Every time I hit x, I find someone talking with great certainty of what appears to be a parallel universe.
I’m not talking here of the doomers who are almost certainly foreign (or clankers) who mix up timelines and history, and seem convinced we’ve been living in dystopia since the 70s but also think that the US is somehow responsible for the inflationary policies of the rest of the world. (In the seventies! When the Mediterranean countries were already on the third or fourth cycle of inflating away their debt. Which arguably is also what the US tried to do.)
I’m talking of people I read and respect, who seem convinced all of the right has suddenly, overnight, become anti-semitic or worse.
They’re living in bubbles. And can’t seem to see outside them.
I wish I could say that this is a problem of the internet. Or perhaps not, since the internet isn’t going away. But honestly it’s weirder when the bubble is in real life.
For years I laughed at people who said that the communists were taking over or the like, because it was so weird and out of touch. What I should have done was check where they were coming from.
Yes, there are states, professions, locations where your view of reality will be completely distorted. It doesn’t make your view any more accurate, but it does explain why you think that.
I found this out in 2020 when we had to cross the country during lockdown. I found that the hard lockdown, unavoidable in urban Colorado, where the signs on the highway told you that you should be home, even though driving alone in your car (or with the person you lived with) could not cause contagion. But a couple of hours away, still in Colorado, little towns were fully open and people looked at you oddly if you wore a mask. And in other states, the enforcement was far less draconian and sometimes wildly spotty.
Another point at which I realized my bubble had blinded me was yesterday while talking about all the stratagems we used to go through to figure out which churches were less likely to serve up sermons on the wickedness of the right and the saintliness of the left. This was a theme of the last six years in Colorado, and I suddenly realized we haven’t found anything even half as bad since we moved. In fact, the worst sermons here would be very good in those days. (Like, I get annoyed because I think I know what the sermon is driving at, but not thing is explicit, and sometimes there is at least an attempt to head that idea off.)
Here’s the thing, yes, the net, and particularly X can make it worse. It’s still not as bad as the days the left controlled twitter. But– But other countries have realized that they can sow dissension and truly weird ideas in the US with their fifty cent army, some of which aren’t even clankers.
Can I tell you how to fix this? Well, I can’t tell you to regularly drive across the country and observe other places. I can’t tell you even to ignore all the bots and the crazies on X. But you should. Honestly, you should. It’s just that you might become confused about who is a bot or a foreign agent.
There are tells of grammar and syntax for foreign, more importantly there’s tells of worldview, like thinking the US is evenly divided by race, or that um… the media is perfectly accurate about how we live* and if you look, it starts to become obvious. For the clankers, not sure. Except sooner or later the “wait what?” comes through. (*Yes, this will also catch our hard left. or, as I said, foreigners.)
However and beyond twitter, keep one very clear thing in mind “Who would benefit if I believed this? And are they the kind of countries who would be paying for a fifty cent army?”
Other than that? Look at facts. Facts are hard to ignore or explain.
If there is a great anti-semitic movement in this country, how come the violence are the same ol’ leftist rentamobs and open-borders invaders we’ve always seen? I mean, it’s a good question, isn’t it?
In the same way, about my long running argument linked above, if everyone’s standards of life have been declining since the seventies, how come they actually haven’t, and if we were transported to the seventies most of us would bitch? I agree that currently the US is screwing the young, but that’s because we’ve become a stupid gerontocracy. And by “we” in this case I mostly mean the left. However, the young still have options we didn’t have, and those with a modicum of drive can forge their own paths. Claiming they can’t because Phds are more expensive or manual labor pays less doesn’t help anything and makes me want to b&tch slap the doomers. (Okay, that last one is constant, but still.) Yes, I’ll write about why the future is so bright we should all buy stock in shades, BUT first and more importantly, if your view of the present and future is that dark and you’re not a bot or a driven ideologue (For some reason the “everything has gone to hell since the seventies” is a favorite of card-carrying communists. I’m not sure why, except in the seventies the USSR still seemed ascendant?) check your bubble. Check what you might not be seeing.
As always, I’m going to recommend you listen to people talking in the grocery store, engage in casual chatter with your delivery people, and compare to what you think you know.
And if the future seems dark, go and look at the new tech, the new things we can now do, and don’t look at it through cautionary tales written half a century ago (No, truly, even if you discount USSR propaganda, a lot of the writers were just trying to write for the money.) And then think how you could use that to forge your own path.
Things feel dark because the left is dying. And they still have enough control over the opinion industrial complex to influence how the rest of us feel.
Talk of past unity and present strife ignores the fact that in the past there was only one opinion broadcast: the left’s.
Today the world seems to be falling apart but the truth is that we’re finally, at long last, fighting back.
Which is why the left is trying to obfuscate by being louder, crazier, and more than occasionally pretending to be on the right.
Oh, yeah, another reality check, people who say they’re on the right but parrot all the leftist talking points, probably aren’t on the right. High chances they’re ALSO not your friends.
We all tend to fall into the occasional bubble. And heck “Obsessed with politics” is a bubble. BUT thanks to the net, we can reality check.
Always reality check.
And don’t fall into despair.
Sursum corda. In the end we win, they lose.
No other outcome is possible — they’re at war with reality — but more importantly, no other outcome is acceptable.
Be not afraid. And keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.
According To Hoyt 