The rest of you were dubious but patient (and I thank you). You figured I was indulging some obsessive yaya, even when I linked it in with such practical concerns as human happiness, autism, addiction, depression (here and here), creativity, art, cosmology, theology, and much more.
Well, here is the opening message of this year's CPAC, the most important mainstream American conservative gathering and forum:
Historians will shrug fatalisticaly and explain that everyone went crazy. Or, my favorite, "BRAINWASHING!!" But we're actually alive, so we have on-the-ground experience, and know that our MAGA friends and neighbors, who were always super nice people (just never never engage them on politics!), are still entirely themselves...aside for their propensity to swallow the spin and regurgitate the talking points. I have baseball superfan friends who hang up phone calls with "Go Cubs!" and live or die on a foul call. This is the same thing. Neither is crazy or brainwashed. Everyone's got a Thing, and everyone's allowed their Thing, and this is just another Thing, despite the appallingness and the danger of it all.
None of it is deep. We are still who we are, despite our Things. But, as I explained last time, light fixations, aggregated en masse, can yield heavy real-world ramifications. And, sorry folks, but everyone gets to fixate as they'd like. The bedrock individual human right is to choose your Thing, and everyone is as free to do so as you are. If you imagine restraining someone's stand - their framing; their fandom; their Thing - because "they're wrong," that's even more fascistic than what they're unwittingly supporting. In fact, brutishly imposed morality is a big part of what provoked all this.
Anyway, now do you understand why I've been stressing framing? And encouraging people to foster a more lithe perspective? It helps you understand (and perchance empathize with) people who seem to have lost their rockers. Baseball fans and proudly self-described "Domestic Terrorists" and all the rest are just playing.
Don't abstract real people into cartoons. Don't hate the seditious radicals. That's the reaction of a frozen perspective, and frozen perspective leads to civil war.
Civil wars arise when righteous-feeling people shut down any empathy for The Other within neighborhoods, social circles, and even families. Everyone in a Civil War feels righteous and sane, though no one actually is. If you feel wholly righteous and sane, you're the bad guy. You're sending us over this cliff. The MAGAs are NICE PEOPLE. If you don't know any, shame on you for your insularity! And whoever you are out there, you're believing/supporting really awful stuff (as a Centrist, I see you all clearly). The extreme right's going Fascist, but the extreme left's going Stalinist. Each clearly sees the awfulness of the opposite extreme while remaining willfully oblivious to the excesses of their own side's extreme.
It's hard to see. But it's essential to see. Hopefully I've made it easier by urging you consider how everyone frames a different world; how those framings are highly socially contagious; and how each of us owns a universal remote control that allows us to easily (easily!!!) blink into someone else's worldview.
The goal is to gain some detachment from your own worldview so you can see how fucked up it is, and, rather than crumble in despair and futility, keep enjoying your brief residency on this colorful planet - generously stocked with free oxygen, water, and sunlight - along with the other loonballs, who you love and tolerate.
Easy-peasy. If you don't freeze your perspective. If you retain your ability to reframe at will.
It will need to get much, much worse before most people (even most Slog readers) really buy it and develop some empathy for The Other and some distance from their own kookiness and some sense of perspective and priority (all of which comprise re-framing). It's all in place, all perfectly clear to anyone watching thoughtfully. But some people refuse to budge their perspective until their world blows up. Why wait for that?
Some people can spot a doomed chess position from a mile away. Others must hear "Check" hollered a bunch of times and see one player turn frowny. Still others need to actually hear the word "Checkmate". Me, I never wait around for that. In fact, as a child, I made a deliberate effort to remind my future self not to dawdle around a solved maze.
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