The idea that one’s distress is primarily caused by a neurochemical deficiency that can be corrected by a drug is a fiction. The idea that it explains first-person experience or that it offers some exemption from responsibility is a fiction as well. As the interviews made clear, people adopted the biogenetic account because they thought it was based in science. The interviews also show how this account undermines the kinds of introspection and self-examination that can lead to meaningful self-knowledge.It isn't a chemical imbalance, it's unrealistic expectations and shitty mental models that lead to you not getting what you want out of life. Thus distress due to rejection and failure.
It’s tragic that this even needs saying, but the sudden reinvention in the press of modern America as a Nazi apartheid state is as phony as the thousands of patriotic campaigns that occupied the news media previously. We’re witnessing an obscene malfunction of the elite messaging system.God save us from these betas. Fogging nonstop like politicians used to do was literally all that was needed to keep this nonsense together.
The people who run this country have run out of workable myths with which to distract the public, and in a moment of extreme crisis have chosen to stoke civil war and defame the rest of us – black and white – rather than admit to a generation of corruption, betrayal, and mismanagement.
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The same pols and pundits who not long ago were waving the flag for wars and insisting that American-style democracy was so perfectly realized that it made sense to bring it to all the peoples of the world, by force if needed (think Friedman’s hypothesis of a borderless utopia of forced wealth creation called the Golden Straitjacket), have now reversed course to tell us our entire history needs to be wiped clean.
Everything is a lie now. CNN even put “Independence” in quotes when describing the holiday today (i.e. “Reexamining ‘Independence’ Day”). This revolution will end with Wolf Blitzer pulling a switch to dynamite the Statue of Liberty. Even if America is an idea whose time is past, I doubt it deserves an ending this ridiculous.
Of all the policies that we discussed, one stands out in my mind — if for no other reason than because it is so thoroughly counterintuitive. I asked him to name the one reform that he was most proud of. "I abolished the collection of statistics," he replied. Sir John believed that statistics are dangerous, because they enable social engineers of all stripes to justify state intervention in the economy.As always the planners turn data molehills into a mountain of cash for themselves.
And this is why I find the lockdown debate so phoney. It’s been fuelled, on both sides, by the presumption that government decrees work as a sort of magic wand that will bring our economies (and perhaps the most acute phase of the pandemic) back to life. But the data suggest there is no magic wand. Much of the lockdown effect was imposed not by top-down fiat, but through millions of small decisions made every day by civic groups, employers, unions, trade associations, school boards and, most importantly, ordinary people.As I have said many times, it's horizontal enforcement and the mental prison of authoritarianism that most are locked into which is the real problem. We wouldn't have an oppressive government without that existing in the first place.
