Being provocative as a psychic survival tool — that's my excuse

© 2020 Peter Free

 

25 October 2020

 

 

I write much more provocatively than . . .

 

. . . my comparatively accepting personality should warrant.

 

I justify this abrasive authorial trait because — by the end of 2020 — the totality of bottomless Rich World avarice, rampaging herd stupidity, and rabidly Adam Henry leaders has become "enough" for anyone reasonably sane.

 

 

As Hamilton Nolan observed . . .

 

. . . just after the last 2020 United States presidential candidate debate this week:

 

 

After thousands of years of practice, human societies have not yet evolved to be able to govern ourselves in anything approaching a rational manner.

 

[W]e cannot agree on the goals.  Nor can we agree on how we should decide what the goals are. . . . on the facts that might allow us to decide on what the goals are . . . . [or] on who to trust to tell us those facts.

 

The only thing that we are able to do really well is to revel in our hatred of Our Enemies. That, and laugh.

 

The president does not know much, but he does know how to set and then momentarily exceed very low expectations.

 

We are experiencing . . . a sort of mass national hypnosis, the product of years of prolonged exposure, that makes us measure Trump against himself rather than against objective reality.

 

[This] has robbed us of the ability to appreciate the ludicrousness of the situation we have gotten ourselves into.

 

The only thing that you can be sure of is that we will get what we deserve.

 

© 2020 Hamilton Nolan, Everyone Loves Our Mass National Hypnosis, In These Times (23 October 2020)

 

 

Nolan's conclusion about "ludicrousness" is the point of . . .

 

. . . my own comment about President Trump's ability to distract us with his geniusly silly, stick-in-the-mind phrases.

 

 

The moral? — We wile our lives away inside an entertaining "We Are the Puppets" theater . . .

 

. . . where We the Puppets get to choose between and among blindness, psychic suicide and laughter.

 

If we are awake, insofar as puppets can wake — and Absurdity itself does not amuse us — we are in for a psychologically rough road.

 

Happily, under all circumstances, there is always available resort to Magical Thinking. And then, the cycle starts over.

 

(If you're on the Polar Bears' side, good luck.)