Brink Lindsey’s 11/21/22 post is “The Retreat from Reality”.
https://brinklindsey.substack.com/p/the-retreat-from-reality
I think it’s best read along with N.S. Lyons’ 2/16/22 post “Reality Honks Back”:
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/reality-honks-back
The essence of both essays is the stark contrast between: 1) the hard, non-negotiable authority of the physical world; vs. 2) the soft, eminently resistible authority of the social world. We have transitioned from a society once organized to solve problems in the physical world to one that delves into problems inside our heads. There are still many people who work in the physical world but more and more, elites have retreated into a virtual bubble – a cognitive bouncy castle, detached from reality.
Lindsey writes:
Our cultural retreat to the virtual has thus left us with an economy less dynamic and productive than it otherwise could be. More fundamentally, it has warped how we think. Living in a world of artifice, no longer exposed to the unyielding hardness of physical reality, our minds now operate in a kind of cognitive bouncy castle — where all sharp edges have been eliminated and pratfalls are more exciting than dangerous. Outside on solid ground, truth amounts to correspondence with a non-negotiable reality that does not bend to suit your feelings. Inside the bouncy castle, where reality consists only of what’s inside your and other people’s heads, the truth is always negotiable — to the point where the very idea of objective truth can be dismissed as a negotiating tactic.
He cites a study on the dramatic change in language use from thinking words to the language of feeling. And this is very much a leftist/woke phenomenon. They are the ones twisting language in attempts to impose an ideology that’s not real. Deliberately restricting knowledge produces epistemic closure – a zipped up bouncy house – you’re not allowed to play in it unless you accept leftist orthodoxy without question.
https://quillette.com/2023/01/06/a-puritanical-assault-on-the-english-language/
It’s all fun in the bouncy castle until you step out and cold, hard reality smacks you in the ass. Concerns about “diversity, equity and inclusion” are now prioritized over actual work and education. The University of Michigan spends $18 million annually on DEI salaries, enough to pay tuition for 1,075 students. There are real hard costs to all of this nonsense.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-high-cost-of-the-leftist-takeover-of-scientific-research/
Motivated reasoning has warped the marketplace of ideas. Lindsey cites many of the same authors I like, including Scott Alexander, to demonstrate that we are trading our common pursuit of truth for the incoherent babble of “my truth”. The decline of dynamism is the direct result of “bouncy castle epistemology”. He links an article on today’s profound unseriousness by Tom Nichols:
https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/peacefield/617c7b245793d600215d2b35/peacefield-post/
Leftists bounce around like children and cannot seem to rouse themselves to the requisite seriousness. They continue with habitual lying, manipulating, and bullshitting.
Next week, more on The Permanent Problem.
The Estate Planning WAR CHEST 