Craziness Codicil

Following up on my previous posting, "The Craziness of Encountering Crazy People Who Don't Exist"...


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 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 preparation 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 anyone trying to reconfigure your motivation from comprehension to conformity. That's the essence of brainwashing, aka "political re-education".

Thought bleaching, even for seemingly benign reasons, leads to debilitating results. It can work for a while, in a limited, blinkered way, but it inevitably leaves you estranged from reality. Me, I'm a big fan of reality, of truth. The very last thing I want is to deliberately estrange myself from it.

It's particularly corrosive for those whom this 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.