When they say “Trump derangement syndrome” it always makes me think of the deranged shit that Trump does. Like trying to start wars with Iran and Venezuela and then practically demanding the Nobel peace prize.
It’s a legit thing though. I live in Boston. There are people here you meet occasionally who literally… talk about nothing about how awful Trump is and are totally obsessed with him to the point of alienating everyone around them. Who agonize over every tweet he makes everyday as if it is the end of the world.
It’s sort of like how Howard Stern used to get better ratings from people who hated him more than those that loved him. Some folks entire identity is now hating Trump. And half of what they hate is just bullshit, lies and imagination running wild and has little to do with reality.
Too many folks are totally detached from reality really. Living in social media bubbles convincing themselves of their persecution from imaginary enemies. A constant stream of nonsense that is breaking their brains and they bring it IRL and refuse to social with you if you don’t reinforce their preexisting beliefs.
There is a growing contingent of folks who think the world should conform to the reality in their head. Not that they should confirm to the reality outside of it. It’s scary AF. And these folks often think violence is totally justified to make other people conform to the nonsense in their heads.
Our species broadly is far more concerned with narratives and stories than reality. This is how our brains work on a very fundamental level.
People think their brains are tools for determining reason and logic, and I suppose with exercise and effort they can be, but it’s not what we’re designed for.
We have brains designed to tell stories to explain how you feel, or to feel things about stories supplied to you. That’s it. It doesn’t need to make sense or have logical consistency, the brain doesn’t give a shit about consistency or reason, it just wants to tie loose ends together to create a coherent narrative that you can use to survive.
See huge paw prints by your watering hole? Feel worried? Your brains writes the most likely story for how those prints got there and why you’re scared. In that situation the story-telling can save your life. In our modern, complex world we have the exact same brains structurally, but the clues and emotional signals are vastly more complicated and others supply us stories for why we feel those feelings, and brains soak that shit up like sponges. We take the narratives supplied to us and twist them and turn them and find ways to fit them into our own lives because this is how our minds work. The whole time thinking you’re figuring something out or doing something good for yourself or your future. Like you’re part of the story.
We have no future until we start accepting the weaknesses and flaws in our own minds and can set up policy-level safeguards against ourselves, but I don’t see that happening since the people who should be managing these safeguards are as fallible as any of us.
I remind myself all the time that as mad as I may feel, as righteous and justified and endangered, that violence on the level that might change things will fuck up my life and the life of everyone I care about and a whole lot of people I don’t know but don’t deserve it. Are the Cubans better off after the cuban revolution? Maybe, hard to say. Were the Soviets better off after the Russian revolution? Again, hard to say. The French are better off today than they were before the French revolution, but they also got Napoleon right after that.
I mean, you can easily point to the atrocities that the USA was built on and feel a deep sense of shame, and we collectively should, we should remember the horrors of the past. But having a social democracy exist and survive as long as it did was proof of concept of an experiment that was not supposed to work. It’s proof that we can do better if we unify just a little. Yes, it could have been better or lasted longer, but we don’t exactly have a lot of alternatives. We’re fucking animals. The fact that we can do any of this at all is amazing.
But we can easily play this “would we have been better off” game forever. Back until we first started killing each other for thousands of years which led to our brains developing into this absurd thing we have now. Would we have been better off if the USA was never founded? Would the Native Americans have been better off? Would the Europeans? (Read Pastwatch, good speculative ideas on all this.)
The reality is though that we’re here now and we’re better off as a society than we’ve ever been. Yes, there are bad things happening, but it’s in the decline. We just feel bad because we don’t live long enough to see that long arc of history and cannot see that tangible, powerful decline in war, disease, suffering, murder and rape and so many other every-day horrors we all had to live with for literally thousands and thousands of years. I can easily count the number of times my house has been raided, and that number is one time, and it wasn’t even an armed militia, it was just some random, confused person. That’s a MASSIVE improvement historically speaking.
What I think is fucking with a lot of our heads is that we imbibe in fictions without taking away the good lessons and grounded, material lessons. We read novels or watch Star Trek and believe that we’re entitled to the stars, that we have this glorious, unified future just around the corner, that all we have to do is make X policies and elect candidate Y and we will have world peace and food replicators.
Nah dog, we’re not going out there. We’re not going to get better than this. Maybe our non-human descendants in a very, very long time from now, but currently, creating a democracy that lasts more than 200 years might be the absolute best we can do.
Our species broadly is far more concerned with narratives and stories than reality. This is how our brains work on a very fundamental level.
Yep. Thanks for mentioning this. It’s really the root of it. The existing social structure is reinforcing/escalating our worst psychological biases. The opposite of what many of us think it should be doing. At least for me… going to school was all about deprogramming all the emotional bias bullshit that my parents and home-town idiots I grew up with believed. The internet also helped a lot with that. It was about getting outside of the bubble.
But it seem around 10 years ago this all shifted. and now education and internet is all about reinforcing those biases. I meet so many ‘well-educated’ people that have such provincial/delusional beliefs about the world now… it’s terrifying. And this is folks on my ‘own side’ of leftism/liberalism… I can only imagine it’s equal/worse among the right. A huge uptick in delusional and magical thinking, and people using their education to justify their crazy thoughts… instead of using their education to dismantle/prevent their crazy thoughts.
I’m not so sure good policy is the way to do it… but I do know from political experience that good policy is something EVERYONE hates. Precisely because it doesn’t benefit them exclusively.
I’m not so sure good policy is the way to do it… but I do know from political experience that good policy is something EVERYONE hates. Precisely because it doesn’t benefit them exclusively.
Our problem we’re butting up against is this, that as individuals we are resistant to the bitter medicine we know will help us. So we have no choice but to elect leaders we know will trick the population in some way, but we never know what’s a trick and what’s a power grab for personal gain. (Present admin excluded, they’re a painfully transparent consequence of our society abandoning community and education.)
But we had a social democracy in the US that lasted more than 200 years. That’s not a bad run, it’s proof of concept. Maybe the USA will splinter and fracture, but from that will come new ideas, new areas of democratic progress and new alliances and power groups who now know that such a thing is possible.
I don’t think we’re going to have a unified world, at least not in our lives and certainly not with our existing social systems, but war and disease and atrocities broadly are on a decline across the globe. It may spike again in places and at times, but despite that we are living in an age of unprecedented peace and prosperity, that shows that something we’re doing is working, but we have to manage and maintain it by resisting apathy and nihilism. If we stop seeing the positives and stop caring, we backslide to raiders looting our houses and raping and pillaging our communities.
History shows us people only learn to do the right thing after things have gone horrible horrible wrong.
we had a worldwide depression and war that uttered in 80 years of peace. we will have another one before things can truly improve. the current generations are all far too removed from the consequences of their actions.
When they say “Trump derangement syndrome” it always makes me think of the deranged shit that Trump does. Like trying to start wars with Iran and Venezuela and then practically demanding the Nobel peace prize.
It’s a legit thing though. I live in Boston. There are people here you meet occasionally who literally… talk about nothing about how awful Trump is and are totally obsessed with him to the point of alienating everyone around them. Who agonize over every tweet he makes everyday as if it is the end of the world.
It’s sort of like how Howard Stern used to get better ratings from people who hated him more than those that loved him. Some folks entire identity is now hating Trump. And half of what they hate is just bullshit, lies and imagination running wild and has little to do with reality.
Too many folks are totally detached from reality really. Living in social media bubbles convincing themselves of their persecution from imaginary enemies. A constant stream of nonsense that is breaking their brains and they bring it IRL and refuse to social with you if you don’t reinforce their preexisting beliefs.
There is a growing contingent of folks who think the world should conform to the reality in their head. Not that they should confirm to the reality outside of it. It’s scary AF. And these folks often think violence is totally justified to make other people conform to the nonsense in their heads.
Our species broadly is far more concerned with narratives and stories than reality. This is how our brains work on a very fundamental level.
People think their brains are tools for determining reason and logic, and I suppose with exercise and effort they can be, but it’s not what we’re designed for.
We have brains designed to tell stories to explain how you feel, or to feel things about stories supplied to you. That’s it. It doesn’t need to make sense or have logical consistency, the brain doesn’t give a shit about consistency or reason, it just wants to tie loose ends together to create a coherent narrative that you can use to survive.
See huge paw prints by your watering hole? Feel worried? Your brains writes the most likely story for how those prints got there and why you’re scared. In that situation the story-telling can save your life. In our modern, complex world we have the exact same brains structurally, but the clues and emotional signals are vastly more complicated and others supply us stories for why we feel those feelings, and brains soak that shit up like sponges. We take the narratives supplied to us and twist them and turn them and find ways to fit them into our own lives because this is how our minds work. The whole time thinking you’re figuring something out or doing something good for yourself or your future. Like you’re part of the story.
We have no future until we start accepting the weaknesses and flaws in our own minds and can set up policy-level safeguards against ourselves, but I don’t see that happening since the people who should be managing these safeguards are as fallible as any of us.
The founders tried that and look where it got us.
I remind myself all the time that as mad as I may feel, as righteous and justified and endangered, that violence on the level that might change things will fuck up my life and the life of everyone I care about and a whole lot of people I don’t know but don’t deserve it. Are the Cubans better off after the cuban revolution? Maybe, hard to say. Were the Soviets better off after the Russian revolution? Again, hard to say. The French are better off today than they were before the French revolution, but they also got Napoleon right after that.
Things will get worse before they get better.
I mean, you can easily point to the atrocities that the USA was built on and feel a deep sense of shame, and we collectively should, we should remember the horrors of the past. But having a social democracy exist and survive as long as it did was proof of concept of an experiment that was not supposed to work. It’s proof that we can do better if we unify just a little. Yes, it could have been better or lasted longer, but we don’t exactly have a lot of alternatives. We’re fucking animals. The fact that we can do any of this at all is amazing.
But we can easily play this “would we have been better off” game forever. Back until we first started killing each other for thousands of years which led to our brains developing into this absurd thing we have now. Would we have been better off if the USA was never founded? Would the Native Americans have been better off? Would the Europeans? (Read Pastwatch, good speculative ideas on all this.)
The reality is though that we’re here now and we’re better off as a society than we’ve ever been. Yes, there are bad things happening, but it’s in the decline. We just feel bad because we don’t live long enough to see that long arc of history and cannot see that tangible, powerful decline in war, disease, suffering, murder and rape and so many other every-day horrors we all had to live with for literally thousands and thousands of years. I can easily count the number of times my house has been raided, and that number is one time, and it wasn’t even an armed militia, it was just some random, confused person. That’s a MASSIVE improvement historically speaking.
What I think is fucking with a lot of our heads is that we imbibe in fictions without taking away the good lessons and grounded, material lessons. We read novels or watch Star Trek and believe that we’re entitled to the stars, that we have this glorious, unified future just around the corner, that all we have to do is make X policies and elect candidate Y and we will have world peace and food replicators.
Nah dog, we’re not going out there. We’re not going to get better than this. Maybe our non-human descendants in a very, very long time from now, but currently, creating a democracy that lasts more than 200 years might be the absolute best we can do.
Yep. Thanks for mentioning this. It’s really the root of it. The existing social structure is reinforcing/escalating our worst psychological biases. The opposite of what many of us think it should be doing. At least for me… going to school was all about deprogramming all the emotional bias bullshit that my parents and home-town idiots I grew up with believed. The internet also helped a lot with that. It was about getting outside of the bubble.
But it seem around 10 years ago this all shifted. and now education and internet is all about reinforcing those biases. I meet so many ‘well-educated’ people that have such provincial/delusional beliefs about the world now… it’s terrifying. And this is folks on my ‘own side’ of leftism/liberalism… I can only imagine it’s equal/worse among the right. A huge uptick in delusional and magical thinking, and people using their education to justify their crazy thoughts… instead of using their education to dismantle/prevent their crazy thoughts.
I’m not so sure good policy is the way to do it… but I do know from political experience that good policy is something EVERYONE hates. Precisely because it doesn’t benefit them exclusively.
Our problem we’re butting up against is this, that as individuals we are resistant to the bitter medicine we know will help us. So we have no choice but to elect leaders we know will trick the population in some way, but we never know what’s a trick and what’s a power grab for personal gain. (Present admin excluded, they’re a painfully transparent consequence of our society abandoning community and education.)
But we had a social democracy in the US that lasted more than 200 years. That’s not a bad run, it’s proof of concept. Maybe the USA will splinter and fracture, but from that will come new ideas, new areas of democratic progress and new alliances and power groups who now know that such a thing is possible.
I don’t think we’re going to have a unified world, at least not in our lives and certainly not with our existing social systems, but war and disease and atrocities broadly are on a decline across the globe. It may spike again in places and at times, but despite that we are living in an age of unprecedented peace and prosperity, that shows that something we’re doing is working, but we have to manage and maintain it by resisting apathy and nihilism. If we stop seeing the positives and stop caring, we backslide to raiders looting our houses and raping and pillaging our communities.
History shows us people only learn to do the right thing after things have gone horrible horrible wrong.
we had a worldwide depression and war that uttered in 80 years of peace. we will have another one before things can truly improve. the current generations are all far too removed from the consequences of their actions.