What is at the core of insanity? It is quite simply the refusal to acknowledge or attempt to befit oneself to reality. It is imprisoning yourself inside your own mind’s fantasies about what the world ought to be, what you want it to be, instead of what it truly is.
This is easily apparent in any sustained encounter with America’s homeless, most of whom are quite obviously mentally ill. It is also often apparent in any sustained encounter with someone for whom leftist politics functions as a religion.
One senses in such encounters the uncanny eerieness of having somehow entered an internally closed loop, a spiral from which there is no escape, and the assumptions underneath it are absolutely not up for question. The assumptions are many, they are often vague and undefined, and they are unquestionable. Try, and you risk being viciously attacked.
There are also the demands that not just the unstable individual but those he encounters be forced to conform to his reality instead of actual reality. Many kind and decent people go along with the initial demands because they seem relatively trifling and, at a surface level, to possibly ease another’s suffering. Wear a mask. Overlook that tent pitched next to the playground. Put an unaccompanied minor into the U.S. foster care system.
Once the first concession is won, however, the demands inevitably grow. Stay home, from two weeks to two years to forever. Give addicts clean needles. De facto amnesty for millions. No more livelihoods for those invested in small businesses. You’re a mass-murdering racist if you don’t comply.
Those who live in the prisons of their own minds are not only a threat to themselves, but to everyone else. It’s not just because their demonically strong delusions pull others in simply out of empathy and fear. As Leila Marie Lawler points out, “it actually matters if everyone around you is performatively mentally ill and/or deluded. Noticing such things is actually a survival tactic, and you have way more to fear from a society of wackos than a non-existent outdoors drop of Covid.”
Once mental illness is normalized, it increases. Just look at how buying into the false promises of lockdowns now has people in blue enclaves still wearing masks even when vaccinated.
For those committed to power at all costs, wokeness is designed to create tens of millions of permanent psychiatric patients, people who believe insane and unreal things like “men are women,” “printing money doesn’t cause inflation,” “human worth is determined by skin color,” “lockdowns are a sensible public health strategy,” and “true socialism has never been tried.” These false beliefs require enormous energy to prop up, and that’s where the political apparatus of the left comes in.
Wokeness is about creating a nationwide mental hospital of forever patients who never get better. They just have to get on a new drug regimen or get centered in a different and more meaningful way, or there’s this new program they’ve heard about, some new place to dope up. If you take a bit much, public employees will give you taxpayer-provided Narcan and you can be at it again that same afternoon.
That’s another feature of the mentally ill society: Endlessly attempting to suspend the real-world consequences of people’s behavior. It requires hopelessly attempting to pretend for as long as possible that reality does not exist, that what goes up will not come down, that what is spent must not be paid, that the children really are alright in Plexiglas cages.
Yet refusing to let the consequences of people’s actions hit them only makes their behavior worse in the long run. It’s what enablers do. Enablers are essential for addicts. They think they are helping, but they’re really hurting. They are vampires, sucking the life out of fellow humans to make themselves feel better. You can’t have so many addicts without a bunch of enablers.
For a drug addict, the enablers might get paid in sex, housing, or feeling better about themselves for “helping.” For woke addicts, the enablers get paid even better, with comfortable government jobs and contracts, political and social prestige, and self-righteousness.
You can’t have the streets filled with dangerous addicts without a weakly opposed international drug trade and a refusal to commit those who are not mentally capable of making decisions. You can’t have endless lockdowns without all the people willing to wear a mask. You can’t have speech totalitarianism without all the people willing to stay silent when they should speak, and to stand by when others are punished for speaking the truth. You can’t have election chaos without politicians and courts that refuse to ensure its security.
Cutting the endless loop of insanity starts with stopping the enablers, first by refusing to be one.
Source: The Federalist
