Twenty years ago, I started undergrad. It was a highly educational experience – although I daresay of everything I learned in those four years, 75% of it was outside the classroom. And it was mostly the sort of thing that you chalk up as a “learning experience” to make you feel better about it.
I was exposed to a lot of freshman-level thought. It was the early 90s, and I heard lots about viewpoints and perspectives, and postmodern thought in which commentary supercedes authority, and all about the importance of self-expression and the validity of other views of the world. Of course, this was a Deep South “liberal”-arts college, so it’s not like we were looking at the Antioch speech codes or the kind of stuff that would be deried as “political correctness” ever since.
And oh, the irony.
The need to regard all points of view as valid is what got us here. The need to accept alternative points of view – and their own frames of reference, under which those points of view wouldn’t seem, you know, batshit loonball crazy – led in a direct line to the phenomenon we now experience. Somehow, the kind of thought that was derided twenty years ago as empowering a deranged sort of Afrocentrism and engendering Maoist levels of feminist and “other” orthodoxy has become the delivery mechanism for an alternate view of the world that rejects objective measurable reality and substitutes its own.
This is how it’s possible that the majority of one political party can say that the other party’s elected President is “probably” not a citizen of the United States. Or “probably” a Muslim. Or how an entire region can embrace viewpoints that might have been considered legitimately medically insane two decades ago – and not only have them tolerated, but validated by larger external forces.
We said people were entitled to their own view of reality. And other people took it, ran with it, and decided they were entitled to their own reality – and built all the infrastructure they needed to reinforce that reality. An entire media ecosystem exists so that those who subscribe to that reality can indulge in it constantly with no fear of contradiction.
Because how do you contradict it? We have plenty of documentary evidence that the President of the United States was born in Hawaii to an American mother and has spent years if not decades as a practicing Christian. In fact, we have no proven evidence contrariwise. But a huge chunk of the population – and its agitators and supporters on television, radio and the Internet – claims the President is in fact a “secret Muslim” and ineligible to the office of the Presidency, with no evidence to support their claims beyond what would be laughed off the street corner by a homeless lunatic. But if they persist in believing it – what on Earth can you do to contradict them? Or persuade them otherwise? If they insist that the sky is English racing green, and you point up at the blue, and they insist that it’s green – what can you say? Especially when there are entire television programs – hell, an entire network – countless columnists, endless call-in shows – dedicated to reinforcing the opinion of those who think the sky is green?
How can you cope with mainstreamed insanity?