Reality, Not Realities

     Perhaps the reason for our current plague of cognitive dissonance lies in all the “multiverse” movies and TV shows we’ve been watching. Ultimately it won’t matter. In this reality, where the speed of light in a vacuum is a generous 299,792,458 meters per second and Planck’s Constant is a steady 6.62607×10^-34 Joule-seconds, the facts are not merely stubborn (John Adams) but lethally inescapable (Sir Harold Bowden). We will face them and act on their implications, or we will be destroyed by our own willfulness.

     And one of the facts that will destroy us is this one:

     Not if we’re too close to one another, at any rate.

     Cognitive dissonance: The mental stress (discomfort) experienced by a person who simultaneously holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values; when performing an action that contradicts one of those beliefs, ideas, or values; or when confronted with new information that contradicts one of the beliefs, ideas, and values. (Infogalactic)

     Many Americans suffer from cognitive dissonance on certain subjects. They strain to harmonize their adherence to some prescriptive axiom (“We can all get along if only we try harder”) with the indisputable facts (the race warfare that’s been going on for some six decades). I once suffered from it myself. Then I resolved to hew strictly to the facts, as I personally witnessed them and as they’re reported by persons and institutions I know to be reliable.

     That decision has cost me several friends. I refused to say or imply convictions I don’t hold in order to retain them. For commentators more prominent than I, the consequences have gone further than some social losses. It takes quite a lot of courage for someone whose livelihood depends upon retaining a publisher (or publishers) to stand to his tack under such pressures.

     But there are organizations determined to maintain the fiction against the pressure of the dissonance. There’s money and power in it. And they press their agenda in every imaginable format.

     Let’s start with this piece from a colleague:

     In the West, we used to enjoy being able to speak our minds. Now we have cancel culture. Unless we share the pernicious and depraved ideology of the ruling class, we either keep our mouths shut or recite lies, lest our lives be destroyed by woke lynch mobs. This is for the best, according to academia:

     “Cancel culture” has its benefits, according to an online anti-racism course being taught to over 100 British academics.

     “Union Black,” a class being taught by The Open University, teaches professors that “In relation to racial/social justice, cancel culture has been shown to realize benefits.”

     What else would you expect of the “Open” University in the land of George Orwell?

     These benefits, according to class materials, include “holding people or entities accountable for immoral or unacceptable behavior” and “promoting collective action to achieve social justice and cultural change through social pressure.”

     Read that last paragraph slowly and carefully. Its full impact takes two or three passes to grasp. The key lies in reifying the final phrase: “promoting collective action to achieve social justice and cultural change through social pressure.”

     Here as in many other places, the riposte that wins the day is “Exactly what do you mean by that? Be clear and specific.”

     The scamsters of “racial / social justice” never permit themselves to be clear or specific. It would make their aim too obvious: the reduction of whites to second-class citizens, racial dhimmis, to facilitate a massive transfer of wealth from whites to blacks. They’ve already made strides in this regard, as witness the many federal and state laws that privilege, de facto, blacks over whites in education, labor, and commerce. No “equal opportunity” commission has ever penalized a prevalently black organization or institution under the quota laws routinely wielded against prevalently white organizations and institutions.

     As I commented at Dave Blount’s site, I’m minded to start a pro-racism course. I’d load it up with irrefutable, easily confirmed facts and exclude all statements of opinion or conclusion, whether or not I find them defensible. I think I’d get a good number of takers, if I could survive the announcement.

     Next, there’s the Colonel’s most recent citation. It’s just below this one, so no need to over-exercise your mouse. The author of that piece, Anthony Bryan, first attacks one of the falsehoods I most despise: the one stated in the paragraph the Colonel quotes. He proceeds thence to note conservatives’ conventional refutation, which is premised on the noble sentiments of the Declaration of Independence. However, Bryan notes that this is a losing strategy:

     The Republican appeal to color-blind civic nationalism is no match for the vengeful emotionalism of the 1619 Project. But this asymmetry is typical of racial discussions in America — blacks, with the backing of liberal whites, aggressively push whatever argument or policy benefits them, while the “MLK-Cons” respond with feeble appeals to the Constitution and universal principles.

     Indeed, there is no effective counterstroke to the racialists’ furiously emotional pitch other than an equally furious, equally emotional pitch from the Right: a “brush-back fastball,” high and tight, that highlights the factual asymmetries between black and white:

• lower aggregate intelligence (roughly 15 points in IQ testing);
• higher aggregate aggression, especially among the young,
• higher aggregate participation in legal and social pathologies (e.g., 70% rate of illegitimacy);
• the enormous legal imbalance between blacks and whites built into our “civil rights” laws.

     But conservative commentators willing to throw that pitch are few; conservative politicians willing to do so are unknown.

     Finally for this tirade, a personal note. Among the reasons I canceled my television subscription two years ago was that I was sick of the left-liberal / progressive / SJW propaganda being larded over every item of “entertainment” available from the broadcast and cablecast stations. There were a couple of things whose loss I lamented, but I wasn’t willing to pay the enormous TV subscription fees just for “first run” access to them. However, I kept an eye peeled for the availability of the shows I liked on DVD. One of them, the CBS drama Evil, recently became available, so I purchased the first two seasons thereof.

     I found the first season of Evil refreshing for its largely evenhanded attitude toward the Catholic Church and one of its more “controversial” doctrines and practices: the reality of demonic possession and the concomitant need for exorcism. The Church tends to be badly abused by the media. The clerical pedophilia scandals are just about the only thing the news media ever mention. Few drama series have treated the Church and its clerics with even mild approbation. Yet the dedication of its priests and its two-millennia fidelity to promulgating the Gospels of Jesus of Nazareth are unequaled by any institution of any sort anywhere or in any era. During its first season, Evil treated the Church with unusual respect, while nevertheless making room for critics and unbelievers to differ with its preachments and practices.

     I was appalled to discover that the second season has departed from that practice. Instead, I was treated to diatribes about Church “racism,” founded on the relative paucity of black Catholics and black Catholic priests. We also get a repetition of a familiar canard against the United States: the notion that, as character David Acosta asserts in a homily in season 2, episode 5, “E is for Elevator,” “America’s tremendous wealth was built from the labors of black slaves.”

     I suppressed the urge to use the DVD for target practice, but just barely.

     Clearly, the racialists will allow no form of entertainment to go unpolluted by their vicious fantasies. Flight is useless, for the pursuit shall never tire.

     There is no “Last Graf,” for there is no solution. Or perhaps there is one, but American whites from whose eyes the scales have not yet fallen remain vainly committed to the attempt to “get along.” In either case, the suffering will continue. For how long, I cannot say. Whatever the outcome and how long it takes to arrive, the realities will remain as they are. Therefore, let us at least spare ourselves any further cognitive dissonance about them.

     And do have a nice day.