Every man his own priest staring at the Internet

These are just some loosely connected thoughts I want to throw out there/here/wherever the hell we all are now.

(1) Scott’s post about the QAnon splinter group down in Dallas waiting for JFK’s return, while giving a grifting crazy person — or crazy grifting person — all their money is funny, but it’s really not.

It’s not funny because this is just a more florid version of normal right wing politics in America today. What these people believe is not any more crazy than what Donald Trump believes, to the extent Donald Trump believes things, because Donald Trump is now completely crazy — he sincerely (again note caveat about what sincerely might mean in this context, which is itself signals how much craziness we’re dealing with here) believes that the 2020 election was stolen from him by vast left wing conspiracy, of the same basic type that underlies not just the entire QAnon world view, but also that of all the fundamentalist evangelicals and other assorted paranoid magical thinkers that make up the American right wing.

(2) I was born at the tail end of the baby boom. Looking back from the perspective of 2021, I’m increasingly drawn to the conclusion that the USA has been gradually going insane for my entire life. I mean this country has always been fairly nuts in various ways, as I suppose all countries are, except maybe Sweden or Denmark, but I get the distinct impression that things really started to slide in the 1960s, when a combination of mass media, especially television, which didn’t exist as a mass phenomenon until we boomers came along, and the acceptance of mind-altering drugs, especially alcohol, marijuana, psychedelics, and in the 1970s cocaine, led to all sorts of magical thinking becoming basically mainstream.

Let’s pause for a little musical interlude:

OK I realize I’m rambling, but there’s something going on here and what it is isn’t exactly clear.

(3) On the right, the backlash to “the Sixties” — which really means the `1960s and 1970s — was massive, intense, and essentially funneled through the most irrational versions of evangelical Protestantism, although lately the most irrational versions of integralist Catholicism — hi Bill and Adrian! — having been doing their bit.

The fundamentally and fundamentalist Protestant idea that was imported to this country by crazed zealots a couple of centuries before it even existed, and is even now playing a crucial role in our present miserable situation, is that every man can and should be his own priest: You don’t need some so-called “authorities” or “experts” to reveal the truth to you: You just need to study the texts that contain the Truth yourself. Very very carefully.

This isn’t working out too great in the age of the Internet.

(4) Perhaps the biggest factor in all this is how over the past 70 years or so we’ve gone from a situation where nobody was looking at screens, with the important exception of the occasional immersive experience of the movie theater, to one where everybody is staring at them all the time, like you are right now. We’re living in this intensely mediated world, which makes it increasingly easy to fall down various epistemological rabbit holes.

This is not a both sides thing though. These sorts of delusions and fantasies are far more prevalent on the right. But if you go back to the 1960s, the left played a role too, with the valorizing of a kind of acid trip rejection of The Man, echoes of which still remain in various types of mostly white upper class post-hippie woo (Gwyneth Paltrow, Marianne Williamson, the self-help movement generally).

(5) Aimee Semple McPherson, L. Ron Hubbard, Manley P. Hall, the Hollywood Dream Factory, Disneyland, Ronald Reagan, Charles Manson, George Lucas, EST, the Grateful Dead, and now the uncanny Silicon Valley. It’s all there somehow.