Extreme sanity is the only viable response to the increasing insanity of Clown World. The crazier they get, the most important it is that we stay ruthlessly and relentlessly in touch with the truth and the Truth.
When an Artificial Intelligence model is fed its own input as training data, the model will tend to degrade over time, losing detail with each iteration like a series of photocopies until the model collapses into a fuzz of noisy static.
Something similar, I think, is happening with liberals. They’ve become trapped in their own illusions, eating a media diet that consists entirely of their own propaganda, and then generating new propaganda that simply refers back to the old propaganda in an endless entropic Ouroboros. Meanwhile, the quality of the propaganda they generate is degrading rapidly: the deceptions in the news media or the academic literature get more transparent and less convincing with every iteration; the entertainment media gets less compelling, more poorly written, with worse special effects and less impressive acting; their literature devolves into hamfisted sermons mashed together with smut; their computer games feature worse stories, uglier characters, clumsy game mechanics, bugs, and degrading animation quality.
As the output of the Large Liberal Model decays, it becomes much less interesting to those not already held captive to it, who increasingly tune it out; and for those on its periphery, easier to escape as its ability to fascinate evaporates. Those trapped deep in the model sense the power of the model – and with it, their political power – evaporating, and respond with panic and rage, furiously prompting the model to generate ever more deranged outputs in an attempt to bully and shame apostates into providing the model with their lives’ limited attention loci. This is effective at more firmly locking down the minds of those already deep within the model’s embrace, but utterly ineffective at attracting new customers.
Eventually, the unstable construct of distortions and outright falsehoods that liberalism is based upon is destined to disappear into a shrieking howl of distorted static, and it will take the minds of its adherents with it. That is not necessarily a metaphor – the brains hooked into that model will essentially have their wiring undone, because this is just what happens when a neural network is forced to ingest an information diet consisting solely of incoherent contradictions. It will cause actual brain damage; indeed we already see this happening.
But before model collapse reaches the terminal phase, its drones can still do a lot of damage. This is essentially a mass psychotic break, in which a huge part of the population comes untethered from reality in a way that I’m not sure has ever quite happened before. We’ve always had the ability to spread bullshit within our cultures: infection of the mind by contagious nonsense parasites is the primary failure mode opened by the evolution of grammar, rendering the human mind uniquely vulnerable to memetic attack. Every avenue of information transfer is also an attack surface; this is why there is no such thing as a secure device on the Internet. There are many examples in history of mass hysterias leading to mass destruction and mass death. But we’ve never before had the media technologies that developed during the long twentieth century, which enable us to wall our minds off entirely from the real world, filtering every perception through the demonic portals of the black mirrors we surround ourselves with.
We already know what the answer will be. Crusade followed by Inquisition. Fortunately, the memelords have already illustrated the path for us. What does truth have in common with demonic madness of the sort described? Absolutely nothing.
