Thursday, August 04, 2011

You heard it from Mr. Roboto first

If you're any sort of observer of US society, one thing with which you are all too familiar is the middle-class American tendency to cling to notions that are manifestly untrue to an utterly ridiculous extent. I like to point this out with the Orwell reference "2+2=5 and we've always been at war with Eurasia". As the various crises of deindustrialization rise and interact with one another to have a synergistic effect (this is known as "catabolic collapse"), I expect this characteristic to kick into high gear in a way that will be truly astonishing to witness. The Tea Partiers are the gold-plated, lemon-scented example of what I'm talking about here. But the phenomenon will be nearly universal. That's why I still expect to see Kostards and Democratic-Party Kool-Aid drinkers still rambling and ranting about how we have to support Obama and the Democrats long after martial law has been declared and elections have been cancelled.

You can take it for granted that people will deal with the ongoing catastrophe by waiting for some ideological Santa Claus to come sliding down the chimney, and they will base whatever decisions they make on this assumption. In the face of mounting evidence that "Santa ain't comin' down no chimney no time soon", they will simply "double-down" on their respective delusion of choice. This is what human nature does in the face of disastrous societal predicaments that are too massive for small groups of concerned citizens to deal with in the sense of "solving a problem". In a socially atomized society such as ours in which you have most people drinking one flavor of Kool-Aid or another to be able to deal with life when things are normal and stable, look for this phenomenon to metastasize like a cancer being fed pure estrogen when things are decidedly not normal and not stable.

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