Those mysterious forces beyond our control

How complicated problems and helplessness can lead to distorted reality

In How the Mountain of Climate Change Evidence Is Being Used to Undermine the Cause, Bill McKibben says the successful techniques of climate deniers resemble those of OJ Simpson's Dream Team of lawyers. When a mountain of evidence gets big enough, there will be a few cracks. Just "spend week after week dwelling on the cracks in a case, no matter how small they may be." But, he says, the main reason for climate deniers success is, "They’ve grasped the widespread feelings of powerlessness in the U.S., and the widespread suspicion that we’re being ripped off by mysterious forces beyond our control." [emphasis mine]



From Extreme fear: could you handle it? "The more control a person has over a threatening situation, the less anxiety it provokes. Numerous experiments have shown that being out of control of a negative situation leads to the release of the stress hormone cortisol."



Michael Bader says that paranoia arises as people try" to make sense of and mitigate feelings of helplessness and worthlessness." "People can't tolerate feeling helpless and self-hating for very long. It's too painful, too demoralizing and too frightening. They have to find an antidote. They have to make sense of it all in a way that restores their sense of meaning, their feeling of agency, their self-esteem, and their belief in the possibility of redemption. They have to. They have no choice. That's just the way the mind works."



"The paranoid strategy is to generate a narrative that finally "explains it all." A narrative -- a set of beliefs about the way the world is and is supposed to be -- helps make sense of chaos. It reduces guilt and self-blame by projecting it onto someone else. And it restores a sense of agency by offering up an enemy to fight. Finally, it offers hope that if "they" -- the enemy, the conspirators -- can be avoided or destroyed, the paranoid person's core feelings of helplessness and devaluation will go away."



Climate Destabilization and Corporate Control of Civilization generate this situation



Blaming the patronising liberal elite and intellectual snobs misses the point, and embeds a self-defeating hierarchy (they understand stuff that I don't, so I must be dumb). All of us humans, including the highly educated and those who claim various expertise, are out of our depth. The world has become far too complicated for our evolved perceptions and our innate responses to grasp and respond adequately. Even coroporate institutions with their vaster resources, designed to maximize short-term profit, fail to forsee economic and ecological catastrophies of their own making.



We need new institutional structures designed to cope with civilization-on-the-edge-of-self-destruction. We need new human identities, that do not demand the impossible in order to avoid intolerable cortisol levels.

A Glimmer of Sanity

It’s easier to see the old way we’ve made sense of the universe and ourselves disintegrating, than to grasp new ways to make sense that emerge from our information technology symbiosis.

cut out by ~klayemi on deviantART
For example, in “Cut Out” by Klayemi, we see the old self, represented as flat photograph, splitting. Whereas the narrative space of the old self portrait presupposed a two-dimensional “universe,” that invisible narrative space is itself the message of a cross-dimensional medium.

One thing for sure, the new way of making sense isn’t linear. Gone is the kitchen table upon which we separated toys into neat categories, and us from our toys. How do separate variables while that single plane folds out into mysterious dimensions? The assumption that we can sort identities and differences in uniform passive space and time supported our capacity for reason. Critical thinking slithers from our grasp as we stream through nested narrative spaces, our attention continually sliced by rapid-fire orienting responses. Working memory fails; our little fingers drop one toy after another as the next barks and sparkles.

How do we grope out shifting patterns on a fractal meta-sorting table, as new windows open and those held in overfull arms delete? What string will lead us to contradictions snuggled away from monitor view in five-layer nesting?

This video straddles our new threshold. It's limited penetration of cross-dimensional self-perception is, at least, suggestive.


The video's the antithesis of reason.It's just a hint of the kind of space within which meme-based "reason" will emerge.