Peak Delusion

The good and the bad news is that we seem to have hit peak insanity. Good because it can't get any worse (right?) and bad because it is really hard to retain much faith in humanity in the face of such widespread lunacy. The thing about peaks is we can't even really be sure we've hit the top. (Or maybe it's the bottom in this case.) I thought we had already hit peak lunacy after the PissGate / Russian dossier fiasco. I believed that is was so clearly insane that the rabid left would surely realize how carried away they have become. But that didn't happen. I guess it's a bit like supposing that this time the schizophreniac will surely realize the voices aren't real. They've basically memory-holed the entire incident. They can't update their worldview to accommodate the new information because they reject it like a failed organ transplant.

For the last couple days I've been engaged in a long -- and highly unproductive -- debate with a couple of left-wingers on facebook. The argument is in regards to someone who posted the recent Washington Post article about Trump revealing sensitive information to the Russian Foreign Minister. My major point has been that, because this is wholly unsubstantiated and refuted by every known involved party, that means we have to question the sole source of this information: the Washington Post. This isn't complicated logic. It's an understanding that all humans innately possess. If someone tells us something and we can't independently verify it, we must consider the integrity of the person giving the information. Naturally I try remind the other party of the false Trump stories with which the mainstream media has already been burned and humiliated, such as the dossier. Never do they respond directly to my mention of those past embarrassments. They either respond only to other points of the statement I made or indirectly as if I had made an entirely different argument altogether. The major evidence at hand -- that the media has provably lost credibility in the matter -- doesn't even seem to register at all.

If you read the Anonymous Conservative blog (linked in the bloglist on the sidebar) then you are familiar with Bob, the case study that led AnonCon to many of his viewpoints on the functionality of the amygdala as well as how it can malfunction. Bob suffered routine humiliation during childhood, and his amygdala became so sensitized, the pain pathways so reinforced, that his psyche seems to have responded by routing painful stimuli away from the pain pathways. AnonCon would experiment on Bob. He deduced something of a formula for what would trigger Bob's amygdala. When used to full effect, Bob would become completely overwhelmed, announce he felt ill, and have to isolate himself and lie down for a spell. When he returned he would be completely refreshed and seemingly incognizant of the interaction that had driven him over the edge. His brain seemed to be coping with the painful stimulus by rejecting it altogether.

This is all eerily similar to what I observe going on with hysterical leftists. All the information that should help them balance the reality of world events against their internal biases isn't there: they've rejected it. All that is left is bias. They respond irrationally when you remind them of the facts regarding the repeated failures of the mainstream liberal narrative because they truly are confused by what you are saying. They filter out the painful part and what is left doesn't make any sense.

The psychological disorder identified by AnonCon has now become a sociological malady which infects a disturbing portion of the voting public. Democracy and rampant hallucination cannot coexist. Not for a very long time, anyway. Reality always catches up in the end. So where does that put us in the context of the Russia investigation? Sociologically it's a disaster. Politically it might be a godsend for the embattled Trump presidency. As mentioned in yesterday's post, it is unlikely anything significant will come out against Trump's team but there are multiple opportunities for the liberal narrative to be routed or for their own scandals to re-emerge. Also, it lowers the threshold for conservatives to push for their own independent investigations. The threshold is either mass hysteria or none at all. Think of how thin the justification for investigation is. There is no evidence of collusion. They say we need to investigate to find the evidence. We need to investigate to find the evidence that might justify an investigation. But it's even worse than that. Not only is there no evidence of a crime, there is no hypothesis for a crime. I've not been able to get a single liberal to even try to explain what exactly the collusion would be. The scenario is something like this, where a policeman knocks on your door.

Police: We'd like to talk to you. You're under investigation for a murder.
You: Okay, do you have any reason to believe I might have committed the murder?
Police: No, but we need to investigate you to see if any evidence exists.
You: Okay, well whose murder are you investigating?
Police: We're not sure yet. We need to investigate to see who you might have murdered.

This is, of course, ludicrous, and is canonical state tyranny. There is no evidence of collusion. There is no hypothesis for collusion. But it will be investigated anyway. The really troublesome aspect of all this is that even if the investigation ends up as a complete routing of the left's accusations; it won't even faze most of them. They'll just move on, still enraged by Trump's Russia ties, still incognizant of the abundance of countering reality. I guess we can only hope that there are enough rational people in the middle that this will allow us to finally marginalize the hysterical left. If that isn't the case, and a majority of the population exhibits incurable delusion, then we are, generally speaking, in a whole lot of trouble, and the world's first modern experiment with democratic self-rule will have reached its conclusion.