*Hey wait a second, I thought this was gonna be blathering hippie psychobabble, but this is actually pretty good.
*Take note that I myself didn't write this screed; I'm merely quoting at length from the tumblr of "steelweaver," whoever he is. It's quite a long article. There's a lot more of it to be found on this link:
http://steelweaver.tumblr.com/post/8175553314/reality-as-failed-state-tl-dr-version-i-like-doing
(...)
"I believe part of the meta-problem is this: people no longer inhabit a single reality.
"Collectively, there is no longer a single cultural arena of dialogue.
"What many techno-scientists fail to understand - and thus find most frustrating - about dealing with climate change deniers is that the denier has no real interest in engaging at the scientist’s level of reality.
"The point, for the climate denier, is not that the truth should be sought with open-minded sincerity – it is that he has declared the independence of his corner of reality from control by the overarching, techno-scientific consensus reality. He has withdrawn from the reality forced upon him and has retreated to a more comfortable, human-sized bubble.
"In these terms, the denier’s retreat from consensus reality approximates the role of the cellular insurgents in Afghanistan vis-a-vis the American occupying force: this overarching behemoth I rebel against may well represent something larger, more free, more wealthy, more democratic, or more in touch with objective reality, but it has been imposed upon me (or I feel it has), so I am going to withdraw from it into illogic, emotion and superstition and from there I am going to declare war upon it.
"So, from this point of view, we can meaningfully refer to deniers, birthers, Tea Partiers and so forth as “reality insurgents”, and thus usefully apply the principles of 4GW to their activities – notably, they are clearly operating on a faster OODA loop than the defenders of mainstream reality, and thus able to respond more quickly, with greater innovation, than the sclerotic bureaucracy of institutionalised reality. [Open source bazaars – media-effective denial memes spread virally through community far quicker than effective strategies of rebuttal do.]
"(n.b. There is a problematic tendency with a certain type of intellect – the scientist, the technocrat – which assumes that, because it is prepared to organise and change on the basis of dry statistics and data, then, if only everyone else could be exposed to the same data, there would be instant consensus for change. In fact, of course, the majority of human beings do not work like this.
"Indeed, there is a positive, indeed, cognitively vital, aspect to intuitive thinking, and the realm of myths, narratives, paradigms of meaning, purpose and significance underlies even the worldview of the technocrat-scientist. Without an ability to engage with and understand the deep psyche, the techno-scientist is doomed to repeat his statistics into the ether without meaningful effect.)
"The deniers are operating from a different ontological platform – an emotional reading of reality where there are forces wishing to control them and restrict their personal power and agency, and there are the forces of freedom, which is the side they believe they are on.
"They are wrong, of course, but it is important to demonstrate to them that they are wrong on the level they are operating from – not by citing more climate statistics at them, but by demonstrating that the forces they are serving are actually the most vicious extant representatives of the control they profess to hate.
"And all this is but one example of the ways in which the traditional ideological blocs of the Cold War have fragmented into complex multipartite civil reality wars.
"Reality, you might say, as failed state; its interior collapsing into permanent conflict under the convergent pressures of deviant globalisation, its coasts predated upon by new mutant forms of memetic pirates.
"Each individual also carries reality-divisions inside their own head:
"As a general point, there is a fundamental dissassociation endemic to industrialised humans that results in some deleterious, and, at this critical juncture, very dangerous outcomes. We necessarily develop many internal veils and compartments in order to buffer the fundamental ethical, environmental and cognitive dissonances industrialised existence presents us with.
"The clearest example, though, and perhaps the major reality-distinction in most people’s minds, is between their immediate, everyday life and the magic fantasy world that exists in the media-realm.
"This is part of the reason why voting is always such a let down - you mark your piece of paper and walk out and feel cheated, somehow, of the promised connection with the Other world.
"Is it any wonder that we don’t, really, expect anything to ever come of the political process? Can we even imagine what it would feel like to organise ourselves around beliefs, ideas, a particular narrative of reality any more?
"This is just one example of the divisions within ourselves: We dimly recognise the scale of the environmental crises, and then waste moments of our lives fretting about whether our local recycling scheme accepts plastic bottles. We wish to be delivered from our lust for foreign holidays – but, like St Augustine, not too soon. We hope for people in the public eye to speak the truth, then laugh at their naivety when they fail to anticipate how unrealistic, how gauche doing so makes them seem...."
