Age of Evil

There's something really disheartening going on here, which isn't something I've been dealing with so much as holding at bay. A lot of what gets written here is pointing out irrationality where it exists, ridiculing it a bit, and hopefully at least getting a couple laughs out of the deal. But much of this is just therapeutic exercise for the author (and I imagine many readers as well). To be honest, I am deeply disturbed to my core about all this rampant irrationality.

They say many people are traumatized when they grow up and realize that their parents and other adult figures in their lives are not exceptional; that they are just regular people. Children grow up sort of idolizing adults and revering them (or at least they used to). It's understandable how it could be a difficult perception shift. But what about growing up and realizing half of your fellow countrymen don't even rightfully deserve to called human? I know that dehumanizing your opponent is the hallmark of extremism, but how else do you describe people who dismiss their unique faculties that make them human? What is most alarming has not been the people who are not good at discerning truth, or even the people who easily fall for pleasant lies, but that people can have truth presented directly before them, and they carry on as if it never happened. How do you account for that in your worldview? How do you not become militant? The apparent solution seems to be, "we must take the world by force, because it won't be reasoned with."

Some examples, which you're all familiar with: The Project Veritas videos are damning. Not only do they show people on tape detailing the crimes they commit, they also prove that the media outlets and authorities aren't even trying to do proper investigative journalism. Liberals, over half of America, just pretend they don't exist! And if you really push them, they might say, "oh, they're fake." It's that easy! The same with the tens of thousands of leaked Democrat emails, which showed how they rigged their own primary, among other scandals (like pay-to-play). Totally dismissed by the left. But then the reversal, that those emails were the product of Trump colluding with Russia to rig the election, now that's a belief they can get behind! It makes your head spin, and we could go on recounting this like this forever. They're now to the point of literally saying "objective truth is racist."

So there are two dynamics here. One is that people will intentionally ignore truth so that they can embrace nontruth. But the other is that people are doing everything possible to spread lies. What dynamic does that sound like? I'm not a particularly religious person, but I was raised Catholic, and to me this sounds a lot like the forces of Satan, who was the slanderer, or spreader of lies and chaos. That is literally what is happening here. That may make things sound even worse, but it should actually grant a degree of re-assurance. This is nothing people haven't dealt with before; it's a battle as old as time! Writers like Brett Stevens, who is heavily influenced by Nietzsche, believe that we have long left the Age of Reason and now find ourselves in the Age of Ideology. I wonder if we aren't more rightly in the Age of Evil. I don't know if "ideology" quite conveys the predominant characteristic of outright rejection of presented truths. But then, maybe that's exactly what ideology means: a belief system that perpetuates despite all apparent reality. It would have to suppress truth on principle.

In the last few years I've taken the time to read at least the major dystopian future novels, and they seem to have all missed the ability of people to just discard unpleasant truth like rain off of windshield wipers. 1984's Doublethink is similar but doesn't capture the phenomenon. In doublethink a person can hold two contradicting ideas at the same time. But the reality is there aren't two contradicting ideas; they've routed out the annoying contradiction completely. [There needs to be a new dystopian novel written to describe this.] I tested this on my facebook some time ago. A liberal was preaching abut Trump not disavowing right-wing violence at Charlottesville. I wrote, "Trump should have said something like this," and then pasted the relevant text of Trump's speech. He took my bait, and asked why Trump didn't say something like that. Then I closed the trap, and told him it actually was Trump's actual comment. He never commented after that, and I knew why. If he commented, it would mean he'd have to acknowledge he read it. By ignoring it, he could pretend he'd never read it and flush the incident away; it didn't happen. It was amusing to see a few months later he again posted something similar. This was his cognitive dissonance. He had surely washed our encounter from his mind, but there was something somewhere bugging him, so he posted the claim again to reassure himself.

You can easily see this in the Biblical metaphor. These people don't want to have to deal with truth. They'd way rather hear the pleasant lies of Satan. When Satan has his way, civilization crumbles, and that is exactly what is happening. I mean this guy is a freaking math professor, and he refuses to know what words the president really spoke, which is easily verified, because he wants to fuel the hate in his heart. If math professors can throw away all logic, what hope does anyone else have?

I think this is the great failure of direct democracy. Evil forces tell whatever lies they can to the public to get their votes, which is the key to power. The people are so overwhelmed with lies they can't rationally tell them apart, so they stick to whatever makes them feel the best. Whoever sells the best emotions gets the prize. Thus democracy doesn't do the one thing it pretends to do, which is to distribute decision-making to ensure some rationality. In fact, it ensures that rationale decisions are unlikely! And in addition, everyone is miserable because they're saturated with lies. Everything becomes fake and debauchery takes hold. Good people won't pick the right side, because they just assume everyone is equally lying. So even when you have a compelling case, it doesn't matter. No one trusts that you're not just making up a sweet-sounding lie, like everyone else.

I've got no positive silver-lining to finish with. These are dark times, and there is no easy way out. Ultimately, we're not going to reason our way out of this. We aren't going to "wake up" enough people and set things right. Deception is inherent to our political system. We're only going to change things by force, or we just wait around long enough until the thing collapses on itself, and see what we can do from there. So our options are war or societal collapse. Is that it? As Captain Kirk exclaimed, "I demand a third option!" Does the good book actually give a precedent for defeating overwhelming evil?