Andrew Tobias blogs occasionally, usually around 1 a.m., and he usually has interesting perspectives on politics, culture, and economics. This is a good one:
The Madness Of Crowds
So, for the record:
> No Democrat I know has eaten children or worshipped Satan.
> Though some Republicans deny it, the Parkland massacre — like the Holocaust — was real.
> The 9/11 attackers really did crash American flight 77 into the Pentagon.
> The Clintons did not murder John Kennedy, Jr.
> I’ve met George Soros. He’s done more to champion freedom and democracy around the world than anyone I can think of. The idea that he used space lasers to light California’s forest fires is insane.
As is the idea that someone who believes these things would have been endorsed by the leader of the Republican party; would have been elected; and would be appointed by her Republican colleagues to the Education Committee.
The difference between our fringe and theirs is that our “fringe” fights (peacefully) to give the average American a better deal: Higher wages. Consumer protections. Health care. A habitable planet for their kids. Crazy s–t like that.
Their fringe beats Capitol Police with American flags, wears Camp Auschwitz t-shirts, and seeks to murder the House Speaker and Vice President.
To which their leader, watching gleefully on TV, eventually responds: “Go home. I love you. You are very special people.”
Their fringe are evangelicals — especially the one African American in the crowd the camera dutifully zooms in on — who just laugh at the notion Joe Biden could have won. (WATCH!)
Because who who better embodies Christ’s teachings than Trump?
The first crowd madness we are living through is the madness of those who’ve been conned into believing Trump and Putin are the ones to be trusted — the good guys in this tale — while the 84 million who voted for Biden are somehow in league with the devil.
[BONUS: Tips on deprogramming a QAnon cultist.]
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Without clicking the link for “Tips on deprogramming a QAnon cultist,” I’m going to hazard a guess that it is a simple fix, a prefrontal lobotomy.
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Crazy or comatose we still have to take care of them either way. What is more humane and /or ethical for them or for us?…..well, we already know what happened when psychological issues (some temporary) met with permanent surgical medicine. It’s the constant gas lighting from all directions (faith/church leaders, government, marketing, economists etc) that causes this decent into madness and social media allows it to grow and fester like metastatic cancer. Words matter. Truth matters. People need to learn to decipher fact from opinion/fiction.
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I’m okay with being considered one of “our” fringe!
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According to Wikipedia, Greene is an Evangelical Christian, baptized in 2011 in an Atlanta suburb, and often speaks about her faith. Evidently she is perfectly ok with hate mongering and spreading lies.
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What in her faith would lead her to believe that the school shootings in Newtown, CT., and Parkland, Florida, were staged?
Why would she believe that the Clintons killed JFK Jr.?
Why would she conclude that laser beams controlled by Jews started the California forest fires?
Did she learn this nonsense at church?
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Going with the whole Austin Powers “sharks with laser beams on their heads”, this brings up the important question, what animal is the proper laser vehicle to alight the California forest, based on temperament, size, stealth, etc. Raccoons with laser beams on their heads?
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Diane In case your questions were not merely rhetorical, in my view, Greene believes those things because she WANTS to, and the narrative feeds into and ends in what she wants . . . I have others around me who regularly display this idea:
I think it and I want it; therefore, it’s true/real. Also, as if often the case with Congress-people, IF I haven’t experienced, it it cannot be true. (I have often referred to their method as psychological provincialism.)
But it’s codified psychological illness when a person cannot distinguish between (a) what’s in their heads, to put it bluntly, and (b) what is or is not the actual case (true-reality); or when they have left undeveloped their internal function of self-correction.
Sanity is psychological, but also fundamentally a philosophical issue: Knowing what knowing means, and being able to distinguish our own dreams and fantastical excursions from the true and the real or even the probable.
Trump mediates this point by the more subtle method of smearing the past with what he wants, but where others may or may not remember well; and by speaking in terms of the future . . . what WILL BE, but in terms of IS . . . which, in fact and at at best, we can only relate to as intelligible but speculative or, as a reasonable assertion, IF all remains the same, which makes future truth conditional, at best. CBK
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Catherine– The psychotic cannot think philosophically, & Q’s are flirting with that condition. Having viewed mental illness up close & personal, I can tell you what delusion looks like: rational thinking on steroids. Everything starts to look connected [remember the Princeton prof in “A Beautiful Mind”?]. One is making connections like mad to come up with—as the article says— “an explanation for why the world feels dark, confusing, and wrong.” It’s fear-driven.
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bethree5 “Catherine– The psychotic cannot think philosophically, & Q’s are flirting with that condition.”
That’s not my note you were responding to? CBK
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It was your 4th para. Also didn’t like “it’s codified psychological illness…. when they have left undeveloped their internal function of self-correction.” Both statements impute some sort of lack of will is operating in those whose delusions are the symptoms of brain malfunction. Perhaps I’ve just been too close to the issue, so I’m defensive. I gather you’re drawing a distinction between the truly deluded and the purposely self-deluded, which is fine.
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Hello bethree5 Thanks for responding. I get it now. Here’s the thing: There are brain functions and there are mind functions (cognitional theory), which of course are deeply related. However, assuming a normal brain, mind functions also have their own developmental patterns with regard to the complex of believing-understanding-knowing-speculating; so that thinking has it’s own developmental patterns that are normative, that are fundamentally philosophical, and that work AS our thought processes towards knowing . . . regardless of whether we are aware of those patterns that, in fact, constitute our awareness.
It gets more complex, then, when we realize that one of our developmental patterns is that we also are potential to become reflective and then self-reflective, and so not only aware, but consciously self-aware. So that, at some point in our development, we can but don’t necessarily begin to ask questions about, for instance, our own cognitional developments and functions at each stage of our development and in our individual histories. So there are the activities that already underpin knowing, and those same activities can take up our own conscious activities, including knowing, as their object.
So philosophically, there are the philosophical functions that involve belief, understanding, and knowing . . . one of which is our inborn self-corrective process . . . where when we develop critically (even young children do this in some circumstances), we spontaneously recognize error and jump to self-correct. . . . This is what occurs in normal human development towards having and employing what we refer to as “critical consciousness.” We do that already as we become mature adults.
On the other hand, there is the study and accumulation of theoretical knowledge of those activities and functions which, again, include our normative movements towards reflection and self-reflection.
Of course you are right that the brain-mind relationship can be responsible for the many mental problems we can have. . . . but of course we can also display distortions of mind developments. These are commonly understood as psychological.
However, because minds are also about knowing, and because knowing is also a philosophical concern, many psychological problems are entwined with distortions of our philosophical development.
One of those problems we have talked about here is the philosophical attitude of dogmatism (there are several). Dogmatism concerns making judgments without actually knowing that what we are judging is true or false. Once we judge, however, we pretty-much have blocked any further questions and so any further development of understanding that would, in an open-minded person, delay or dislodge that judgment.
Again, knowing is a philosophical issue; and so, on that analysis, we can be involved in many issue of brain, and/or mind development that are psychological, but that also have a philosophical component . . . and whether we are reflectively self-aware of it or not. In fact, becoming relatively reflective and self-reflective is a part of our potential overall development.
Probably too long, but that’s where I was coming from when I made those statements.
Thanks, CBK (I’ll be glad to supply background citations if requested.)
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Thanks so much for this. Very helpful I’m going to reply down below under general comments to get more margin space.
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This is a very broad statement; I wouldn’t be willing to stand behind it. Perhaps I’d caveat with “to the best of my knowledge.”
“No Democrat I know has eaten children or worshipped Satan.”
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Joking, right?
“To the best of my knowledge, FLERP! hasn’t eaten children nor worshipped Satan.”
That’s exactly the kind of “both siderism” reporting the so-called liberal media specializes in that helps the right wing narrative and is one of the main reasons that so many people believe these conspiracy theories.
Everything that is wrong with America is encapsulated in the wrongheaded idea by journalists that being “fair and balanced” is to report that some supposedly normal person accuses FLERP! of eating children, and include the disclaimer that “to the best of this reporter’s knowledge, FLERP! hasn’t eaten children.”
How about this?
“There is absolutely no evidence that FLERP! has ever eaten children but people who lie over and over again are now telling yet another lie because FLERP! won’t do what they do and lie, too.”
See the difference?
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NYC I see what you mean: “That’s exactly the kind of ‘both siderism’ reporting the so-called liberal media specializes in that helps the right wing narrative and is one of the main reasons that so many people believe these conspiracy theories.”
The “however” there, however, is this: that Flerp rightly infers that “Flerp Doesn’t Know Everything There Is to Know about Everything,” and so understands that a sense of humility is built-in to human knowing. In other words, Flerp refuses on principle to take an absolutist, dogmatic stance.
On the other hand, when dealing with know-nothings who ARE dogmatic absolutists and who even endorse ignorance, sadly, Flerp cannot assume the same kind of humility and its first-born child: reasonability based on thoughtfulness when conversing with them.
What Flerp doesn’t have to say to the rest of us is how UNREASONABLE (nee stupid) it is to assume, in such cases, that an absence of evidence means evidence of absence . . . or that, because we don’t KNOW of any democratic pedophiles . . doesn’t mean there aren’t any. In fact, we probably can assume the opposite . . that there ARE SOME pedophiles who are, loosely speaking, democrats, as, most probably, some republicans are.
But the above exposes further the vacuity of the pedophile claim anyway. Their thinking goes: If there is one republican pedophile (and because I don’t like Romney who is a republican) Romney is a pedophile.
The more general problem is far from being Flerp’s problem: Rather, it’s that those responsible for what you mean by “right-wing media narratives” need to learn how to think before anyone can carry on a reasonable conversation with them. In my view, the distortion of the liberal side of the argument comes with thinking WE alone can fix it, especially through our own unknowing ways . . . with our nice-ness projected onto willful idiots who, of course, will learn their lesson instead of just becoming more intellectually, morally, and spiritually coarse.
Again, though it’s not a given or necessarily forever, in our present situation, thoughtfulness and reasonability have already left the building. CBK
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“Flerp refuses on principle to take an absolutist, dogmatic stance.”
Sorry, I don’t agree there is any principle involved.
FLERP! surely knows it is impossible to “prove” a negative, but that doesn’t mean you cannot completely discredit a lie that has absolutely no evidence to support it.
One person makes an ugly charge about a person without one iota of evidence.
Another person categorically denies that false attack is true and calls it out as a lie.
FLERP! says that the person who categorically denies the charge needs to be careful about how they word their denial because it better not be too strong as you can’t “prove” that the charge isn’t true!
See the problem?
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NYC Public I see the problem as the divide between absolutist and reasonable minds. If Flerp or we should explain what we mean by reasonably assuming that “Hillary is not a pedophile” to idiots . . . oh, I forgot, they’re not listening (aka closed minded), even to that.
The alternative is to scream at each other “Yes it is! No it’s not!” which gets us nowhere either, except to the door of violence, as was evident with those Right Wingers who visited this site recently. . . . left the building, pun intended. CBK
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No, the alternative is that each side is forced to make their case with real evidence and not innuendo and lies. And people do not insist on false equivalencies in which an invented lie with no evidence must be treated as if it “could” be true unless someone can absolutely prove it isn’t true (which is virtually impossible to do.)
There are a few times when I have seen the far left make the same kind of evidence-less accusations and demand that “the other side prove it’s not true.”
There is a lot of real evidence about President Trump’s corruption in office. It isn’t innuendo and lies — it was sworn testimony as we heard during the impeachment hearings.
There was no evidence whatsoever that she who must not be named did something corrupt during the Benghazi events that directly caused a well-respected ambassador’s death and the death of security staff.
And I do genuinely worry that the kind of thinking that gives both sides equal weight is exactly why we are in this mess.
Evidence must be tested – does it stand up to challenges? During the impeachment we saw that none of the evidence could be discredited despite how much the Republicans tried.
Maybe the ONLY way to stop this is for Democrats to start making the same over the top charges against Republicans with no evidence. That’s why I showed what it would look like if someone said that FLERP!’s family was known to eat children. FLERP! seems to be saying that he can’t deny that some of his family members eat children because he can’t be 100% positive that one or more of his family don’t eat children, so all he can say is “as far as I know, none of my family members eats children.”
Which is truly absurd and allows the nastiest lies to get credibility that they don’t deserve.
You can’t accuse someone without evidence. It isn’t up to the people you accuse without evidence to “prove” that you didn’t do what they are saying you did. If they can’t back up their charge with an iota of fact, they are liars. Period. And should be noted as such.
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I agree with you. The Biggest Lie of our day is Trump’s fake claim that he won the election. His lawyers have failed to prove any voter fraud, but he keeps repeating the lie.
Millions of Republicans believe him. They think he is telling the truth. He has so many details, but they are so fraudulent that his lawyers will not present them in court.
Both sides do not have a point.
One side is telling the truth.
The other side is lying.
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Diane “The Biggest Lie of our day is Trump’s fake claim that he won the election. His lawyers have failed to prove any voter fraud, but he keeps repeating the lie.”
Trump’s “landslide” thing is the real clincher. However, notice, that when the truth side speaks, we hear NOT that there is NO FRAUD, but that there is no SIGNICANT fraud, followed up by: not enough to change the results. They know that, to say NO FRAUD is also a falsity.
Truth is often hidden in those nuances, which in some cases don’t apply . . . like being a pedophile demands a yes/no answer, like being pregnant also demands a yes or a no: We either are, or are not a pedophile; and Sandy Hook’s children died or did not die from that attacker. <–no wiggle room in such cases. CBK
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NYC public Try the truth of Sandy Hook, rather than the “not absolutely certain” of pedophelia. If it’s evidence that makes for our knowing truth, then there it is.
Some things, but not everything, reaches that level of certainty, however. Reasonable belief and self-corrective critical consciousness is what we go on a good amount of the time, even in the sciences.
And POLITICALLY, the multi-state size of our field of knowing where politics is concerned (not to mention the rest of the world) demands a certain amount of trust and belief, which is why reasonability and critical judgment is so essential in our time . . and which is why knowing our journalist’s background of truth-telling and self-correction are so important. CBK
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Simple fact: the side that makes an accusation has to present evidence in order to discredit the evidence.
There hasn’t been any “evidence” to discredit when it comes to whether Democrats eat children. If the Republicans had presented “evidence” — as they did when they cited the legally blind computer repair shop owner who had Hunter Biden’s laptop — it can be pretty easily discredited when it is false. That’s why (thankfully) the reporting was not that even though the guy was legally blind and not one part of his story made any sense or could be verified, he “could” be telling the truth if a dozen irrational things that make no sense for people to do were all done at the same time and witnessed by a man who can’t see. There was no reporting that “both sides have evidence and we just can’t know which side is telling the truth”.
Now if the Republicans had presented some “evidence” that Democrats ate children, that evidence could have been discredited. But if the Republicans DON’T present any evidence, the proper response is not to do what FLERP! did and demand that Democrats include a disclaimer that “as far as they know” this made up out of thin air charge isn’t true.
The proper response is to note that this is a lie.
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I can unequivocally state that no Democrat I know has eaten children or worshipped Satan.
FLERP, are you unsure? Do you know of one or more Democrats who might have eaten children or worshipped Satan?
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One side is absolutely positive something false is true.
The other (so-called “liberal” side) says “I just don’t know enough to be sure whether what they are saying is true”.
No wonder so many people believe conspiracy theories.
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Not to my knowledge.
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That’s odd. I have many friends who are Democrats. None of them has eaten children or worshipped Satan.
Be careful whom you hang out with.
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I try not to talk about religion.
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Does eating Sugar Babies while jamming to Sympathy for the Devil count?
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“avoid talking about religion”.
Public policy has recently advanced conservative Christian religion. The GOP talks about it but, not the Dems.
Amy Coney Barrett is of note for her speech stating the purpose of the practice of law is to advance the kingdom of God.
Americans should read, “What the Ahmadi-French dispute was really about”. (Intelligencer, 9-7-2019) Ahmari is Catholic and David French, who considered a run for President against Trump, is a Christian evangelical. Both oppose gay marriage and abortion. One holds the view that in the current “cultural civil war”, government should be used to impose culturally conservative values in society and, he speaks of “religion for the elected elite in a degenerate society”.
Btw- It’s not the one you assume it is.
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No Satan I know has eaten Democrats or worshipped children.
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Good god, the amount of non-ironic text that this little joke generated.
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Sammy Davis Jr. was reportedly a Satanist for some period in the early 70s. Although he probably was a Republican by that point. Those were crazy times, babe!
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Dang, I made a Sammy Davis, Jr. joke about Satanism but it disappeared. So I’ll just leave this here. It still makes me laugh.
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FLERP!,
I thought at first you were joking, but then you replied to Diane Ravitch in a way that doubled down on your clearly misunderstood “joke”. Were you doing that so your “little joke” would generate more non-ironic text? If so, well-done. You kept up the joke long enough to get lots of non-ironic replies. Congratulations!
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I wonder if Marjorie Taylor Greene will say “I can’t believe how much text my little joke about Jews using space lasers to cause forest fires created.”
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NYC public “Just kidding” is on page 1 of the Trumpian Playbook, or somewhere thereabouts. CBK
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CBK,
Thank you! I had that same thought myself!
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HOWEVER “No Democrat I know has eaten children or worshipped Satan.”
HOWEVER, *What About This? . . . Some democrats agreed with a Republican that, after being impeached by the House, Trump “has learned his lesson.”
What about THAT? CBK
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Looks like he’s been reading his Gustave Le Bon….
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And Charles Mackay
I love that in French the noun la foule (pl. les foules), meaning “the crowd,” has this strong connotation of milling about, suggesting foolishness, especially given le fou, “lunatic.” The English crowd, in contrast, has a strong connotation of not giving sufficient space.
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!! Excellent Bob.
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Wikipedia defines “Human cannibalism [as] the act or practice of humans eating the flesh or internal organs of other human beings. A person who practices cannibalism is called a cannibal.”
There are other instances of cannibalism in the animal kingdom, particularly among insects: cricket cannibalism, for example.
So, it seems logical that “paedophile cannibals” would really be cannibals who eat paedophiles.
Or perhaps I am missing something here.
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13 percent. Only 13 percent of Republicans thought that there was no truth to the QAnon conspiracy theory.
BTW, what does “GOP” stand for?
Well, nothing, or so the vote on trying Trump seems to indicate, though this also works:
Grown Overtly Pathological.
On a related note, according to Pew Research, 69 percent of Republicans and those who lean Republican believe the medieval superstition that there is a place with lakes of fire, ruled by Satan, in which “bad” people spent all of eternity undergoing extreme torture because God wants it that way. My take: if you can believe that, you can believe anything.
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How would a pollster ask that question?
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They asked, “Do you believe in hell?”
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But note that the number of people who identify as Republicans is shrinking.
If 87% of people who identify as Republicans believe everything they read on QAnon, but only 25% of Americans identify as Republicans, that means that fewer than 22% of Americans believe it.
If only 50% of people who identify as Republicans believe everything they read on QAnon, but 50% of Americans identify as Republicans, that’s actually more Americans who believe what they read on QAnon.
There is a reason that the number of Americans who DON’T identify as Republicans is growing.
The Dec. 17, 2020 Gallup poll was that 75% of Americans identify as either independent or democrats.
It’s amazing that Republicans are given an outsize voice.
I bet there were at least 22% of Americans in 2016 who ALSO didn’t trust the results of the 2016 election and did not believe that Trump won fairly. But they were ignored! They were marginalized! They weren’t treated as if their concerns needed be addressed. When they asked ONLY for the hand recount that Georgia voters automatically got, they were treated like conspiracy theorists!
And so those Americans did what Stacey Abrams did and started to register more voters so that the election couldn’t be stolen again through nefarious means.
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Because every state gets 2 senators, regardless of its size, the Republicans in the Senate have a disproportionately large voice and represent a lot of acreage but not many people.
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This is why vote fixing is so important to Republicans. One ballot box per Texas county. etc. And it’s only going to get worse for them. POC and young people way over in the Democratic camp.
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And so those Americans did what Stacey Abrams did and started to register more voters so that the election couldn’t be stolen again through nefarious means.
Yes. yes. yes. Make Puerto Rico and DC into states. Create default voter registration in states with Dems in control.
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Not to mention the madness of cowards:
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Dear Fringe “GOP”
Third Party! Third Party! Third Party!
Ross Perot.
George Wallace
Ralph Nader
Please Q folks and crazy enablers – RUN FOR PRESIDENT on your own.
Split those vote!
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Oh, how I would love this.
TWIT, the Trump Worshiping Idiots Team. And they could start their own messaging service:
TWITTER-B, the Trump Worshiping Idiots Team Talking Egregious, Reactionary BS
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On a different note, what do you think is going to happen now that Jeff Bezos is stepping down from Amazon to concentrate on being God?
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You got that wrong. He’s going from god to god emeritus.
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Wait, what about the other one? I mean, yeah, there were some screw ups–brain-eating amoebae, Stephen Miller–but s/he made the planets run on time.
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He’s no longer in his prime…. Time to join his fellow billionaires and start a data-collecting Education Philanthropy!
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Bezos is Prime evil
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Diane’s word: villainthropy
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There are indeed some fields in which people do their best work young. But this is not always the case. Robert Frost, the great innovator of the blank verse dramatic monologue (who picked up where Robert Browning left off), didn’t publish his first book until he was 43. Yeats arguably wrote much of his greatest work when he was elderly. And next year, of course, I am going to write the definitive Great American Novel. LOL.
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Vile-anthropy?
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Thinking outside the box the bigger underlying issue is that these people are side effects of the fractured education system in America. When history is told with truths omitted the mind is inclined to fill in the blanks with any information that seems possible, and with an education system that does not put critical thinking and individual growth at the forefront you get a mob of easily misled and misinformed citizens.
Many of the ‘fringe’ you speak about from The Capitol Riots are die-hard supporters who have been led into a rabbit hole, this we already know as commonplace. But we must not see these people in an ideological vacuum. We live in an age where whether the earth is flat or spherical, an argument I couldn’t imagine myself having given the education I received, and that movement has done nothing but grown since its inception. (They panned a cruise to Antarctica before Coronavirus to see the worlds edge akin to the reason Christopher Columbus sailed to America according to high school history textbooks) The same ‘fringe’ that despises cancel culture are also those who retreat back to their echo-chambers after being confronted with information that conflicts with their views.
This creates fragile and unstable people who do not understand the true complexities of issues because they can not get past the ideological block that has been trained into them. Forcing people into a cycle of polarizing content and increasing their inability to compromise, thus reinforcing their views.
I believe this movement has now gone far beyond its source, or main supporter Donald Trump. He is too enamored by the praise and limelight of his base to realize he is setting standards that he can not complete. These radical people believe he can do no wrong and if he was to, it would be the ultimate betrayal. Even if he was to come publicly and denounce everything the movement is too large and he would been seen as a puppet, removed from his pedestal and replaced anew. Enters Marjorie Taylor Greene, the personification of America’s past troubles and a history we failed to learn from.
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I was a teenage almost-John Bircher. If such fanatics as QAnon folks came from a place of rationality, I would recommend Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer, which was lent to me by a cousin and started my turning-back-to-normalcy. If only such a worthy book would work on these people…
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Thanks for coming back to rationality. If it’s not too personal a question for me to ask, what led to your drift to John Birch?
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Replying here to CBK at 2/5 11:35am:
This is brilliant: “So that, at some point in our development, we can but don’t necessarily begin to ask questions about, for instance, our own cognitional developments and functions at each stage of our development and in our individual histories.” I think I was thrown off by “philosophical.” I have zero background in philosophy & no concept of how it relates to devpt of cognition [–tho I know it does, as I came across Chomsky more than once as a student of for-langs; never could make head nor tails of him]. So I tend to make divisions along the mental illness/disordered thinking line in terms of physical-genetics vs environment.
Your cite helps me distinguish between delusions produced by brain damage, vs faulty development of cognition. Both cases that concern me belong in the ‘brain damage’ category, I perceive, tho I’ve long puzzled over the fact that one ‘was not’ & one ‘was’: I think what I’m realizing is that environmental trauma also produces brain damage.
One loved one was traumatized early by sexual abuse [repressed until 70yo]. In certain contexts I noted behavior I associate with bipolar & psychosis in general, i.e. loss of chunks of memory, once in a while betraying an ‘alter’ voice that held the knowledge. Also occasional behavior seen in borderline & narcissism disorders. All could be connected to the early trauma, so I perceived it as environmental damage. Contrasting to a loved one who was bipolar [mania expressed as delusional psychosis]: anything experienced during mania was lost to memory—and chunks of childhood past were irretrievable, suggesting that the illness was operating while still latent/ undiagnosed. Both people were otherwise rational, open-minded, empathetic. The philosophical cognition you describe was well-developed. Their brains managed to leap-frog around the damage, minimizing its impact.
Quite different— I think– in most cases– from the delusion we observe in Trump, Greene, & perhaps many victims of QAnon et al conspiracy theory. I still maintain will is only sometimes a factor. Those with the will to deceive [like Trump & Greene] probably share faulty cognitional devpt w/the masses they manipulate, but are further developed along those lines– more self-aware. But it begs the question of whether stunted cognitional development eventually over the years becomes physical brain deficiency (i.e., mental illness). As I said initially, there is an eerie similarity between the delusions of the conspiracy theorist and that of someone experiencing full-blown psychosis. Both flail out, making unwarranted mental connections, so as to find “an explanation for why the world feels dark, confusing, and wrong.”
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bethree5 I see what you mean. In my experience teaching philosophy, most who are first introduced to it think it’s just an assortment of unconnected abstractions. (That’s why I always started with Plato.) But insofar as from Greek times, philosophy is a love of knowledge, and insofar as it’s about questioning itself which can end in knowledge of the true-real, and about metaphysics, cognitional theory, knowing, ethics, logic, world views, and has many subsets, like political philosophy, . . . it’s rooted in our concrete living as historical beings, even if we are not aware of our own nature has having a deeply influential philosophical comportment.
Like anything else theoretical, however, the psychologist, sociologist, and/or philosopher can know the theory and even verify aspects of it in human patterns. However, as your note implies, individual circumstances are complex, stubborn things. And so, like architectural theories, GENERAL theory must find its odd-off relationship with THESE SPECIFIC x circumstances.
The point, I think, is to have the right questions, and where those questions are differentiated enough to draw from several fields of human studies, including but not exclusively from, the field of philosophy.
An excursion into Trump and Trumpism:
One thing to note about Trump (and so many others of his ilk) is that he lies so very easily . . . lying is about the difference between truth/falsity (it’s philosophical). From my own view of him, he seems to confuse his vacuous and predatory ego with what he (thinks he) knows and therefore with his distorted version of the true-real (alternative facts?).
His version of “knowledge” then never reaches the true-reality that even a mildly critical mind can recognize as such . . . UNLESS the real-truth happens to fit what he wants, or UNLESS reality is something he can mold to his own needs (like hijacking others’ concepts) . . .or UNLESS it’s what he wants US to think. This is what makes him a master manipulator. No conscience or at least a deformed one . . . lying is merely a method to get what he wants. We see it as lying, because we have the true-real facts via a collection of reasonable belief and hard evidence. Again, HE sees it as a way to serve his interior manipulative framework. If he has manipulated people (aka screwed them), then THAT satisfies his deformed conscience . . . aka his ideology of the good–the “strength” to “be strong” over others.
Also, in his case (and I am speculating here), he seems aware of his own ongoing scamming of others who DO have relatively well-developed consciences . . . like with Mueller and the first impeachment, it was reported that Trump said at one point, “Now I’m screwed.” That’s a small thing; but if it happened, it seems to me that it shows a self-aware complicity in what’s occurring.
However, again, we cannot use our own framework for what “lying” means. For Trump, it’s only political . . .that is, I don’t think for a minute that it has anything to do with truth, falsity, or with whatever reality we can identify . . . like with the voting. You and I and Mueller (et al) take an oath and we mean it.
For Trump, however, its ONLY about his getting over on others . . . he really is only about serving himself–that’s the only “true-reality for him.” My take on Trump is that he is a purely political, self-serving animal. The “lesson” he took from being impeached is that: everyone is stupid, and he got away with what he wanted, which to philosophically sane people, is pure fraud. CBK
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