Even a very determined political optimist like myself can understand why it seems like the world’s gone crazy lately.

It hasn’t, of course. This is still the best time to be alive on planet Earth that there has ever been. All the things that make it seem like the world is going crazy – the rise of right wing politicians all over the world’s democracies, American political paralysis in the face of amazing amounts of horrific gun violence, the rise of Trump as the summation of all that is evil about modern conservatism – all of this is bad, but most of it does not actually change anything. If you live in a country that has the luxury of worrying about right wingers rising in the polls, congratulations, because that means you live in a democracy and probably have it better off than at least half of the world no matter how poor you are.

And sure, there are a lot of shootings in America – it’s never been more popular – but these are still tiny blips on the statistical radar. The average person is just as safe as they would be if none of those shootings had of those shootings had ever happened. Yes, these crimes are horrific, senseless acts of brutal violence, and that tends to command our attention – that’s why people do it, after all. But they mean very little to your daily life.

The rise of the right wing is considerably more damaging, but I can’t see a way out of it. Right minded individuals can only do their best to limit the damage and talk the general public down from their crazed state. Demographics have a rather cruel inevitability to them, and as the Baby Boomers age they get stupider and meaner and more on the market for easy solutions that don’t require thinking but that let you vent your impotent rage on targets so weak that even a coward like you doesn’t feel like they are a threat.

The best thing I can say about this period is that once these fuckheads get into power, it becomes obvious even to their supporters that they have made a terrible mistake and that the things that they thought sounded so good when they were just political slogans and talking points are actually phenomenally stupid ideas that never should have been implemented by anyone, ever. After all, one of the many things the world had learned from the Brexit fiasco is that right wingers are perfectly willing to vociferously and wholehearted support policies that they know would be a bad idea if they were implemented, but sure are fun when you and your buddies get together for a good old fashioned hate-fest.

And yes… this applies to extreme left wingers too. Neither side has a monopoly on substituting emotionally appealing ideology for thought, reason, common sense, and connection to reality.

And Trump is the Lizard King of it all. He’s officially the Republican Annointed One now, and there’s nothing they can do to stop him. These next few days should be mighty interesting, then, because now the GOP has absolutely no way to separate themselves from the things he says. He speaks for the GOP now, and no matter what idiotic, psychotic, sociopathic thing he says, all the people who are still in the party will have to support and defend it.

And if that becomes too painful, they will leave the party. Some vocally, but most quietly. They will just stop showing up to certain events, and stop participating in certain forums. Up until now, supporting Trump in public has not been too painful, and could actually be fun when it got you on TV to defend yourself.

But the closer the actual election gets, the greater the pain – both from the growing hordes of right wing Trump haters and from the massive amounts of cognitive dissonance building up in the brains of people trying to keep the ideas of “Trump should be President” and “absolutely everything he says, does, and says he’ll do” from making their brains melt and flow out their ears.

Like I have said in this space before, conservatives do not have a choice as to what to believe. They lack the metacognitive strength for it. They can’t actually derive their beliefs from observation and analysis because that’s just too much information with insufficient mental bandwidth to spare for it. So they have to believe what they are told to believe by the people they have accepted as smart and trustworthy and politically palatable. If it doesn’t pass the sniff test, they reject it. If they do, they accept it, at least consciously.

And thought it may seem sometimes like they are immune to cognitive dissonance, they are not. They simply have a deep driving emotional need that can, in some circumstances, override it. They can gloss over a lot in order to maintain their all important sense of certainty – but this is an emotional act, and as such is subject to emotional disturbance. If Trump stops feeling right to them, then the anti-Trump Republicans can gain the upper hand. And all that takes is that the deep down feeling of wrongness that is growing within even the diehards continues to grow until it poisons the warm glow of certainty and forces the populace to leap for the next source of certainty : that Trump is terrible.

A lot of the GOP have already made that jump. More will follow, I think. Trump is an out of control pedagogue, and sooner than people think and later than they hope, they go too far and say something that their audience simply refuses to assimilate, and therefore can act as their face-saving “jump ship” signal.

“I was with him up till that point, but when he said age of consent laws coddle children, I had to put my foot down. ”

It’s tempting to think that there is nothing he can say to lose his rabid supporters now.

And it’s true, there won’t be…. until he says it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It was a couple of days before Kate Schechter became aware of any of these things, or indeed of anything at all in the outside world.
She passed the time quietly in a world of her own in which she was surrounded as far as the eye could see with old cabin trunks full of past memories in which she rummaged with great curiosity, and sometimes bewilderment. Or, at least, about a tenth of the cabin trunks were full of vivid, and often painful or uncomfortable memories of her past life; the other nine-tenths were full of penguins, which surprised her. Insofar as she recognised at all that she was dreaming, she realised that she must be exploring her own subconscious mind. She had heard it said that humans are supposed only to use about a tenth of their brains^[1], and that no one was very clear what the other nine-tenths were for, but she had certainly never heard it suggested that they were used for storing penguins.
–Douglas Adams in “The Long Dark Tea Time Of The Soul”

I would love to be able to do that. Just go through my memories like I am going through old clothes, and figure out which ones I should keep and which ones I should throw out. That’s something me and my massive metaconscious would really enjoy. It would be like getting to re-index your mind. Defrag your mental hard drive.

But instead, of course, I have to do it the hard way like everyone else. Especially now that I don’t have therapy helping me along any more.

I could still be going to therapy, now that my schedule is opening up. It’s not too difficult for me to figure out when I have time off in a week. I am sure I could find a time when both Doctor Costin and I are free. It’s just a matter of logistics and coordination.

But I would have to get there and back on my own, and therein lies the problem. That’s a very large gumption trap and I am not quite good enough yet at getting out of those on my own. To get there on my own would involve a bus ride there, a walk from the bus stop to the office, a walk back to the bus stop, and a bus ride home. And that…. is a lot of effort.

I’m not saying it wouldn’t be worth it. But I just don’t have that kind of effort to spare any more.

Plus I am really starting to worry about what my poor feet go through every school day. It takes a very long time for my feet to recover from the walk. The first time I get up from the computer after coming home is always agony. And I am always eager to get my damned shoes off.

I suppose, speaking of doctors, that I should make an appointment with my GP to get that looked at. It is possible that somewhere out there is technology that would allow me to walk without pain. It has been so long since that was true that I find it hard to believe that it’s even possible. I have a terrible fear that the doctor will just shrug and tell me to lose weight, even thought my GP, Doctor Chao, is a very sweet guy and would never say something like that.

Even if there was nothing medical science could do, he would be super sensitive in how he told me. He’s good that way.

And I know the fear that nothing can be done is the depression talking. Yet the fear remains. Depression is a mental illness and all mentally ill people have to come face to face with the fact that their minds are not entirely their own. That there are things they believe (or even see) without or despite evidence and that no simple act of will or mind will banish these beliefs.

Believing things you know aren’t true is the real meaning of mental illness, at least for me.

After all, I am Mister Rational. I have great power of logic and reason. And I don’t just use logic and reason, I believe in them. I take some pride in being naked before the truth… a slave to the evidence. That means that no matter where the evidence leads, I shall follow, period.

That, though, assumes that I have full mastery over my mind and my beliefs, and that is something no human being has ever had. Even a cold rationalist myself can admit there are things he believes a priori to any evidence – thinks like “it matters what happens to humans”.

But this isn’t about that. This is about following a chain of evidence to what you know to be true – and not being able to believe it. That’s when you are truly cognizant of the limitations placed upon you by your illness. It’s like a big thick wall between you and the truth, and the human mind is not capable of holding onto truths it does not believe.

So the truth slips away from even a muscular rationalist like myself. In fact, if I were less of a hardcore philosopher, what is beyond my reach would not bother me so much. Most people live in the twilit world between the objective and the subjective and are comfortable there. Or at least, comfortable enough to not feel the need to pursue the truth so relentlessly as I, and therefore do not end up with some of their self-worth, not to mention their sanity, tied up with their belief in their ability to believe whatever the evidence says is true.

But in my mind, the things I cannot help but believe regardless of evidence stick out like the proverbial sore thumb. In many ways I have an extremely organized and optimized mind where everything fits together like a n-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, and belief without evidence cannot be made to fit in it anywhere.

But I am not helpless. The rational can fight back by stopping irrational self-talk and replacing it with something more rational and balanced. Over time, if you do this enough, and with enough ruthless determination, the bad beliefs shift towards the good.

For example, I no longer hate myself nearly as much as I used to, long ago.

Upward and onwards, children!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.