Mailvox: the psychic undercurrent

Anonymous Conservative notices that everyone’s antennae are twitching these days:

Something difficult to pin down is activating amygdalae. It’s telling everyone’s brain that bad is coming, and everyone is trying to assuage those amygdalae, to turn off all the uncomfortable warning alarms they are producing in their brains. Conservatives buy up guns and canned goods to ease the stress level and lower the warning level by preparing. Liberals, deep down know the collapse is the end for them, so the only way to assuage their amygdalae is to retreat even deeper into the bubbles of denial that are producing our problems the begin with. Part of that denial is sending anyone who doesn’t tell them the future is happy far, far away, so they won’t have to think about it.

What Vox asks is the most fascinating question of our time. How can it be that our bellies are full, we are bombarded with endless, professionally produced propaganda telling us everything is fine, and yet deep within us, we all feel like the cattle on an island that head for high ground hours before the tsunami, that nobody knew was coming, hits? How complex is our biology that we connect with our world on such a deep subconscious level that we can’t be tricked by professional liars with nearly limitless resources and a death grip on every major media? How bad is the coming mess, that we can’t be blinded to it?

And why is it in nature, when the tsunami is coming, no cattle insist on telling all the others that now is the best possible time to go swimming, but in our supposedly more advanced species, we have idiots telling us that if we only double down on the debt spending, print a little more currency, and debauch our culture sexually a little more, everything will get better, because a collapse is impossible?

Of course, some are more sensitive than others. I’ve more or less felt this way since 1999, and not due to Y2K either. Or at least not directly; my concern then was that it would be used as the same sort of excuse that 9/11 was two years later.

Remember, it’s not paranoia when they actually are out to undermine the foundations of your civilization. If only we actually had a Last Redoubt to which we could safely retreat from the rising tide of abhumanity.