What Does This Clownworld Mean?
What Does This Clownworld Mean?
Considering the questions that arise when everything just keeps getting weirder and weirder...
Clownworld just keeps getting weirder. These past few years, I’ve learned to ignore much of the craziness. I think a lot of us have. It’s how you cope. It’s how you get through all the demands of daily life. You adjust to the new normal, however strange and surreal it is, and you stop noticing how drastically things have changed in such a relatively short time. But every now and then, some new anomaly shakes me awake and makes me wonder, all over again, what does all of this mean?
A Very Strange Pattern
Yesterday, I saw another one of those news stories that highlights just how upside-down everything is. A brown-skinned foreigner rammed a truck into a barricade at the White House, and the feds and media started crowing about it being a white-nationalist terrorist attack. The FBI is running out of white white supremacists and U.S. citizen domestic extremists, so now they’re using non-white non-citizens for false flag white-nationalist terror attacks to justify their ongoing war on non-elite white Americans.
But I don’t want to discuss the specifics of this particular case. Very likely, in a few days, this incident will be entirely forgotten, after having been swept aside by some newer and more egregious assault on common sense. What I wish to discuss is the larger pattern that this news story instantiates. It’s a pattern that has become all too familiar in recent years:
Bizarre event happens;
Mainstream media and public officials make immediate and almost identical pronouncements on what happened and what the response should be;
Anomalous facts quickly emerge that show the official narrative isn’t just unlikely, it’s patently absurd;
Independent, heterodox thinkers seize on these anomalous facts and present much more plausible alternative explanations;
Mainstream media and public officials ignore these anomalous facts — they just act like this contrary evidence doesn’t even exist — even though anyone with functioning eyes and half-a-brain can plainly see that these facts completely discredit the official narrative;
The citizenry — divided into Regime-Lovers, Dissidents, and Don’t-Have-an-Opinion-on-Anything Normies — immediately respond to the underlying event and to the official narrative in predictable ways;
The Regime-Lovers enthusiastically and uncritically subscribe to the official narrative, while denouncing all the heretics who criticize it;
The Dissidents condemn it all as unbelievable bullshit (which it pretty plainly is);
And the Normies express a vague concern that the world is getting crazy, that everything costs more than it used to, and that “OMG, did you hear about [insert the latest stupid celebrity gossip]?”
What does this pattern mean? And what underlying state of affairs does it signify?
The Regime-Lovers are a minority of the overall population, but there are still a lot of them. Among lower-class blacks and upper-class whites, the Regime-Lovers appear to be the majority. Whatever their screens tell them to believe, they will zealously believe. Even when they occasionally notice that things have changed dramatically for the worse, they don’t connect the dots between those changes and the platforms of the elected officials for whom they overwhelmingly voted (and continue to vote). Whenever the Regime’s puppets talk, the Regime-Lovers listen and nod along. They believe whatever they’re told to believe. They support whatever causes they’re told to support. They vote for whomever they are told to vote.
The Dissidents are also a minority of the population, although their numbers seem to have grown substantially in the wake of all the COVID craziness. The Dissidents see the problems clearly. Though they often disagree among themselves as to how to solve these problems, they usually are able to make fairly compelling arguments in support of their proposed solutions. The chief problems the Dissidents seem to have are (1) their OODA-loops 2 continually get reset by the daily barrage of bullshit coming at them from all directions, and (2) they are a minority of the population and have almost no institutional power in any First World countries. Consequently, their Scylla and Charibdes are anger and despair, either of which is an understandable response, but both of which are used against them by the Regime and its toadies.
The Normies are a solid majority of the population, but like the proles in 1984, they only ever get riled up about stupid shit, like buying televisions and sneakers during Black Friday sales. As long as they have fun games to mindlessly play on their phones and fun TikTok videos to mindlessly watch on their phones and fun products to mindlessly buy on their phones, they are happy to remain blissfully ignorant.
A regime official gets caught with his hands in the cookie jar. He points to a Dissident and starts chanting the magic words: white supremacists, conspiracy theorists, domestic extremists, etc. The Regime-Lovers also point at the Dissident and start chanting the magic words in unison with the regime official. Because the Regime-Lovers hold institutional power, they fire the Dissident from his job and have him arrested for stealing cookies. The Dissident is flabbergasted and tries to interject, “Look! That official’s hand is still in the cookie jar! I don’t steal! I don’t even like those kinds of cookies!” The official takes a cookie from the jar and begins eating it, right in front of everyone. As he reaches for another, he grins and winks at the Dissident. The Regime-Lovers continue chanting, as the Dissident is hauled off to jail. (The Normies, meanwhile, are oblivious to the whole thing, as they are ensorcelled by the stupid TikTok videos playing on their phones — if anyone took their phones away and asked them what they thought, they’d say that white supremacy is evil and cookies are good, so the Dissident deserves to be in jail.)
This pattern has played out repeatedly over the past few years. From Justin Turd-eau calling peaceful trucker-convoy protesters fascists, while simultaneously employing fascist police tactics to crush them, to Joe Brandon and Hillary Clinton calling their political opponents a threat to democracy, while simultaneously using the FBI to interfere in the election and harass the other candidate. Their playbook is childishly inane, so why does it keep working?
And what does it say about Humanity that these tactics work so reliably well on so many people? The confidence men have grown progressively more brazen. The scope of their frauds have swelled exponentially, and they no longer make any attempt to hide what they are doing. Yet so many people remain blissfully unaware of the obvious crimes being committed right under their noses, while others cheer and shout encouragement to the criminals who are in the process of robbing them blind! What do we make of that?
Some Further Questions
Every major religion and spiritual tradition emphasizes Truth as being of central importance and condemns dishonesty as a moral failing (absent some strong justification for concealing the truth). Yet our civilization’s leaders are mostly pathological liars, and our institutions all seem to incentivize lying as a way of life. People acknowledge the value of Truth as an ideal, yet they promote and reward the practice of telling obvious lies — even when they are the ones being lied to! Why is that?
Humans are supposedly rational creatures, yet a significant number will readily agree to absurdities merely to affirm their tribal loyalties. So strong is their desire to believe whatever their group believes, that many of them really do believe it3 . And of those who may, in an unguarded, private moment confess to having some doubts, many will nevertheless say publicly that they believe the nonsense and will urge those around them to agree with it too. Why are so many people so eager to promote the obvious lies of obvious confidence men, no matter how many times those confidence men get caught scamming them?
And why are so many humans so stupidly incurious? I have dogs, cats, and parakeets in my household. All of these animals display abundant curiosity. Introduce anything new into their environment, and they immediately go to work investigating it — tentatively at first, and with cheerful enthusiasm after they find it is not dangerous. I see that insatiable curiosity in all kinds of other animals, especially among non-human primates — yet a significant number of humans do not demonstrate any curiosity about anything whatsoever. How is that even possible? How can chimps and baboons display more curiosity and creativity than many humans?
And why are so many of our leaders such bad liars? Some seem shrewd and clever, though incredibly lacking in self-awareness; but with each passing year, more and more of them come across as drooling idiots, completely incapable of concocting any halfway decent criminal scheme and carrying it out effectively. Are the true masterminds operating behind the scenes? If so, why do they choose such stupid subordinates for the public-facing roles? Why not choose agents who will be able to lie effectively?
And isn’t the point of lying to keep people from knowing the truth? If their lies are so unbelievably bad that nobody who cares about the truth is ever convinced by them, then why do they even bother to lie in the first place? Why not just come right out and say, “We’re doing this because we feel like it and because we can”? As for those who are still Regime-Lovers after all the insanely obvious lies and scams of the past few years, is there really any chance that they would suddenly begin caring about Truth and Reason and Integrity now? Why should the con men go to the trouble of creating and maintaining a system of lies, when those lies aren’t convincing anyone who needs convincing? It’s almost like they want to make it obvious that they’re lying. Why would they want it to be obvious that they are lying?
I’ll consider possible answers to these questions in a future post.
We are strange creatures living in a very strange world. And I say that based simply on what we can see. What we cannot see may be even weirder. Much weirder.
Granted, some of them have an excuse for voting the way they do — at least the ones who are dead or comatose.
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