There’s a particular type of person that indulges in the type of thinking that brought us to yesterday’s sedition, sedition incited by what some are calling a treasonous leader. I’ve known some of them personally, although I’d care to know them less these days. They feel gifted with the insight that they “understand” that there have been “hidden forces” attempting to rule us. Paranoid nonsense-thinking abounds, about great cabals backed by One World Armies, power-blind and merciless; elites in Hollywood and New York, corrupt and depraved, somehow capable of shaping minds and controlling actions. Apparently, and although these are the same people who would be lost without GPS and the internet, social media embeddedness and wanton materialism, cheap gas and Walmart, they blame globalism and big tech for our woes as well. And yet, they made that happen as much as anyone.
The perilous and panoramic fantasy thinking of it is ironic, as this is the segment of society that has traditionally been blessed with a weaker sense of imagination than the rest of us.
It’s bred an inverse uprising among the so-called silent, now not-so-silent, majority. That segment of society traditionally sat still while others protested or rebelled, but now has the manic passion of the recently converted. Easily seduced by others’ ideas and mostly not very deep-thinking, these are people who have always been the most impressionable and least capable of original ideas. A group, then, whose first taste of rebellion comes at the hands of toxic thinking, of the smoke and mirrors of conspiracy, accompanied by the mistaken idea that it will make them free.
At the end of the day, ironically, there has never been a greater hive mind, a larger group of people duped by an idea. Bowing to a ruler who rivals all autocratic rulers of the recent past, these are quite possibly the greatest sociopolitical sheep in recent history. A true dictatorship of the masses, this is a political force that will believe anything their egregious leader or anyone on their “side” tells them. This is the blind conspiracy thinking of populism.
What seems more logically sensible? Belief in a mirror world that is a matrix to all those who haven’t yet been red-pilled or brought forth from the underground by a grinning, lipsticked amphibian? A segment of society steeped in conspiracy theory, whose arch and wildly spinning ideas promote a dark desire to return to the mainstream society of a #deplorable past, one based in blind nationalism, social sovereignty, and co-opted notions of patriotism?
Or the simple desires of a real society, as it moves toward a quite possibly better, more sensible, progressive democracy?
Speaking of irony, is it true they’re now erecting an impenetrable barrier, a wall of sorts, around the Capitol?