Running Away From Reality

It boggles the mind that a large section of a nation of educated people, whose parents and grandparents had the gumption to run away from being ignorant peasants kept that way by a system of economic exploitation and religious separation, should willingly choose, in the space of a couple of generations, to go right back to being ignorant peasants again. Especially so when you consider what the young of other countries have to do to get an education and escape the kind of institutionalised ignorance and religious authoritarianism many Americans seem to yearn for.

It’s one thing to find a safe place to practice to worship your imgauinary gods but it’s another entirely to attempt and create a separatist state within a state in which your imginary god, (as interpreted by self-interested humans, as always) reigns supreme and to then use that as a base from which to convert the nation to an imposed belief in your fantasy world.

Here’sScholars and Rogues on the religious right’s retreat from reality:

So apparently some conservatives, unsatisfied with the “well-known liberal bias” of YouTube, have created their own conservative alternative (”conservalternative”?) called QubeTV.

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But this is silly in the same way that Conservapedia is silly. Rather than actually engage their opponents in actual cultural discussion and putting their ideas in the stream of debate, these ostrich-heads are sticking their heads in the sand and creating closed social systems where they never have to face anyone who disagrees with them. To use a simpler and funnier metaphor, they’re taking their balls and going home.

It’s this kind of sheltering from reality that is endemic to so much of the modern conservative movement, particularly the evangelicals. They create their own home-schooled networks, their own shopping centers, their own cultural events–a sort of “parallel reality” that exists completely alongside ours, but is not engaged with ours in any relevant or real way. And when you never have to face or understand things that don’t conflict with your worldview, you never feel any need to question or criticize the world you live in.

In the intellectual arrogance of girlhood I used to openly wish that I were stupid – because then, although the world would still be shit, I wouldn’t care.

I can still see the attraction of just giving up questioning and going with the flow. In times of existential dread, when we live in fear of our fellow humans and what they might do, with the looming threat of a dying planet and an unforgiving, random universe, there’s an overwhelming yearning in all of us for some other reality than this. It’s a harsh epiphany when it hits you that this really is it, this is all there is and therefore it’s up to us to improve it and ourselves. No wonder people recoil into self-manufactured reality.

Most of us in the developed economies have our temporary virtual worlds, our escapes from the grimness of the news. For some it’s music, for some drugs, for some the digital world – but most of us know that this is only an escape, a temporary cop-out at best. Only Republicans and fundies have the money, the freedom and the scope to have made their preferred alternate world into a reality. The result is closed communities of the mind, and often of the body as well, where the pastors have always been in power and there’s no need to think and everything is allowed, even kinky sex, just as long you’re male and you slap a ‘Christian’ or ‘Biblical’ label on it.

The phrase ‘cognitive dissonance’ was all the rage on the blogs a couple of years ago, with many wondering how Bush supporters could maintain this ongoing denial of reality without their heads exploding. Well, making their own reality via the likes of Qtube and Conservapedia and the rubbish pumped into the media by the intricate nesting Chinese puzzle of wingnut thinktanks and advocacy organisations is how. They’ve simply ignored what they don’t want to hear; for them it just does not exist. What they do want to hear they make up out of whole cloth. A lie is not a lie if it suits God’s purpose, as interpreted by the one doing the lying.

Recently I quoted a contented Ukrainian goatherd, who’d spent most of his 116 years in a totalitarian society:

“People who know too much always come to a nasty end. Better to stay stupid and not wonder too much about anything.” He told local newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda he had only been to school twice when he had visited his local primary school for two days and learned to write his name. He added: “The less you know, the longer you live. Ignorance is long life and happiness.”

I know Christianity is also a philosophy of a an ancient goatherd, but who ever thought ‘Ignorance is long life and happiness’ would become the mantra of choice of such a substantial minority of educated Americans?

The fundies’ve taken escapism to its extreme, so much so that they’ve retreated into the blessed stupidity and blind faith of medieval feudalism. While that may be fine for a bunch of overprivileged westerners who can live out their fundy dreams in isolation out on the prairie somewhere, to the detriment of no-one but themselves – and who also of course mostly have the option to snap out of it at any time – the problem is that they want the rest of the world to dress up and revert to ignorant peasantry too. This fundy philosophy of willed ignorance and submission to authority in exchange for a spurious feeling of safety and community is a model that’sbeing exported around the world, to much ill-effect.

While I’ve no doubt that fath can be a comfort and escape to many this retrogressive movement is not faith – it’s an illusion and a snare, a political, uber-capitalist, exploitative, proselytising, patriarchal totalitarianism, dressed up as a blessed spiritual escape from the physical grimness of life. Just go with the flow, all is forgiven, Jesus will save us all. Just sign here…

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