Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Insanity is a dramatic deviation from reality. Whether it’s a relatively minor one like believing your cat is trying to say human words (guilty) or an elaborate and more difficult one, like the proverbial belief that you are Corsica’s gift to the martial arts (is that ever a thing, or was it just something comic artists seized on?); whether it’s relatively harmless (no one cares if I scream at the cat “Speak clearly.” At least if I’m not in public) or very dangerous, like believing your at is whispering that you should kill the neighbors and put their pieces in a garbage bag (oh, please, Havey is too stupid to have a concept of neighbors.) insanity is a deviation from reality. (I almost typed consensus reality, and that way lies one of the dangers, which I’ll mention later.)

I don’t think there breathes a single human who is not at least a tiny bit insane by the strictest definition. As Heinlein pointed out, some illusions are even functional and parents’ belief that their kids are the most beautiful and smartest human beings on the planet keeps the kids alive to adulthood. Because sometimes the temptation to strangle the living daylights out of them will be almost unbearable, say when the four year old blows a crater in the backyard. (Actually it’s worse than that, because you don’t know whether to giggle or scream, so you can die of an apoplexy before you even think of yelling at the kid.)

I suppose my own, personal bit of undeniable insanity is that I believe stories show up fully formed in my head, as though I were a receiver for some master story teller elsewhere. And I talk about it that way too, by saying thing like “I just can’t get properly tuned to receive this story.”
By everything rational, this is an insane, nay, a possibly utterly bug nuts belief. But it is a functional one. It works for me, to cast what I do in that terms, and I certainly don’t demand that anyone think or believe the way I do. Even husband more or less pats me on the head and makes the expression that means “well, it works for you.”

But we all have some. People talk to plants; believe they can hear something that’s patently impossible to hear, etc. People also have strange ideas that don’t accord to the real world but which don’t hurt anyone—under normal circumstances.

It’s perfectly possible—or was until the late nineties—for me to be friends with people who believe that every country has the same priorities as America, or who thinks China elects their government, or that everyone lives at least at the same level we do.

Which brings us: why till the late nineties?

Because since then the media/overculture has been on a tear to sell us a “consensus reality” which has no contact whatsoever with real reality, but which locks in every part of it, in lockstep.

They’ve been building a great, overarching madness, in which women are the most oppressed people of all, unless it’s against transwomen who are even more super oppressed; America is systemically racist, but other countries (snort, giggle) are better; all other countries are more tolerant and people have more rights than we do; it is possible to pay everyone money so they can “pursue their art” and we’ll all be automagically rich and food will materialize from the air along with medical care, and possibly free unicorns; the only people standing in the way of this are “haters” who is anyone who doesn’t agree with the program as proclaimed that day; and all we have to do is put the right (left) people in charge, and it doesn’t matter if they take all our rights away, because they are so perfect and loving and want to take care of us.

There are branches to this madness, like the idea that if you get rid of the police/guns/self-defense violence will stop; that if there are no possessions there will be no crime; that there is no difference between men and women, but you should be able to change from male to female and female to male, even though these categories don’t actually exist.

The deeper you delve into this insanity, the deeper the waters of madness become, till they cover everything and everyone, into a grand unified theory of nonsense that doesn’t connect to anything real.

Look, yep, there are transsexual people—real ones (very, very few, percentage wise, but they exist)—;and there are racist assholes (very few, but we’re a population of 300 mil. There will be assholes); and there are instances of discrimination against every possible category of humans, and some impossible ones too.

But the world—the real world—as it exists is imperfect. There’s always going to be something. The more you look for something—whether it’s ways to make money or instances of microaggressions—the more you’re going to find.

This doesn’t mean you can somehow find every instance of the bad things and turn it into good things, because that’s not the way the world works.

You can’t stop every instance of child abuse; racism; mass killing—well, pretty much anything. Because humans are humans, capable of both self will and dissimulation. You can’t control everyone. And the more you try, the more power you give to the people who control it all. And think about it, what type of people want to be in charge of deciding what everyone can’t and can do? They’re not usually the most selfless, other-oriented people in the world.

Part of the problem and the reason saying “Consensus reality” is wrong is that it doesn’t matter what the consensus is. We can all believe that food will rain from the sky every day at 12 pm and yet it won’t happen.

But you see,t he left believes it will. When they tell you “The consensus is” as though that meant “reality is” it’s because they believe this is true. They’ve gone around the postmodern bend so far that they think that believing makes it so. Which is why in 2008 in Denver we were treated to the bizarre spectacle of their trying to levitate the mint.

This is also why they get so made when you tell them their beliefs are wrong, and this is what makes our speech “violence”—because if we all believed, the world would be paradise. This is also why they want everyone to say the election was completely aboveboard. Because if you all believe it, it will have been so.

There are many forms of madness. A madness imposing itself from above results in the insanity that was 2020 (and 2021 isn’t getting any better. Worse, it results in insanity like the Cultural Revolution in China, which killed millions and destroyed knowledge and material wealth in untold amounts.

I know, being bombarded from all sides with the insane narrative makes it feel like it must be us who are crazy. But it is not so.

Consensus (which they don’t have, and we know they don’t have it, because they’re destroying every possible means of figuring out what the consensus is) is not the measure of reality.

Reality is the measure of reality. All of your wishing upon Das Kapital one make a single one of Marx’s insane assertions correct.

All it does is tilt you further and further away from reality.

And reality is a stone cold bitch. She always wins.

So insanity will cease, because it has to.

The only question is what remains after. Build over, build under, build around, and get ready to hold when the Earth Shattering Kaboom comes.

Be not afraid.

 

Reprinted from According to Hoyt for March 29, 2021