Sometimes I suspect that there are worthwhile reasons to be unseen. One of the saddest memories I have of being a father was when I overheard my son telling my daughter. 'never let them know you're smart'. School is pretty much a gauntlet at best, and that happened when they were going to Memphis public schools. What was I thinking?
Having feared being known as a homosexual, I had married, and then divorced, something which is I suspect is always hard on children. It was certainly hard on my children. Giving into fear has collateral damage. But then I 'came out', and I felt good about being honest. I did not want to have extra-marital affairs. I didn't even want a divorce. I just wanted to be honest. But there is often a bias against honesty if it keeps up appearances. My wife did not want to allow that honest, so, we divorced.
However, as important as sexuality is, as essential as trying to understand one's own sexuality is, sexuality is not something uniquely or even particularly human. What does differentiate humans from goldfish, among other things and perhaps most importantly, is our intellectuality. (Is a word? I think its meaning is at least clear.) And coming out intellectually can often be much more difficult than coming out sexually.
Like most folks, I kinda like to have friends, and as I have wandered through life, I have drifted into lots of different groups of people. It's easy either to agree or at least not disagree with them. Folks have a lot of crazy ideas, and to call those ideas crazy makes friendship difficult. A lot of crazy ideas aren't worth the effort to even question.
And yet. A lot of not just crazy but harmful ideas become so widespread as to be hardly noticeable unless one disagrees with them. I have two degrees in history, one from a private university and one from a state university, and (surprise!) both schools were almost entirely Marxist. Most of my professors could have transferred to the University of Moscow with no changes in their lecture notes. I can remember four exceptions. One was a philosophy professor at Memphis State. One was my advisor at Roosevelt University, who was data-driven in a time when data was much harder to find than it is now. The other two were in my graduate studies at Arkansas State. One was just an all-around skeptic from the University of Colorado, and one was perhaps the most helpful teacher I ever had after high school, with a degree from Claremont, who taught politics. I flunked one of my graduate essays. Why? I wrote my answer from a classical, Aristotelian viewpoint, thinking it would be read by the guy from Colorado. It was read by a Marxist, and I had posited the outrageous idea that some men (and women, although the actors in the question were men) could act from their concepts of virtue rather than from economic determinism. What did I do? Well, I took that question over, writing it in the politically correct vein. It was a sort of 1984 moment, when I said something I knew was not true, but I did it and didn't even notice. Thus one looses one's integrity.
Lately, most of my friends are very left-leaning democrats, who seem most often to think that the highest human value is 'free' health care. They read the New York Times and find Donald Trump disgraceful. Now, full disclosure, I find Donald Trump outrageous. I also find Bernie Sanders outrageous, and Hilary Clinton demeaning of her 'followers' for whom she wants to be a 'champion'. What feminist allows for champions these days? So, in the 2016 election, I voted for Gary Johnson, but I also swallowed the blue pill.
I remained in the matrix of fear that the New York Times and CNN and the Washington Post and my democrat friends concocted about the dangers of Donald Trump. He was going to put kids in cages. (Never mind that Saint Obomber's administration had built the cages.) He was going to destroy gay rights. (Never mind that one of his Supreme Court nominees supported the decision to extend the Civil Rights Bill's protection to gay people.) I looked at the news each morning to see where there was a new war. (Never mind that President Trump has consistently been the least war-making president in recent history.) In other words, I let the little fears spread by the sort of intellectually mushy folks who had been my teachers continue to influence my thinking, because it was easy. I could post something on Facebook critical of 'the fucking moron' and it would get lots of likes. I was on the side of the angels. I was on the side of the smart people. What was it that Hilary Clinton had called Trump supporters? A basket of deplorables?
For three and a half years those angelic folks the non-deplorables, milked a false narrative that somehow Trump was a Russian agent, that he was a racist. Meanwhile, Russia hasn't moved back into Poland,the economy has boomed, and unemployment rates for non-white folks fell to the lowest levels in decades. I kept waking up to find that the things the democrats would tell me would be the end of the world as we know it if Trump were elected, hadn't happened.
Now the fear machine is being cranked up again, and I am told that I must be mentally ill because I didn't vote for a demented old man who will almost certainly be manipulated if not replaced by one of the meanest women ever to enter US politics. I was told just days ago by one of my 'liberal' friends that I had gone around the bend because I that police should protect private property rights. I put 'liberal' in quotes because property rights have long since been abandoned by many main stream leftists.
And now that the folks who spent the past four years calling half the country every sort of nasty name Twitter would allow, and that was just about anything so long as the person being attacked seemed conservative, those folks are calling for unity. One of my 'friends' posted this on Facebook a few days ago:
Except that the population of Poland was down to about 24 million after World War Two, it could have been one of the propaganda posters used by the Soviets as they improved Eastern Europe after their victory.
Now,, I must confess to being a slow learner. Or perhaps, more importantly, I should confess to being someone who allows himself to ignore empirical facts when doing so makes life more pleasant on a daily basis with others who are ignoring empirical facts. It's easy to yield to the fear that one's friends will think one queer if one disagrees with the beauty of the emperor's new clothes. Besides, there is the wonderfully convenient crisis of the corona virus, a virus so deadly one may never know one is infected unless one is tested. Imagine, all those cases walking around thinking they are healthy when they could be a statistic to frighten us all on the nightly news. Obviously the only thing to do is to close down the economy and rebuild it better.
In my last blog post, I explained how as someone who leans towards being a libertarian, even an anarchist, I found Trump a much less dire choice for president than Harris/Biden. Now as someone who has long advocated a post-national view of the world, I want to explain why I don't think Klaus Schwab's view of that world is one I want to support. The post-national world is possible because , with the emergence of what Marshall McLuhan called the Electric Age and what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called the noosphere, communication between people unmediated by states is possible on a scale unimaginable before. But despite the vision of one my favourite artists, Nam June Paik, that that world might be different from what Orwell had envisioned, there are certainly many folks who have grasped the Orwellian possibilities of being mediators.
If personal freedom is to survive in Airstrip One, and there is no guarantee that it will, we must first conquer our own fear of being taken to Room 101, because if one deviates at all from the Truth as the Ministry describes it this afternoon, someone will take you to Room 101. (I wonder if Orwell chose that number because it so often designates the first course in the official story as it is taught in colleges?) I have long found it ironic that in many ways the world of Twitter was foretold by Jesus: 'whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.' And as Nietzsche foretold, we have found ourselves stuck in the cycles of Christian theology with no way out. We have inherited the concepts of guilt, sin and shame,but without the means of redemption (thanks to Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds, p. 211). Once one makes one step away from RightThink, one is doomed to the outer darkness.
I have found it particularly interesting that one of my friends who has cast me into the outer darkness is someone with whom I became friends on Facebook and later in meatlife because he thought I was 'authentic'. I think he means that I have not tried to present someone whom I am not. (Indeed, one of the things that made Facebook attractive for me before absolutely power had corrupted absolutely, or nearly so, was Zuckerberg's ideal of 'one identity'.) As always, Shakespeare had it right in Polonius' advice to his doomed son. I want to be true to my own self, but it can seem dangerous. But as Winston would learn in Room 101, to do otherwise is to lose oneself.
Or, again, as Jesus said: 'What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?'
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