Sweet Willow,
the branch never does fall too far from the tree, eh?
It’s a rough world you inherited, my young friend. I used to think there was a War For Reality, but that ws optimism. There is a War Against Sanity, and all of us are winning.
Science fiction spent forever on the fear that people would burn books. Then it started worrying, as Mr. Bradbury said, that people will simply stop reading them.
Again, optimism.
The purest and most artisanal hatred is self-hatred, and it comes from the inside. More precisely, in this day and age, it is activated from the inside until it self-reinforces. And it’s hard to get help; those who might help us are oftentimes also the ones telling us that we shouldn’t be sane.
Oh, they call it “discomfort”, and it brings up thoughts of the French Revolution; of a decadent nobility oppressing others while living in luxury; and nobody wants that.
But they mean discomfort. They mean they want us to have PTSD; they want the anxiety, the fear, the eating disorders, the imposter syndromes, the insomnia, the addictions.
And in the dystopian novels, it’s always a They. It’s a government; it’s a secret organization; it’s some supervillain.
That’s the problem with this whole thing; it’s not a damn conspiracy. There are too many places where this is happening. Look around you. Are you being traced by your technology? Yes, massively so; everyone knows that. Does social media hook you? Yes; spend an informative afternoon pretending to be a buyer of social media advertising, and they’ll brag about their ability to reach people who think and want certain things at the moments when those people are most vulnerable.
Who wins a war for Madness?
Just Madness.
There’s not anything else left.
