The unveiling

how deep does it go? how long will it last?

To my surprise, the election results of last November, and then the speed with which the Trump administration has taken a wrecking ball to wokeness, gave me more hope than I anticipated. I was nearly at the point of accepting that the U.S., and Western society, was over. Today, I’m not entirely convinced that it’s not over; I think it’s plausible that wokeness (disconnection from reality, reversals of the truth) went on so long and got so deep that it cannot be eradicated any more than Kudzu can ever be fully rooted out of land where it’s taken hold.

But the election and its aftermath gave me enough hope to make it seem worth it look forward to the future. That is still the case, but it is less the case. My hope is tempering. It looks to me like we’re in a time of “unveiling,” where the true depth of this ideology is still being exposed to our view for the first time. As the administration pushes back and slashes and burns, the entrenched politicians, media, and activists are still in “fight back” mode. This is to be expected, but still, the tenacity of the literally lunatic ideas that have captured the Democrat/leftist mind is disturbing.

It’s making me ask questions like this:

—“If a near-landslide election, plus several months of action demonstrating that the administration means exactly what it says and will back that up, is not enough to even make Democrats slightly embarrassed and nervous about calling men women, what action would be enough?”

—“Will we discover that the cult of wokeness (and it is a literal cult, not merely “cult-like”) is usually terminal for the person who has it? That is, will we find out that it’s as bad as we feared, and that the majority of people infected with it cannot come out of it, and will not ever come out of it?”

—“If the above is the case, what does this mean for us? What must we do to steer society in a new direction? What will we have to do to disempower the terminal cases, knowing now that they cannot be remediated? Do we have the will to do it? Or, will liberals and more timid conservatives work against those of us who keep pushing and neuter their own side through civility politicking?”

We don’t have the perspective that time and retrospection will give us in the future. It may turn out that my worries right now won’t remain worries, and that the “right now” seems larger and longer to me than it will turn out to be in the real world over time. It may be that this is simply what we must go through for an indeterminate period until the tantrums subside, and more realignments take place.

But it may not turn out that way. It may be that wokeness is terminal for most people, and that it is terminal for our society. We might be living through “the big one” that we can’t “come back from”.

Here’s just one example of the kind of behavior that’s provoking these questions. It’s a single event, it may turn out to be a blip, but you can extrapolate from this event to understand the kind of reactions I’m talking about that worry me.

The other day a House committee was holding a hearing. I don’t know on what, and I don’t care. The committee was chaired by Texas Republican Keith Self. The committee included a man named “Sarah” (nee Tim) McBride, a representative from Delaware. McBride is a man who calls himself a woman.

Chairman Self is no longer playing any gender games. In opening the hearing, committee member Bill Keating, Democrat of Massachusetts, got emotional and shouty because Chair Self referred to McBride as “Mr. McBride.” Yes, we expect Democrats to get hysterical over their cult nonsense. But notice how brazen and confident they are.

Notice how committee member Keating broke all rules of procedure and gave orders to the chairman, yelled at the chairman, scolded the chairman, and did it all with the tone of voice that indicated that he truly believes he has the moral, political, and cultural power to overturn the hierarchy and control and punish the chairman. In other words, it’s like employees who try to “fire” the boss and openly defy their boss while expecting (sadly, they’re often right) that they will be allowed to be the boss themselves and they’ll be backed up in subverting the power structure.

I don’t know whether Chairman Self’s decision to say, “This meeting is adjourned” indicates good or ill. I don’t know if he meant it to set a deterrent precedent to onlookers: “If you behave in this way, the meeting is over and I dismiss you. You will get no work done until you stop this behavior.”

Or, was it a capitulation by Chairman Self? After all, shouty member Keating said there weren’t going to be any hearings until Chairman Self did as he demanded and called a man a woman. Did Self shutting down the hearing signal, “I give in?” Will Keating and the Dems read this as a victory? Will this embolden them to do this to more committee hearings on purpose until they paralyze more of government?

I don’t know, and I worry.

My deeper worry, though, is how many Bill Keatings there are. People like him are leftists who, apparently, cannot be brought back to reality. They’re so far gone that they’re getting obviously emotionally hysterical (that was real; Keating was mad and seemed like he might start crying while yelling) over something lunatic. He’s angry and willing to disrupt government because he believes a gay man who is now a transvestite is actually a woman and must be referred to as a woman, and this is so important that government work must be shut down until this act of lying obedience is performed.

What I’m about to write may strike you as overwrought and exaggerated, but I believe it’s true. I think that, if you think it’s exaggerated, that is only because you and I have been sitting in the proverbial pot of slowly boiling water so long that you’ve forgotten what normal was in your own recent past.

It is this: That kind of display from someone like Keating, had it occurred in decades past, would have made him unelectable. It would have ended his political career immediately, and probably his money-making career. He may even have been viewed as someone in need of psychiatric evaluation (reasonably).

We are so far through the looking glass that I struggle to describe the depth of what I mean. It’s not that I don’t have words to describe it. It’s that we’ve gone so far that I’m not sure other humans are thinking and processing words and concepts the way I am at all, or in a way that’s mutually intelligible.

Let me try for an analogy. Say you’re talking with someone about steam locomotives. You start discussing how Walschaerts valve gear is a superior way of regulating the intake and expulsion of steam from cylinders in comparison to other types of valve gear. The person you’re talking with responds with bafflement. It’s not that they “disagree”—it’s that they seem to not understand what valve gear is at all. They seem not to understand that it’s necessary to precisely control the intake and exhaust of steam from cylinders if you want a locomotive that operates and performs work.

You don’t have to know anything yourself about steam locomotives to recognize that managing steam is important. For a more accessible analogy, imagine you’re talking to someone about why your car must have diesel and that you cannot use gasoline because it will not only not work, it will actually destroy the diesel engine. Imagine that the person you’re talking to tells you that you’re wrong, but can’t explain to you why you’re wrong (but they’re very certain you are, and they’re emotional about it). You then realize that he literally does not understand what an internal combustion engine actually is.

That’s the level of disconnection from reality that I think I’m seeing in the objecting, crying, screaming, obstructionist Democrats and leftists. I’m asking myself, “Do they actually understand, at base as a concept, what sex is? Do they understand, as concepts, what verbs do? What nouns are?”

Like I said, I find this really tough to explain. It’s almost down to the level of “qualia,” a term philosophers use to describe the subjective, internal-to-you, experience of the world. “Qualia” are those subjective experiences of emotion or pain, etc., that we can’t directly share with each other, and that we can’t directly intuit in others.

I’m asking about Democrats and leftists: do they even share the same qualia? When I experience pain, do they experience the same thing I mean when I talk about pain? Or, do they have an experience that I would call “pleasure,” but they call “pain”?

This may sound very mixed up and nutty, and perhaps it is! But it’s honestly what’s on my mind. I’m no longer certain that other humans are having analogous and comparable experiences that are generalizable enough that we can understand each other.

I just thought of the example that may convey this. Imagine a science fiction novel or movie you remember that features first contact with an alien species. The researchers have to start at the very basics. With no shared language, there’s not even anything to translate. First, we have to figure out if the aliens recognize and experience the universe in roughly the same ways we do. For example, do they understand the concepts “affirmative” and “negative?” Do they understand and experience binary number logic, such as the difference between 1 and 0, and how those can correspond to “yes” and “no?” How will we know if they do, or if they don’t?

The alien researchers have to get to the very philosophical base of perception and interrogate on that level before they have any hope of doing something more complicated like translating Ceti Alpha V-ese into English.

That’s where I’m at with these leftists. I’m unsure if we’re even experiencing the same world in roughly the same ways. Do we respond to pain and pleasure the same way? Or are we so far apart now that there’s no possibility of translation or communication at all?

This has gone farther afield than I thought it would. Thanks if you got through all of this, and I hope at least a part of it made sense.