we live in some truly distempered times, times of what seem like one can only describe as monomania and breakage.

the obsessive nature of it and the need to make every single thing in the world about whatever your particular idée fixe is could well be the most conspicuously horrendous concatenated failure of iterated rorschach tests in human history. (though possibly not, the bolsheviks, mao, and who knows who else may well have been the same)

but i will say this: it’s getting worse and the speed of this is going exponential. it’s not even “everything i see is the same ink blot” anymore.

it’s veering into “if you are not constantly validating me you are anathema.”

even the idea of a world outside the obsession is becoming intolerable to the obsessed. and that’s a trend as worrying as it is predictable.

here’s a charming little missive received by a good friend of mine (we go back to high school) he has a large instagram account focused on home improvement and cooking tips. it has zero political content nor does it aspire to any. and, apparently, that is no longer OK.

(posted with permission, ID redacted by me)

stop and consider the likely internal mental landscape of this woman (it was a woman, let’s call her “lady love” as a nom de stack) whose profile pic is the word “love” as she quite literally says “i cannot follow this harmless and apolitical content i like because it never addresses the things i rage about.”

his quote (based on other experiences and conversations with other content providers) was this:

these are wild times in which to live.

so how did we get to here?

surprising exactly no one, i have a theory:

let us ponder the intersection of two ideas: the fungibility of reality as it is distorted by the imposed fictions of history (and of the present) and the idea of externalized identity because i think understanding how these two things interact and, perhaps more important, the pressures this interaction creates if one starts to be forced into a meaningful shift in reality alignment, are going to matter.

i have a rapidly rising sense of foreboding that understanding this exact thing is going to be the key to understanding much of what is starting to occur and will doubtless follow.

first, some simple salients:

history is not a real thing.

never was.

basically cannot be.

to quote george santayana “history is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there” and in the modern age, even the astonishing cynicism of napoleon, who opined that “history is a set of lies agreed upon” appears inadequate to the task of making it make sense, especially in this time of fracture where “you’re entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts” presents as positively quaint because, of course, half the point of the post modern age is to veer into post reality where entitlement to one’s own flavor of facts appears a right held as sacrosacnt as one’s opinion.

none of this is new. constructions of “control the past, control the present, control the present, control the future” and the wrestling of ideologies to erase history and monuments, recast heroes and villains, and retell and reinvent the long tail that got us here has always been the meat and drink of the ideologue; to see everything in their way, in the frame they imagine grants them power and makes them the good guy.

in this way, all history is, always has been, and essentially must be contemporary history because the story told about the story of what has come before only matters when it is told today and this is part of what is making such an astonishing mess at the moment as we have who knows how many competing stories about history, about the world, and about current events which map, with varying degrees of success, to actual events and tangible, testable reality.

the problem is that the current reality has two powerful new salients:

1. the instant on receipts machine of social media, newly unfettered and free to “point things out” and rugpull the hallucinators has profoundly altered both speech and reach

2. memes have become the most powerful and intellectual informational medium in history with ronin memelords running amok and inverting the emotionally loaded imagery and oratory that has so long dominated discourse because it was rapid to consume and refuting it took ages. memes are macros and have 100 times the image density.

these two things are wrecking worldviews.

once, cherokee liz giving this effusive eulogy for a man she never met might have passed muster. absent context, it’s powerful stuff. listen to it with your eyes closed if you doubt me.

but listen to it superimposed over video of the eulogized from perhaps a week before his death, and it becomes devastating indictment.

imagine the manner in which one with the political sensibilities and sensitivities of “lady love” above would react when encountering this sort of content.

it must be like squeezing plutonium-239 under several million atmospheres of pressure…

you can see all over how these intrusions and outrages are occurring, and, if you pay attention, you can also see how much more malign and excessive the stories keep getting and, perhaps more interesting, how much more rapidly they are being unpicked, how widely this unpicking is spreading, and how much more fun it is to be on team penn and teller vs being on team “self absorbed unfun rage monster.”

see, i told you the revolution would be fun!

again, imagine the views of “lady love” here. boom. it’s bikini atoll season…

and it just keeps getting worse as the pathology as politics veers into precincts of absurdity like “somalis were an important part of the founding of boston” from which no reasonable escape may be effected.

this trend has, of late, seemed more acute among women. i suspect the big driver for this is that it was predominantly women whose political views changed in the last 15 years.

there appears to be a great deal of denial and projection about this, a sort of “redshift” where those moving rapidly left assume they are the ones standing still and the more radicalized they become, the more they must believe that everyone else is going “far right” in order to explain the gaps they see opening up.

“it’s not me, it’s you” is a common psychological and political viewpoint and one whose expression seems to have intensified of late.

now consider how this huge bolus and weight of fake history, fake present, and misapprehended movement across a political spectrum plays in those we have so often discussed here as “the people who ARE their ideas as opposed to being people who have their ideas.”

they have forged externally validated identities on patterns of facts and assumptions about how the world was and is that cannot find consonance with reality, and as more and more folks defect from this world view, it gets harder and harder to find ways to tell yourself that you are not seeing what you’re seeing.

the deep need to “know what is not so” becomes a rising rage forged in the burning wires of cognitive dissonance trying to protect an ideological identity whose revision feels like erasure and death.

and people under pressures like that will believe wild things to protect their world views.

do you see now how a person like “lady love” would find themselves spiraling and desperate, lashing out and demanding agreement, validation, and even obeisance from people who just want to talk about ways to fix up the bathroom and make a soufflé?

they have become so accustomed to being the center of the universe, the center of debate and attention in their chosen echo chambers that merely to hear others speak of normal things outside of the splash zone of political and ideological obsession becomes upsetting.

we saw so much of this during the times covidian.

you cannot have “normal” when your identity is in crisis.

this is, of course, the sort of standard “one note flute” monomaniacal obsession inculcated by post modernists and marxists alike: everything must be seen through the lens of race or sex or class or sexual predilection.

baking your own bread can never be “just bread” but must always be seen in the context of the struggle.

and we have some really unhealthy folks out there.

here’s an example i happened to come across.

try considering what you see here in the frame laid out above.

“i want you to be able to look at me and see that i am a safe space” says the young lady who seems to wish to be defined by her jewelry, right before expressing a long, aggressive stream of people and things she hates.

• donald trump

• men (as a whole)

• what’s going on in the world

• the “genocide” in gaza

• and anybody who thinks any differently

quite a large group. by the time we’re done, i’d guess we’re at 80%+ of america.

“if i’m not for you, good.”

it’s a pretty interesting set of sentiments to spend so much time expressing to people you claim not to care about.

but when one’s whole sense of the sweep of history, the ongoing activity of the present, and thoughts for the future are caught up in and distorted by a single obsessive lens which has been mistaken for identity, importance, and morality, it’s a perch with no climb down.

and as the group around these people who are accepting or even tolerant of their worldviews and monomanias grows ever smaller amidst the breakage of the cancel culture that allowed these views to rage unchecked and unchallenged, some will wake up, but the far fringe, the really ill and ill-formed, will self-immolate in rage.

they seem way past the idea of “adapting themselves to the world” and when faced with a world less and less interested in adapting to people too obsessive and demanding to let a video about painting a chair stand free of politics, it’s just going to spiral.

there will, over the coming months be a vast amount of information surfacing about fraud, elections, manipulation, and a whole ream of the “cherished history” of this tribe that will be overturned.

i'm not sure there is, at this point, really much that can be done to head off the impending melt down and freak out festival to come, but at least understanding why it’s happening can help with navigation.

it will punch itself out. this cannot long survive without engagement, attention, and validation. “convincing” is not a path to success. once one ceases to feed to trolls, they’ll move on.