[Sarah's "Sunday Rant" at Orcinus set me off on this and Josh Marshall's snippet about the reality of Iraq also lit my fire -- apparently things are going so well there that mercenary para-militaries are pulling out! Iraq has become, literally, one Hell of a place!]Authoritarian and fundamentalist mind sets -- the two are actually quite interchangeable -- are basically immature and infantile, prone to magical thinking and incapable of accepting reality as it is.
Since even the best of us can hardly be said to be completely free of authoritarian and fundamentalist tendencies, it is obvious why wingnuts who wallow and take pride in eliminationist rhetoric resort to use of:
Such a Clever Device!
I've found a very clever way
to solve the kind of problems facing us today.
The only thing we need to do
is deny reality -- deny that it's really true!
I started off believing that
the Earth -- it's really true -- in fact is really flat!
The fools who sail too far from land
fall off the edge and are never ever seen again!
It's really such a clever device
to brazenly claim that lies are truth and truths are lies!
"Rome wasn't built in a day -- but the earth was made in six!"
"All those who believe in evolution are morally sick!"
"And those who say the sky is blue
are all a bunch of liberal fags and traitors to
the Cause of Liberty, Freedom and Peace!
They ought to be tortured and shot for their outrageousness!"
All things equal, I could care less if somebody denies reality -- why should I bother to even think about it?
Thing is, all things are most certainly not equal.
Reality and truth are kind of connected, in fact two sides of the same coin. Since authoritarians and fundamentalists have a tendency to get rather in one's face about the "truth", an honest reaction must be to inform them that truth requires facing reality.
Still, there is the question of compassion. It can be a bitch to face reality, so one might say something like this:
Sounds kind of heavy, doesn't it?
"If you really want to know the truth, you must face reality and reality can be a bitch if you can't face the truth. In order to face the truth you must love the truth with no strings attached.
If you don't love the truth, your only option is ever increasing, ever stronger illusion. At a certain point the strength and fascination of illusion increases until, in the end, you cannot break the bond.
That is a real definition of the Hell you talk so much about!"
That's because it is!
If Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush and neo-con crew were locked away in an any other nut house but the White House, it wouldn't matter much how much they denied reality, not to mention simple human decency.
But they aren't and the Decider has his hands on the buttons of the most terrifying military machine the world has ever seen.
That is the crunch, that is where the shoe pinches
2 comments:
Wikipedea defines what you describe:
Delusional disorder is a psychiatric diagnosis denoting a psychotic mental illness that involves holding one or more non-bizarre delusions in the absence of any other significant psychopathology (signs or symptoms of mental illness).
A person with delusional disorder can be quite functional and does not tend to show any odd or bizarre behaviour except as a direct result of the delusional belief.
Gosh, who does that sound like?
What does it sound like?
Gee, I haven't got a clue, I mean, I'm not sure I can even pronounce "delusional disorder" without getting my tongue twisted in a knot.
I bet it's something that goes on a lot in the Third Galaxy and is mostly an almost theoretical condition in our world which is just a step or so away from a regular paradise.
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