Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

So, as I’ve mentioned before, I am an introvert. I can fake extrovert. Though honestly, I think part of the way I fake extrovert is by being so introverted I am “eccentric.” Because see, for normal people seeing you walking down the street rocking a hat made entirely out of feathers (not that I’ve ever done that. I’m allergic to feathers, but take it as a metaphor) means you must be an extrovert AND extremely self-confident. They’d never DARE do that. It never occurs to them you just put the first thing that came to hand on your head because it was cold, and it happened to be the feather duster. (You removed the handle because that was just weird.) It also never occurs to them that you don’t realize they’re all staring at you, because you’re trying to figure out just why your character wants you to write him doing THAT.

So there are certain words that make me stop and look and go “um…. did I put my underpants on my head again.”

One of those words, as used by someone who is British was “peculiar.” As in, she commented on someone’s share of my blog, that I’d gone increasingly peculiar in recent years.

This causes the mental equivalent of patting my head to make sure I’m not wearing a feather duster for a hat. Or in this case that I’ve not been locked in my echo chamber to the point I don’t see how things are outside it.

I—Don’t think so?

And before you say “But you wouldn’t know.” Dude (Dudette and dudekin too), all my life I’ve been subject to suddenly going galloping into imaginary worlds, and then having issues when I have to interact with the real one, remembering that this is the real one. Like “Oh, yeah, cars don’t fly.” (Used to be a big one when I was a teen.)

In the same way that as a depressive, I fact-check reality constantly. For one, if the world REALLY is coming to an end, I’d like to know, thank you very much. Because it would be terrible to be sucker punched by the apocalypse after YEARS of dooming it on not much excuse.

In the same way, I have sort of a built-in mechanism for reality checking my analysis of situations/whatever. Like I’m ALMOST sure that we’re experiencing as much of a “Salida” as an invasion from illegal border crossings. But I’d not stake my life on it. It just has that whiff, but I haven’t found enough data to back it up yet.

However, in a time of corrupted data, it’s hard to be sure of anything. 90% of the reading I do in newsites and blogs is looking for the interstitial spaces and seeing what they show.

Look, I learned as an artist that you don’t really draw the thing, not on initial approach. You draw the blank space around the thing. And to be fair, after that, if working in black and white, you mostly draw the shadows. (Or at least I do. The exception is drawing something living because then I FIRST have to get the eyes right. Don’t ask. It’s like having the right name for a character.) I’ve been reading news like that for years.

Now, are my conclusions often unusual? Sure. But I find I tend to be more wrong when I follow what “everybody knows.”

I don’t want to rag on the person who made the peculiar comment, but she is one of the people on the soft left who are intentionally conventional (also European) and trusts the signals almost exclusively. Like, when she ran a magazine, you could jump out of the slush pile if you’d graduated from Clarion or one of the other accredited workshops. (No, I never made it in.)

On the other hand, she TRIES to be fair which is more than can be said for most on the left, and was one of the few who listened to our side during Sad Puppies. (Even if she didn’t believe us.) Though I haven’t tracked her the last few years (I’m not that social, and I’ve been busy with other things) so I don’t know if she has done the requisite grovel-and-apologize.

I also do know, from when I was in the closet that saying that kind of thing is what you do when you are trying to distract from looking at wrong thought or knowing wrong thing.

However, I took the whole “peculiar” thing and started taking it apart. Mostly because I was doing heavy manual labor while not feeling well at all, and thinking about things is how I forget I’m in pain. (I’m not feeling well enough for thinking of stories.)

I will admit I am peculiar, in that I stick out. I stick out in my position on a ton of things, particularly if you’re the sort of person who values the “authorities” of universities, of governments, of “the experts” — top men, you know?

Then again, when you look at where those authorities and opinions have taken us, you realize they are mighty peculiar indeed.

We now have 100 years of governments, “scientists” (mostly of the “social”) kind and other “experts” trying to push normal people into a system that would work great if everyone, at the same time, lost all our instincts and our culture, and what makes us human, and robot-like worked their prescriptions.

And by worked great you must understand it would mean people living sad lives with no purpose, but according to plan. With NO surprises for the rulers.

Despite commanding the heights of culture and not inconsiderable force, these “experts” have managed …. nothing good.

Mostly they’ve managed to put 100+ MILLION thinking, feeling humans in their graves prematurely, take prosperous lands and turn them into wastelands, distort economies to create gross inequity, then complain about the inequity.

And despite all this, humans, and notably Americans, have managed to work around all this “expertise” and central planning to improve life on Earth, innovate, and create and be happy.

It’s almost like all the narratives the experts feed you are mighty peculiar indeed.

(Adjusts feather duster hat.)
The minute one of their five year plans works as planned, or makes life better for any human for more than ten seconds, I will consider their opinion.

But I will not turn over my thinking/analyzing brain to their consensus narrative. There is a truth. It can be discovered. (Sometimes with much effort.)

I don’t care if it’s contrary to what everyone believes. Reality exists, and it’s worth knowing.

Mostly because reality bites you in the fleshy part of the back otherwise.

If that means I horrify the conventional ants in their conventional anthills, fine. And if they stomp me for it, fine. At least for a brief moment, I’ll have known and spoken truth.

And that’s worth it.

 

Reprinted from According to Hoyt for December 4, 2021