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Escapism at this juncture feels like a way to temporarily pretend that everything is fine—and while there’s value in taking a break from Hell, it also feels dangerous. Like drinking to drown my sorrows; nothing wrong with alcohol now and again, but nobody needs a steady diet of oblivion.
“Never do something for just one reason,”
“Never skip a step. Skip a step, you’ll find five more new ones waiting ahead of you.”
If you quacked like a scientist and waddled like a scientist, soon, to nonscientists, you became the subject under discussion and not a person at all.
“Are we obsolete? I think not, I think not. But don’t ask the army’s opinion of that. A circle looks at a square and sees a badly made circle.”
The gist had been that institutions, even individual departments in governments, were the concrete embodiments of not just ideas or opinions but also of attitudes and emotions. Like hate or empathy, statements such as “immigrants need to learn English or they’re not really citizens” or “all mental patients deserve our respect.” That in the workings of, for example, an agency, you could, with effort, discover not just the abstract thought behind it but the concrete emotions.
This felt very current as we just finished a presidential election cycle that was particularly brutal on both people and the institutions of the government.
The idea that a dysfunctional thought could take root in a vacuum, the individual anonymous and wraithlike, unknowable because, especially at first, he or she had no interaction with other people. Because more and more in the modern Internet era you came across isolated instances of a mind virus or worm: brains that self-washed, bathed in received ideologies that came down from on high, ideologies that could remain dormant or hidden for years, silent as death until they struck. Almost anything could happen now, and did.
This felt so true with the new age of misinformation
“There must be something.” Pleading. Let there be something, to distract from the carnage in my head.
An ice pick lodged in a brain already suffused with the corona of a dull but persistent headache that radiated forward from a throbbing bolus at the back of his skull. A kind of pulsing satellite defense shield protecting against anything more hostile that might sag into its decaying orbit.
