Reading and listening to the jeremiads of impending doom and catastrophe electing Hillary Clinton will bring, it becomes clear that a significant part of her opposition is flat out delusional. It’s not just her, it’s this whole “lib’ral agenda” thing, wrapped up with the gay agenda and the persecution of christians and on and on. Some people obviously believe she descends into a secret temple every night to eat the livers of virgin meerkats and praise Cthulhu while demoniacally laughing in anticipation of the power about to come into her hands by which she can trample on our freedoms with the abandon of a Godzilla.
How many times does the senate have to haul her into hearings on Benghazi and end up finding nothing—NOTHING—that she did which was illegal or even immoral before people begin to realize that she didn’t murder four Americans for reasons which no one has made very clear anyway. And how many times do these same people have to be reminded that the problem there was a viciously slashed budget for embassy security, done by the very people in congress who are trying to tag her with the blame before they start to realize they’re being snowed?
Apparently always one more time than this one.
Same with the emails. Not that Hillary’s handling of them is without problems, but how many times do her detractors have to be told that the last three Secretarys of State did the same thing before they realize this is a common practice and hardly grounds for the kinds of accusations of treason being made?
Apparently always one more time than this one.
It beggars reason. Why this level of denial? Why this depth of entrenched delusion?
We have a model for it. Has to do with repeated insistence on a parallel reality. We watched it happen to children, en masse, during the McMartin PreSchool debacle.
Recall that this was a national item in the news for months. It began in 1983 with false accusations by a mentally disturbed woman claiming the preschool was involved in the sexual abuse of children. The detectives initially investigating thought it was absurd, but a very aggressive prosecutor with career ambitions got hold of it and rode it through seven years and the most expensive criminal trial in American history to that date. It ended with all charges dropped, lives ruined, and the psychés of the children involved scarred. It was part of a hysteria and the allegations made kept getting stranger and weirder, beggaring imagination,about networks of tunnels, secret airfields, black masses. Lovecraft would have proudly claimed it as a masterpiece of fiction.
Yet people believed it. Especially, after seven years of being told again and again that these things had happened to them, the children, who were a lamentable spectacle in the courtroom the day it ended and they were betrayed again. First they had been made to embrace the charges, even though none of them initially validated any of it, and now, after seven years of living in a delusional bubble, many if not all had come to actually believe these things had happened—and the court told them none of it had.
It didn’t matter that to any rational person on the outside looking at all this it was clearly nonsense. To those inside that bubble, this had become reality. What is amazing is the ability of the human imagination to come to the defense of such delusions when they have become so personal that one’s very identity depends on them. The capacity to invent seemingly plausible explanations to counter fact and logic is remarkable. And frightening.
We see something like this in the byzantine conspiracy fears of the hardcore Hillary Haters. Not the ones cynically manipulating that hate in order to gain power, but the ones willingly handing over that power because they truly believe she is evil and has a trail of bodies in her wake and that she was somehow, though the details get murky here, plans to sell us all down the River Iss. (When I ask what it is they think she’s going to do, usually the response is either “You’ll see” or “Go ahead and vote for her if you love her so much!” In other words, they have no idea what it is they fear.) They’ve been living in that bubble for so long that the larger reality has small chance of breaking through.
There is a whole roster of related delusions that go along with this. That Obama was not born in the United States, that both he and Hillary will send out secret police to confiscate guns and overturn the Second Amendment (a president can’t do that), that 911 was an inside job, that death panels are part of the Affordable Care Act, that—
It goes on. This makes the people still clinging to the grassy knoll in Dallas seem reasonable.
The screeling insanity of the allegations sets up a false dialogue in which those of us who simply prefer her to her opponent for reason short of embracing her as the next Lincoln can’t profitably discuss the issues. For us it comes down to competence and policy positions which do not lend themselves to soundbyte “debate” tactics which depend on superlatives. Do I believe Hillary Clinton is the best choice for president? Given the present circumstances, yes. But it’s conditional. Do I think she’s the best possible choice? No. But that choice is not on the field. I don’t even know who it would be. Bernie Sanders might have been a better choice, but he’s not on the ballot.
Which points to another delusional bubble on the opposite side, which is that the election was stolen from him. He’s not claiming that and insists on his supporters supporting Hillary. Because he understands how politics works in this country. There will always be another chance to do better or just differently in four years. Do not tear everything apart because the party didn’t hire the right DJ.
Since the end of the Cold War, what we have needed—badly—is a manager who will step us back from the brink of world war and start returning us to the kind of republic and economy best suited to caretaking the country. Instead, both parties have found themselves lashed to the masthead of demanding war leaders. We are constantly preparing for war. Like a traumatized child who can no longer trust that other realities might be possible, after World War II we have been unable to trust in our own principles. That and the fact that war is very, very profitable for certain people, and money drives elections. Bill Clinton was close. All other things aside, he was a capable manager. I believe George H.W. Bush was of a similar cut. But even they were unable to withstand the pressures of constant war preparation.
The problems of the world are based on resource allocation. This is a tractable problem, given the political will. But not if everyone insists that they can’t be solved. They can be. But it requires that we change certain other basic practices and admit that some of the ways we’ve been doing things no longer (if they ever did) work.
But that’s a conversation that can only happen when there are no bubbles separating us into different realities. Delusion is the biggest barrier between people, which in this case is the reason we can’t see each other.
Either that or it’s Toxoplasma gondii.
My own bubble—yes, we all have one, to greater or lesser degrees, with lighter or denser membranes—suggests that the constant undermining of education since the Sixties has had a net effect on lowering people’s resistance to nonsense. That given the fact that education has been roped to the requirements of the job market almost since its beginnings, this is no surprise. We claim we want educated people but I believe what industry wants is, rather, well-trained people, which is not the same thing. The assault on unions, the undoing of economic rules that once allowed for a robust middle class, and the apparently successful propaganda campaign by the Right to convince people to vote against their own best interests for nigh unto 40 years goes hand in hand with lowered standards in education and a neglect of what once we called the Liberal Arts. But I don’t believe you need an organized conspiracy to do this. Just inattention and the situational shrug of shoulders that allows something to become normal that once was not.
For instance, look at the terms. Liberal and Conservative. They don’t seem to mean what they once did. In the long view of history, neither Barrack Obama nor Hillary Clinton would be considered liberals. Centrists at best. But those bubbles have enabled a shift in viewpoint that has pushed us to the right so much that a full-blown liberal is no longer recognizable as such. It’s been said that in a more traditional (or sane) world, Hillary would be the Republican candidate and Sanders would have been the Democratic.
But that view bounces off the bubbles.
We have, in my opinion, a traumatized country full of children who have been told for decades that they’ve been abused and they can no longer recognize the reality outside that conviction. Some have, but they aren’t the ones defining the inside of the bubble.
Anyone have a pin?
