(I wrote this in response to an old professor who asked for my opinions on national politics. He asked because, in his words, I was conservative. I am no such thing. Nor am I a liberal. I find both equally reprehensible; only fools marry themselves to idols.)
My dear friend,
Thank you for your thoughtful note. I appreciated both your reflections and your response to your circle, and I value that you’re trying to engage across perspectives — not just in theory, but with emotional and intellectual vulnerability. You’re looking for the roots, not just the symptoms, and that matters. So I want to answer in kind.
You raised two topics. I’ll take up only one here; the other I’ll address when I desire to, and right now I don’t. Forgive me for that.
Firstly, I must inform you that I am not a conservative. Nor am I a liberal. The closest doctrine I could honestly be aligned with would be something amalgamated from second-wave feminism, anarcho-capitalism, Kropotkin’s faith in mutual aid, and a deeply held belief that humans are inherently good creatures. I hold, beyond all truths, that all living and mortal creatures mostly wish the best for themselves and those in their tribe — even if it’s the lamb who has one bad, final day. I also believe we are as lazy as we are clever, which produces a variety of outcomes.
The right has strayed as much as the left, and most people can see the oligarchy is operating just as designed. Division is its battle cry. Just ask the Black Panthers.
The center has been disowned by both mainstream parties, and the disenfranchised — right wingers and left wingers alike — become prey to sabotage-minded bots whispering from server farms on foreign shores. YouTubers and podcasters have replaced credentialed journalists for a lot of people. A not-insignificant share of Boomer-aged respondents on a poll I saw a few years back thought Facebook.com was both a web browser and a news site. Tim Pool, a very successful political YouTuber, was hosted on a media company that turned out to be funded — to the tune of millions — by a shell tied to Russian state media. He says he was an unwitting dupe. That may even be true. Somehow that’s worse. (The downfall of journalism likely began with Hunter S. Thompson and Gonzo, but I digress.)
But why would otherwise reasonable people be compelled to believe these grifters, or mistake a social media site for both Google and the New York Times?
The conspiracy theorists keep being proven correct often enough to test the authority of those who decide what makes something a conspiracy theory in the first place. In more than zero cases, perfectly reasonable criticisms of various policies and their thinly veiled goals get touted as conspiracy by those making money off the horrible thing being imposed on the public. Just a few confirmed occurrences, and people start to question why those particular authorities were handed the power to decide this for everyone. Sadly, because people are narrow in their vision, this becomes a blanket rule for everything. “Trust, but verify” and “do the research” went from left-wing catchphrases to the secret passcodes of counterculture, right-leaning internet dwellers.
From where I’m sitting, a lot of it starts when the American public found out about MK-Ultra. It was real. The government admits it was real. The CIA really did do the thing with the guy and the chicken and the weird sex stuff and the LSD with the two-way mirror in that hotel room in San Francisco way back in the ’50s. They really did dose an entire city with a crop-duster full of LSD in the mid-’60s, and then wondered why the “Summer of Love” happened in the Upper Haight a few years later.
As you are well aware, Watergate was big news around that time. We had the Manson Family, the Unabomber, the Moonies, and handsome ole’ Jim Jones. Save for our tragic Harvardite Ted, all of those people and movements came out of the same general place. Funny, that. It’s almost as if conducting a large psychedelic experiment on an entire city’s populace might result in strange behaviors. That region also gave us Silicon Valley, and the highest concentration of high-functioning autistics the world has ever known.
Maybe LSD makes people autistic, not the vaccines.
Then add the first televised war, the birth of Kleinrock’s ARPANET in 1969 and the Pandora’s box it turned out to be (“modernity and its consequences” comes to mind), droves of women entering the workforce — driving down wages and justifying inflation — joking about drugging the water supply, and then quite literally putting drugs in the water supply. Killing pet birds with burning Teflon, but also sending some men to the moon. But also: do you or someone you know suffer from mesothelioma? You may be entitled to compensation.
Now, I say all of this to mean that we have been accelerating toward what I call the blasé-faire political era.
We are so oversaturated with consumer media, clickbait headlines, and 24-hour news cycles that we have reached a point of fatigue. So, whatever. Doesn’t matter what you believe. Your vote doesn’t count. You don’t matter. Order DoorDash and tip 4%, dab some concentrates, watch Netflix, and call it “self care.”
There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, right?
We are more literate as a society than ever, we have more access to information than any culture in all of human history, and it has disabled us. Humans generally aren’t built to hold many contradictions in their heads at once, and the advertising firms — and the political campaign managers down the hall — understand this well, exploiting the feature on schedule. After decades of a culture absolutely saturated in media, we find ourselves with so many personal “truths” that every hallucinatory fantasy is enshrined as reality.
In just my 35 years it has been a constant barrage. Doomsayer headlines littering every outlet, telling me I shouldn’t bother making plans for the future. Every other month, another “end of the world” scenario.
The future is dead. You will have nothing and be happy.
Buy Funko Pops. Wear the MAGA hat, ironically or not. Wish the days were simpler. Admire Cybertrucks. Listen to mumble rap. Consume TikTok brain-rot slop. Get your life advice from chatbots and teenagers on Reddit. Goon to OnlyFans models putting on ever-more-depraved exhibitions for ever-less pay. Everyone is valid — but if you don’t agree with me, you’re literally Hitler. Blame avocado toast for millennial debt and online dating for the male loneliness epidemic. Never mention Occupy Wall Street, or who was president when Standing Rock started.
Refuse Starbucks over the “queer libs” — never mind that it busts unions and offers its baristas no real insurance. Swear by Black Rifle for its patriarchy and American chauvinism — never mind that it’s donated to Obama, Biden, and Planned Parenthood. Insist that trans lives matter, then go irate when someone says “all lives matter,” because that phrase exposes the diversity-through-exclusion underneath the first one. Both crews are running the same play.
Yes, the left fucked up. Identity politics is a cancer on the minds of tribalistic Americans with the attention spans of geriatric goldfish. And the right played right into it. The blue cop makes over half the population feel like they don’t belong; the red cop gives them a new crew to hang with.
Ben Shapiro likes to say “facts don’t care about your feelings.” It turns out people’s feelings don’t give a single toot about no facts.
Politicians know this. Journalists know this. Advertisers know this. I know this. You know this. It’s quite undeniable. We have to literally train ourselves not to react emotionally to new data — that’s what a classical education is all about. Learning how to learn, and discovering debate not as a method to “win” but as a way to broaden understanding. A distinction you understand both academically and intuitively. The problem is, people with this understanding in their bones take for granted that pretty much no one else has it.
Critical, non-emotive thinking is not innate. It’s trained into you — and it only becomes habitual if you had the aptitude for it to start with.
Most people never learn how to do that, yet they all have platforms to be as loud as they want about their factual feelings. This is how you get a crumbling Democratic party. This is how you get Trump… again.
You expose it for what it is: a grift. And you do it with empathy, or at least sympathy, for the average American experience. Only about half of Americans even hold a passport, and far fewer have used one to leave the country in the last year, if ever. They read all the time — very literate as a cohort — but comprehend at a third-grade level. They can’t do math beyond the tip on a bar tab. They read headlines, not articles.
And I say all of this, but they aren’t stupid per se. They’re overwhelmed by information, and they can’t imagine what they haven’t experienced for themselves — particularly seeing as we now have at least two generations whose imagining has been outsourced wholesale to the makers of consumer media. How are we to expect them to envision the future? Couple that with a news and political landscape that seems bent on gaslighting everyone, team red or team blue, and no wonder things are the way they are.
Realizing this, internalizing it, and then actually listening to people might be enough to help change things. MAGA people have been telling the Dems why they take their positions since before 2016. No one listened; they called them deplorables instead.
Meanwhile, anyone even remotely turned off by politics doesn’t care. Fuck it — the world’s gonna end anyway, at least that’s what they keep telling us. Might as well party.
Blasé-faire, baby.
I hope this makes sense,
Alaric