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Adaam & Vanessa—

I love it! Yes and so many yeses! I especially love the question you posed regarding reading Thomas Sowell. Everything about his life, his time at Cornell, his career, his race, his success, and the hatred he senselessly suffers from the Left was like a perfect little secret bomb that exploded midway of essay. So so good. In a bomb-nutshell, he encapsulates so much of your point. And of course Christopher Hitchens too.

Believe it or not, I actually think you went kinda soft and too easy on the Right. Which, I know, is quite contrarian of me given my own unquenchable leaning toward condemning the Left. It’s probably my guilt for feeling this – I definitely feel more vitriol toward the Left since I think every counter-position is effectively created by the first position. Duh. How could it not be? The Left effectively gives us the madness of the Right. Do we really want more of that! But the same is true of the Right. Their stupidity, madness, and dissociation give us the madness of the Left. Do we really want that! But the point is not to name call the other, but to grapple with the way in which our own affiliations are inadvertantly creating our worst nightmares in the other. This, I think is why I'm so hard and incensed with the Left. Because I live in greater affiliation with them in most things.

The most interesting thing I find personally about the post is your Orwell frame.

And let me preface by saying that you may be tempted, as I myself am, to think that I keep referencing Neil Postman in just about every conversation I have these days because I recently reread Amusing Ourselves to Death. It is actually the opposite: I re-read that book recently because I remembered that it actually had already defined back in 1985 what I had finally put together in my own way of seeing it just now!

Like Postman, you and Vanessa are calling for an end to Orwellian labeling – but for different reasons.

Postman argues that Orwell was wrong but Huxley was right! At least for America, Orwellian metaphor never did or never would truly be applicable. Big brother does not need to watch us, Postman writes, we are busy enough watching him by choice.

But rather, Huxley’s prediction is in fact what we are seeing now. Forget seeing! We’re so far in it, we can’t discern any more than a fish can discern water. Namely, that we are so busy laughing, that we do not think. Now the laughing is a metaphor for that which has replaced serious thinking. And for Postman, and I agree, it is TV and the entertainment epistemology that has replaced serious thinking— now fully realized in an entire social media and all media culture that is not even noticeable.

Huxley, yes. Orwell? No.

There is no need for the control. The damage is already done.

Orwell, at this point, is just part of the entertainment quality of further dividing us. Blaming each other, even in cliché, is much more amusing than having to do the whole, complex, hard work of reading Thomas Sowell to find out that the 1960s civil rights hurt African Americans economically and socially even though legally it was indeed progress. And that is only one little tiny issue. There are so many others. But no need to control my mind. I’ve got fun little gadgets and an entire cultural addiction to TV that has already done that. I don’t even know that there are any books out there that I’m missing. It’s all summarized by my drug of choice— sorry, I mean network or magazine of choice.

And that was what I really meant the other day when I said that journalism should handle the human condition. I wasn’t being sweet or naïve. I was indicating that even journalism (all: print and tv and now internet) redefined itself to follow the rules and way of the quintessential TV commercial: short, sweet, fragmented, half true (and therefore false) to make you buy some shit and giggle doing it. And the TV way is that the customer MUST feel helpless! If you don’t feel helpless, you can’t keep buying. And so every political problem feels impossible- not because it actually is impossible. Most problems are actually easier to solve than we presume for a civilized culture of today. But the feeling that they’re all impossible is both created and perpetuated by the half-truth-narrative-based-shit-show that is our public discourse.

Nevertheless, I do not totally despair, just to be sure. The answer lies within blogs like this. Education. Etc. But practically we must choose to argue from complexity — as we do here— rather than from reductionist and tribal positions. Maybe it will catch. Even if it doesn’t, people can learn it. And besides, this way is so much more fun than tribalism.

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