Jon Schwarz essentially (and accurately) said that — politics is about fostering deadly delusions

© 2020 Peter Free

 

11 September 2020

 

 

Illusion, delusion and sheep

 

The Intercept's Jon Schwarz wrote recently observed that:

 

 

[P]olitics is mostly about illusions that leaders strive to create inside our heads.

 

In the case of 9/11, the Bush administration did not attempt to respond rationally to the actual events. Instead, they used it as a justification to do what they had always wanted to do but couldn’t get away with.

 

By contrast, Covid-19 really did demand a large-scale government response, but there was little that Trump wanted to do.

 

So Trump has delivered hours of a TV show in which he starred, but not enough PPE for doctors and nurses, or contact tracing, or desperately needed funding for states and cities and people thrown out of work.

 

Bush wanted a pretext to do a lot of things that were unnecessary, such as invading Iraq, while Trump wanted an excuse to do nothing when in fact a lot really needed to be done.

 

Governments decide what they want to do, and then search for some public rationale.

 

© 2020 Jon Schwarz, 3,000 Dead on 9/11 Meant Everything. 200,000 Dead of Covid Means Nothing. Here’s Why, Intercept (11 September 2020)

 

 

The deeper point is that

 

Humans are led and tethered with intentionally misleading stories.

 

 

If we free ourselves from mind control . . .

 

. . . we could accomplish things that are qualitatively valuable.

 

However, for most of us, throwing off these mental and emotional chains — most of which are due to perennial inattention — requires too much effort.

 

 

The moral? — Being Mind Lazy, most humans welcome Illusion's control

 

Our shared deludedness fuels passions and fears that excuse us from doing Reality's painfully mundane spiritual work.

 

This is why spiritual traditions that require mental and emotional housecleaning (all day long, every day) have so few adherents.

 

This millennia-long shortage of people willing to wake themselves should give optimists pause.

 

Perhaps "awakened cynicism" should be a spiritual path.

 

Is that a contradiction in terms, or merely an acknowledgement of humanity's most fundamental self and selves? Evolution has not been kind.