Dear Friends,
It seems to me, there are things that are true and things we want to be true, and we often believe those things we want to be true. We are all guilty of this. When I was a kid, I used to believe all sorts of foolish things… often because I wanted them to be true. In retrospect, I see that now but at the time I was adamant in my convictions. As I look around and interact with people, I see so many mesmerized by glittering lies. This isn’t because we are dumb, it’s usually because we so want it to be true. The idea is so compelling. Like in physics, when the math is so beautiful, it must be true… yet isn’t. Elegance and beauty often mask their opposites. So it’s wise to admire an idea’s beauty and elegance, but don’t be captured by it… in the end we have to apply pragmatism and logic to see if it’s true.
Wisdom comes with age, not due to old neurons being better, but accumulated experience bestows wisdom. That’s why every faction, philosophy, and religion pounces on children… to mold their minds before someone else does. A young mind without experience has only books and stories with which to understand what’s happening and the world around them. This attribute of young people to be easily fixated by emotion is well known. “Those who are not liberals at twenty have no heart… and those who aren’t conservative at forty have no brain.” This is a famous saying that goes back to the French Revolution and maybe earlier. Emotions like want are to a young person more important than cold, dry facts, precedent, and logic.
Not everyone who is captured by an idea is a youth. Everyone who gets caught is a kid, but sometimes people don’t put away youthful notions… they cling to them. This is often done because someone has incorporated that idea into their self-identity. Their idea of self is inextricably bound with that notion so they can’t let it go. Such an act would be a form of superego suicide. So they hold to it like a drowning man does to a branch in a torrent. That’s why so many people cling to absurdity and are led to further absurdity… because to escape would be to enter that torrent without the safety and comfort of that branch. Even if it keeps dragging you into the center of the whirlpool. It does, because it’s supposed to. That whirlpool is absurdity, and both will drown a person.
Absurd notions often sweep through modern cultures like wildfire. They are seldom grassroots though, they are almost always astroturf… and we know how hot and quickly plastic burns especially when doused with gasoline. Bonhoeffer called the people who become captured by those absurd ideas… stupid. He also said stupidity is more dangerous than malevolence… because at least the evil benefit themselves while the stupid harm everyone, including themselves. We have to wonder, human beings are tribal and so if a notion, no matter how stupid, is pushed by the elite, many will believe simply to stay in the clique. Such people rationally choose not to think for themselves and instead let the tribe do their thinking. That this leads to disaster may be stupid, as Bonhoeffer said, but it is human.
Factions will use absurdity to keep their followers disconnected from the truth. Factions use phrases like Orwell’s, “War is peace and freedom is slavery,” and the modern versions, “women can have penises and Islam is a religion of peace…” They dare you to believe your eyes, logic, and history to defy them. Elites couch their absurdity in emotional euphemisms to get buy-in, and ostracism as a deterrent to wrongthink. A faction then could use propaganda to astroturf an absurd notion that creates disaster, ply on the wreckage of that disaster to manipulate people into acting stupid. This tactic works on the youth more than older people, but older people can be the most trusted zealots. Because their very being is tangled up in the absurdity. This means… it’s smarter to be independent than a blind follower.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
