This is an expansion on something I put in a YouTube comment recently.
Us liberal intellectual types are quite fond of wailing and gnashing our teeth about Trump humpers and their tendency to believe all kinds of things which are clearly objectively wrong and honestly a very tall supply of hooey.
My response to that is, “so what?”.
Why should people care whether their beliefs about the world and how it works are objectively true or not? Whether or not they really faked the moon landing has no direct bearing on people’s daily lives, and that means they are free to believe whatever suits them best regardless of facts.
This is why evidence to the contrary has no effect on these people. Their beliefs were not arrived at via reason and therefore reason cannot dislodge them. Their worldview emerges from a steamy haze of emotional needs and their own life experiences plus their cultural programming and as long as their beliefs continue to serve those functions, especially the emotional needs one, they are not going to let go of them and will interpret any attacks on those beliefs, no matter how well reasoned or based upon the evidence they are, as attacks on themselves personally by evil people trying to take away their emotional safety blanket(s).
The virtue of getting closer to the Truth ™ means nothing to them. They are not on a lifelong search for true knowledge. They don’t pursue impractical goals like that.
They know what they need to know to work their job and take care of their kids and make it to Church on Sundays, and everything outside those critical beliefs is unimportant and therefore can be whatever you need it to be.
Obviously these people are not entirely divorced from reality. These kinds of things are rarely that cut and dried. Like all humans, they live in a world which is a blend of the objective and the subjective into what I call “human reality”.
We are neither robots nor lotus eaters.
But the ultimate truth of things is not of paramount importance to them. That’s why if you do happen to take away a beloved belief of theirs via logic and evidence, they will not thank you, they will hate you with the white hot passion of a thousand suns.
Just the fact that you have introduced the possibility of doubt into their mind is a good enough reason of them to hate you and everybody like you till the end of time.
Doubt is not good for these people. They have absolutely no faith in their ability to derive belief from their own intellectual faculties. The best that they can hope for is to use their people skills to figure out who seems trustworthy and then follow that person or people with undying, unswerving loyalty no matter what.
Thus we have Fox News. Their bread and butter consists of seeming trustworthy enough to their demographic to feed them the kinds of reassurances they need to quell their doubts and let them go back to their preferred state of artificial certainty.
If us left leaning intellectuals want to stand a chance of keeping hope and freedom alive in a Trumped up world, we will need to understand and accept these hard truths.
We will have to address the underlying emotional needs that their belief in Trump addresses and learn to address them better.
This requires not just paying lip service to these people and their concerns or talking above their heads in terms of lofty abstractions or distant ideals but actually going to these people where they live and truly listening to them and give them every indication that you are on their side.
They go to Trump because he makes them feel welcome. He does, quite frankly, a terrible job of it but it still makes him seem like the vastly superior choice over some college educated liberal who looks down their noses at people they see as their social inferiors and therefore can’t imagine possibly being important.
We have to become conscientious objectors in the culture wars. We have to open our arms and our hearts to Trump supporters and give them the love, reassurance, respect, and support they will never get from him and thus steal his supporters in a way that will not only be effective but highly ethical too.
More after the break.
The spaces in between
I definitely feel like I am somewhere between two places lately.
I know that I am going in the right direction, the direction of greater emotional health and mental functioning and maybe even (gasp!) personal productivity.
Which is the only truly meaningful form of productivity. To feel like you have made something worthwhile is an incredible feeling and I want lots of it.
So some time soon I will start making YouTube videos again. It won’t be easy to get back into it – for one thing, I will need a competent video editing program that can handle both video capture and basic editing without screwing up the timing – but if I make a concentrated effort I can get going again and hopefully keep it going long enough for the fun and appeal of making stuff to kick in.
I’ve realized that I was making a classic mistake : delaying getting back into the biz by waiting for the “right” idea to come along.
Fuck that. It makes self-sabotage far too easy. Just never actually decide any idea you can think of is good enough and you can bullshit yourself right into the grave, the whole time thinking you are going to do your thing “someday”.
I’m for just plunging into things and figuring things out as you go. I know that according to practically everything that is the “wrong” way to do things, but it’s what works for me.
Fuck it, I don’t do anything the “right” way. I do things my way, which works for me and possibly nobody else ever.
I’m special like that.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.