Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Burning Down the Social Networks—by Crossoverchaos

If you’re feeling the tension singing in the air and over the Internet, and wondering “why are people cracking now, instead of last week, or the week before that?” I suspect the reason has to do with how the brain works. Or doesn’t. There’s some really neat stuff on how outside environments affect the brain for depression in this book:

Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression—and the Unexpected Solutions by Johann Hari. [Kindle, or Audiobook, or Hardback, or Paperback from Amazon.com.]

(Yes, I know whose endorsements are all over the covers. No, I don’t agree with all the guy’s proposed solutions. There’s still a lot of useful info to chew over in it.)

Short version of what he put together: Depressed people tend to be suffering from one or more environmental and social disconnections. The seven he identified are disconnection from meaningful work, other people, meaningful values, childhood trauma, status and respect, the natural world, and a hopeful or secure future.

Look at what we’re dealing with now. Too many people are out of work. We’re not supposed to get within six feet of other people in public, and in many places if you are hospitalized with COVID-19, your family will not be allowed to see you, even in extremis. Meaning there is a significant chance you will die alone.

Values? The churches are closed. Donations of anything not food or protective gear are shut down. Sometimes you can’t even properly care for your own children by getting them vaccinated—it’s a “nonessential medical procedure”. Trauma? If you were traumatized as a child or adult by being controlled (and all abusers try to control you), the constant round of “you can’t do X, you can’t do Y, Because We Say So”, is hitting all those panic-buttons that tell your body your life is in danger. Status and respect? Job loss. Businesses closed. Oh, we get to see the politicians and media bigwigs getting haircuts and heading to summer cabins, but so much as head out for groceries without a mask on yourself, and you get the Evil Eye from perfect strangers, you ignorant peasant, you. Head for nature to try and regain your sanity? Parks, closed. Beaches, closed. They’re hauling in paddleboarders off the coast of California and arresting them.

Hope for the future? Fauci keeps gleefully recounting that we might have to keep the country closed another year or more. Too many politicians seem to be fine with that, while the rest of us who work for a living are watching what savings we have evaporate, and everything we’ve tried to build go down in flames. And nobody knows what the hell is going on.

Long story short—the shutdown of the country is taking every last one of those connections that normally keep people from getting depressed, and setting them on fire.

Humans are primates. Primates do not live alone. They get sick. They go crazy.

The majority of Americans are not crazy. Yet. But we’re hurting. Most of us have been confined in one way or another over a month, and that’s more than enough time for our brain to decide this is the “new normal” and start shedding neurons related to better times so that we can survive in this horrid numb depressed state. Good news is that the brain can recover from this. Bad news is it’ll take time and a lot of good feelings, sort of a neurological kick in the pants, to get out of the depressed groove.

Worse news is that depression seems to be the primate response of “please stop beating me, I’m no threat to you.” Which, of course, means that the tinpot dictators coming out of the woodwork have every reason to keep this up.

What we have is a situation in which all of America is being abused. I do not use that term lightly. Loss of jobs that you have no control over = financial abuse. The media constantly going on about “if we don’t do X, we’ll have bodies in the streets” = constant negativity, gaslighting. “You want the economy reopened? You want people to die?” = emotional abuse. Being shut up into your own house with people you may or may not be able to stand, not able to get the medical care, food, or other things you need freely = emotional, environmental, and physical abuse.

This is a situation tailor-made for narcissistic abuse, with the media and the politicians, too many of whom have those tendencies in the first place, taking full advantage of it.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/heres-one-thing-officials-can-do-to-make-lockdown-life-better-stop-being-hypocritical-tyrants/

(If you want some horror stories check out the “raisedbynarcissists” reddit—too many people posting there are forced to shelter in place with the same people making them suicidal. Some are moving out with no job, no resources, and no place to go, because otherwise they’re going to die.)

I’m not surprised so many people are cracking and afraid. I am angry. I’ve seen this before. I’m an Odd, after all. And I grew up in a little town that was distinctly not Odd, with parents that encouraged said town to believe I was the problem child and they could do what they liked to “correct” me. And when I say “could do what they liked”—that list of seven disconnections? I was forced into all of them. All of them.

(Books saved me. I know others might not have been so lucky.)

There’s an interesting bit of history that leads me to believe Hari’s more right than not. I can’t remember the exact details, but… let’s just say, at one point as a child I was told I should have been burned as a witch. So I looked up the subject.

Some researchers studied the history of witch-burnings in Germany, trying to figure out why some areas would pretty steadily burn one or two witches every twenty years or so, while others would have one massive flare up and then maybe nothing for a century or more. It wasn’t religion—Protestant and Catholic seemed equally hit. Didn’t seem to be famine-related, or wealth, or any of the things they expected.

What they found, was it depended on where the victims were in the social networks. So long as witch-burnings targeted people living on the fringe, who had maybe one or two other relatives/other social connections in the area, you got the low-level steady burnings. But if a true hysteria got started, to the point that the accused started being people of middle to upper-class status with lots of social connections-

Then it ended. And there wouldn’t be another accusation for decades, even centuries. Because important parts of the social networks got impacted, people who hadn’t been ostracized, and therefore it stopped.

What’s happening to America right now is our own government sawing through our social networks. Telling each and every one of us anyone we know might be a life-or-death survival threat. It is crushing the spirit… and people can’t take that and survive. Either they give up, curl up, and die….

Or they start looking for enemies. And they’re being told people around them, anyone who’s not behaving just like The Authorities demand, are the enemies.

I’ve seen this before.

I’m not afraid of the virus. I’ve never been afraid of the virus.

But I can hear the roar of the mob in the distance, and it’s bearing fire.

 

[Because C.C. is right, and depression is a passive mode, also a vulnerable mode that makes you susceptible to getting ill and to just not doing anything, even what you know you should do, I’m going to combat mine starting tomorrow (but taking the weekend off for the other stuff, including promo I didn’t do last wee) to sketch where we are, and where I think we’re headed.

The where I think we’re headed will be four scenarios, only two of which avoid the boog, and only ONE of which is in any way good. (And the one that requires the most action NOW.)

You should have received your “Please don’t boog” money and if you don’t need it for immediate expenses, it’s time to consider how to put it into durable goods, because where we’re going, you’ll need a barrel of money to buy coffee.

So tomorrow I’ll explain my sense of where we’re going (why, let’s tie a ribbon on the handbasket handle. That will make it ALL better.) More tomorrow.—SAH] [ Which follows—Editor ]

 

The Paths Ahead—Pie In The Sky

In this series of posts, I’m going to sketch what I view as four probable futures coming from this. Mind you, I’m a fiction writer, not a prophet. These futures would probably all have bits of each other in it. Because people are mixed up and messy.

Only one of them—this one—is unalloyed “good” (as much as anything is in the real world) and I start with it, partly because I don’t want to send you into the weekend depressed. Also because I’m doing my best to avoid bottoming out on depression, because last night’s presidential weaseling of guidelines solidified for me that we now live in a socialist economy. Our only choice is between national-socialists (no, not like Hitler. Hitler was an aberration. The others, by and large, didn’t kill their own people in batch lots, just in lost of opportunity, despair, poverty.) and international socialists. The economy will never be free, and your ability to pursue happiness will never be your own again. Not unless….

In this scenario people set themselves free. At some point, they get tired of the disaster porn the media is feeding them and get out of their basements, and look around to realize that no, we’re not all dying like flies, there are no bodies on the streets, the hospitals are so far from overwhelmed that doctors and nurses are choreographing dance numbers in the hallways, all while grandma’s cancer gets worse, and mom goes without heart surgery because the government closed the hospitals, to make way for a surge of COVID-19 deaths that never happened.

Then people get angry and jam the streets and start screaming and yelling and refusing to be arrested. They, in fact, become the America Hong Kong thinks we are.

The governors, in terror, realize they’ve gone too far, and lost all plausible cover.

If this happens soon enough, it will be tight this winter, but not outright famine. If this happens soon enough, and Trump realizes it (if he has a talent, it is reading people) he puts the blame squarely where it belongs. He denounces “governing by “experts”” and does a 90 degree turn and tells us how we were fooled. And what the media and the DNC (BIRM) did to the country, all to put their spokeszombie in charge.

He wins in a landslide, but with the other side completely discredited. At which point he cleans house, the Dems fall apart (I told you it was a dream) and the election in 2024 is between Republicans and Libertarians. And I don’t know for whom I’d vote, at least if Pence is the nominee, because as head of the Covid-19 task force he seems to believe experts and reach for the authoritarian lever, given a choice. I don’t like his personality as seen in this response, and his personality is all we have to go on. So it would depend on how wild-eyed open-borders the Libertarian was. (Because open borders are a bad, bad idea when the rest of the world is largely unfree.)

If it happens soon enough, say no later than mid May, the winter will suck like living hell, but America recovers. America recovers fast. Regulations that impair the opening of factories and America doing for itself are struck down. Everyone goes to work, and Welfare becomes a distant, bad memory. The economy takes off like a rocket, because bad as we’ll be we’ll still be way better than 90% of the world.

And because people have seen what schools and colleges are doing to their kids, homeschooling grows exponentially. Perhaps not everyone, but a vast majority of parents in jobs that work from home opt to teach their kids from home. Because the job market is so tight, kids are encouraged to join the gig economy as soon as they’re able (and laws are relaxed. Look, our laws are insane, okay. 15 year olds have never been “children.”) College becomes less relevant, and what remains is real scholarship and real training.

Eventually—I’d like tomorrow, but I know it’s more likely to be ten years—the stupid tax collection laws online are done away with, and people can trade and work across state lines, start up their own sales sites and not be dependent on vast, increasingly unresponsive corporations.

In ten years, from a happy, prosperous America starting to colonize space, we look back at this moment of utter insanity and say “yeah, but without it, the breakage of the old institutions would have been slower, more painful, and we’d have ended up in a more centralized and less free society.”

And 2020 initiates the beginning of the Liberty century, one in which individuals become more and more free each year, until the crazy theories of that angry inkblot, Marx, are no more than a bad memory and referred to in wondering confusion, as we talk about phrenology.

Sure, people still need to fight to KEEP their freedom, but the corner will have been turned, and we’ll be undoing the closing of minds and opportunity of the 20th century.

No, I do not believe it is likely. But I WANT to believe.

 

Reprinted from According to Hoyt for April 16 & 17, 2020