that is doing it’s job.
As an American with family and friends in the Twin Cities (George Floyd) I worry about their safety and the States in general. The corrupt and clueless people running the country, and printing money like it was going out of style, I fear it will be 1930’s Germany.
Neo, I understand your comments about friends. In order to maintain friendships, I do not talk about my views on the direction I see the States going. It is is very sobering how willing the people in power are to destroy the country for power and economic benefit.
On an optimistic note, I am impressed with Individual/groups of States that are suing the administration, changing their voting procedures, opening up, and pushing back against the over reaching federal government. It is the States that have the power to wreck havoc with the Democrat’s agenda of a racist, job killing, environmental biodiversity destruction, and promotion of mediocrity in education in the country. May the States be successful.