Sunday, April 4, 2021

Craziness Codicil

I left something important out of my previous posting, "The Craziness of Encountering Crazy People Who Don't Exist" (alt titles: "Opting Out of Fetishizing Malicious Stupidity", "Anti-Stigmatization", or "The One With the Five N-Words").

By the time I'm done pre-mumbling, mumbling, and post-mumbling, I sometimes discover, too late, that I've forgotten to drive home my actual point. "Too late" because the posting's been so worked, and is so embarrassingly lengthy, that there's little hope of cramming in any new chunk.

So while I often deliberately bury ledes (one of my snickering delights), I appear to have plunged to a new low of ditzy incompetence so extreme that (in keeping with the theme) it has no name. I hereby coin the term "Lost Lede", and offer it to you below. It's nothing not already implicit in the post, but I never quite got around to firmly summing it up and putting it in wider perspective.



When you sanitize and euphemize your language and your thinking about a thing, you deliberately detach yourself from truthful conception of the thing. You shun and reject truth. And that's not good, because if/when that thing and that truth is encountered, it will stun you. Having methodically bleached some truth nugget previously lodged in your consciousness, you're left in a bind when reality pops up...which it does with some frequency.

This is, in fact, why we think. It's so that reality doesn't knock our teeth out or leave us yammering like idiots. Thinking is our pre-production prep for reality. It's useful work, even if it's not all sparkly nice and a smooth fit with cultural trends. Ideally, we think to understand, not to conform. You need to really watch out for the latter.

This issue is far more timeless than some stupid argument about political correctness or whatever. Thought bleaching leads to debilitating results in all instances of political re-education/brainwashing. It can work for a while, in a limited, blinkered way, but it inevitably leaves you estranged from reality. My examples are relatively light ones, leaving us lightly estranged. But I'm a big fan of reality, of truth (it's not a popular stand, but I'm such a contrarian). The very last thing I want is to deliberately estrange myself from it.

It's particularly corrosive for those whom this whole artifice has been contrived to protect. It shames and erases their reality. However positive your intentions, that's a hack that should never be pursued.

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