Why I Write

Once upon a time, I wrote for very political reasons. Bush had invaded Iraq, I was upset about it, and I saw that if the US and the world in general did not change the path they were on, we were going to wind up in an era of war and revolution. Combined with climate and other environmental issues like aquifer depletion and ecosystem collapse, we were going to have a huge human die-off and massive suffering.

At first, I went all wonky. I assumed people couldn’t possibly want such a catastrophe, so I explained why it was likely to happen and I explained how to stop it in terms of plans. I used to do VERY detailed policy posts.

That didn’t work. Didn’t get any significant traction at all.

I examined the situation, and realized that people couldn’t reason morally and ethically. A few incidents convinced me that people didn’t understand really basic things like: “Killing civilians is worse than killing military,” and “Killing more people is worse than killing less people.”

So I spent a couple years trying to explain basic morals and ethics to people.

That didn’t work. They either already understood, or they were incapable of learning, no matter how simply I put the propositions. Oh, they might agree with no context (although often not even then), but the moment their tribe was involved, they became evil again.

So, I looked at that feedback, and realized that most people can’t reason, can’t separate morals from their own interests, can’t separate ethics from identity, and so on. Worse, many couldn’t even separate their own interests in terms of health, money, and staying alive from their tribal identity.

To put it simply, they were living in completely delusional fantasy worlds, so separate from any even vaguely objective reality that they might as well be living in a TV show (and, in effect, many are).

Yes, they were incapable of basic ethical and moral reasoning. Yes, many were incapable of thinking a few years into the future, or evaluating opportunity cost (look it up). Yes, if they identified with a politician or a group, they were largely incapable of applying ethical rules or even assessing their own self interest in relation to the actions of that politician.

I then moved onto issues of ideology and identity (though I’ve written less about the second), trying to dig into why people are how they are, how and when that changes, and so on.

Short answer: They have to die. The generations who are that afflicted cannot be taught, they simply have to age out of power and shuffle off the mortal coil. At a very fundamental level, they never intend to do the right thing if it conflicts with anything else of importance to them. And if that means a billion or two billion people die with whom they are not personally identified, and/or there is a great-die-off of non-human life, they’re fundamentally okay with that.

They can’t even understand “kill less people.” It is genuinely beyond them in practice. The majority will certainly never vote for a genuinely good candidate, and those candidates have been offered to Democrats during their primaries regularly.

They don’t want to do the right thing. (Yes, not everyone in those generations is so afflicted, there are large minorities who aren’t. They are minorities.)

So, I do not write, any more, to convince people to do the right thing. I know that doing so is beyond most people, certainly most Americans over the age of 30. And that is not about Trump, or Clinton: A population who wanted to do the right thing would not have had an election between two such monstrous individuals.

I write, today, to tell truths which are I believe are ignored by many people–especially on the center-left (the right-wing does not read me). Truths such as: Clinton’s hatred of Russia was extremely dangerous; Trump is not incompetent by any useful definition of the word; racism grows stronger when times are bad; under the EU, some people in England have been plunged into hopelessnes, and; while it may not be the EU’s fault, they are the status quo and will be blamed (though it isn’t not their fault).

This is shit people don’t want to hear.

As such, I suppose, I shouldn’t complain when people scream because I’ve hit a pain point. After all, by telling them truths that are not generally accepted in their group, I’m aiming for pain points.

Yet, I still am flabbergasted by the inability of people to understand simple points like “good and competent are not the same thing,” or “don’t underestimate your enemy.”

So, I write here to explore subjects which interest me, and, quite often, to tell truths that are not widely accepted. I see little point in writing articles which simply parrot views you can already read in the NYTimes or hear on CNN.

As such, I am likely to say things which challenge your world view. Things which, yes, may hurt.

But the reason the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and the reason we are actively riding that handbasket all the way down, is that we were given warnings that we were in the hand basket and we ignored them for decades. Trump isn’t the cause, he is the symptom. And frankly, though most can’t understand it, so were Clinton and Obama (who, if you want to blame someone, is the man most proximately responsible for Trump’s victory, but most people can’t admit that, either).

People wanted to live in fantasyland, and so we are going deeper and deeper into hell.

And so I will speak the truth, as I understand it (I may be wrong, though if you think I am mostly wrong, you should not read me). That is, more than any other reason, why I write.

We are here because people wanted to both believe and act on lies, because they could not stand to live in the real world, fantasyland being much more congenial to their self-image (based on their group-based identity), and to what they perceived (often–but not always–incorrectly) as their self-interest.

The problem does not lie at not being able to fix the problem. Leaving aside the whole “it’s too late now” argument, we have no significant problems we couldn’t start fixing or substantially mitigating tomorrow if we so desired. We could easily have avoided the worst of climate change, ecological collapse, and the rise of racism/stagnant economies if we had acted decisively 20 years ago.

The problem lies with people not wanting to do the right thing, and with them willfully living in a world that contains no more than a remote resemblance to the real world.

People who cannot understand simple things like “kill less people,” or “don’t underestimate your enemies,” have problems that are far deeper than whether Trump or Clinton rules them, but many who read this won’t even understand that.

The truth won’t set you free by itself, but lies will keep you in hell more surely than chains made of iron ever could.

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