Guest Post by The Zman
Way back in the olden thymes, I was going back and forth with a liberal acquaintance about a topic related to his cult’s recent fixation on diversity. I no longer recall the details of the conversation, but at some point he said, “The reason we moved to Arlington was so our child could experience diversity.” He was speaking of Arlington Massachusetts, one of the whitest places on earth. He had moved to honkeyville, but he had somehow convinced himself that it was a rainbow community of racial and ethnic diversity.
Being a polite person, I laughed in his face. There are limits to civility. I doubt he has ever forgiven me for not only laughing at the ridiculous claim, but then proceeding to point out the demographic reality of his new home. Arlington is roughly 85% white and 10% Asian and those Asians will be college professors and professionals. The tiny black and Hispanic population is clustered in one area of town. You can drive around the place all day and never see a brown face that is not riding a lawnmower or leaf blower.
Now, I have no doubt that my former acquaintance and his Progressive hive-mates glorified one another on a regular basis for their embrace of diversity. You can bet they swapped stories about how their kid had a black friend at school or about their supposed friendship with the Muslim coworkers. He actually tried that one on me once. Because it was nothing but virtue signalling, they never faced any push-back. In fact, they got nothing but confirmation from their hive mates, so their delusions were always reinforced.
When people outside the hive wonder how people in the hive can believe the nonsense about diversity and the blank slate, it is important to keep in mind the power of magical thinking. They want this stuff to be true, so they tend to gravitate toward others who have the same fantasies. It is exactly how cults work. The doubt or concern of one member becomes a reason for the rest to double up on their belief. Progressives are people in search of purpose and identity, so they tend to clump together for support.
Whether you call it self-delusion, magical thinking, wishful thinking or whatever, this is powerful juju. My old Progressive acquaintance was not phased by my mockery or the facts I later sent him. In fact, he has only grown more deluded over the years. He’s now one of those old guys who still wears an “I’m With Her” t-shirt and tells people he is a moderate libertarian. It’s not that he is a liar or crazy, it’s that he so desperately wants this image he has of himself to be true, that he has convinced himself it is fact.
It is not just lefty cult members who are prone to self-delusion. Magical thinking is just the grease that makes the gears of life turn smoothly for people. All of us engage in some degree of it. In fact, it may be a requirement of leadership. Read the biographies of great leaders and you almost always find that they had an extreme over-confidence in their abilities. Often, they believed it was their destiny to achieve greatness. It was what pushed them to conquer the world or accomplish some great contribution to humanity.
At the same time, over-the-top belief in some cause is the driving force behind the great evils of history. Stalin was not mindlessly evil. He believed he was on the side of the righteous, just as the Nazis, Chinese communists and other murderous movements of the last century believed they were on the side of good. The Allies in World War II incinerated cities full of women and children, in order to break the will of the other side, because they thought they were fighting a just cause. The self-righteous make the best killers.
The power of self-delusion is not just the belief in some cause, but belief in the face of available evidence. It’s the conflict between the delusion and reality that is the chemical reaction, releasing energy the believers harness. The American Left refers to themselves as the “resistance” even though they are in complete control. It seems that the greater the gap between observable reality and the delusion, the more fanatical the believer. That conflict between reality and the delusion releases energy in relation to its contrast.
This is a useful thing to keep in mind when dealing with lefty relations. Your well-intended efforts to break the spell, only serve to make it stronger. It is counter intuitive, but the best thing you can do for a deluded friend or relative is to act disinterested. If you argue with them, they see that as proof they are speaking truth to power. If you agree with them, even on a small point, they see that as confirmation. Indifference throws water on that chemical reaction and robs them of the energy to carry on in the face of reality.
This is why the Left forces everyone to pick a side. For example, you cannot be indifferent to the various crotch fads. You are either enlightened or a homophobe, open minded or a gender-normative bigot. There can be no middle ground, because the delusion that fuels these causes depends upon the conflict. The indifferent are the black swans of the delusional. It’s not simply hive-mindedness. It is a need for the conflict between their beliefs about themselves and the reality of the world in which those beliefs conflict.
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
― Philip K. Dick
This is very much on-par with San Francisco (#91) on the list of Stuff White People like.
I met a delightful (inquisitive, thoughtful, industrious) Cambodian woman recently and she told me loved Living in Canada because people here (i.e. whites) care about each other, outside of immediate family. Her explanation was that SE Asian cultures, being generally influenced by the Buddhist ideal of emotional detachment, don’t really have much of a regard for others and don’t practice the golden rule collectively speaking. I don’t believe that is a legitimate interpretation of the Buddhist conception of or motive behind detachment, but regardless it was very affirming to hear such a direct refutation of the diversity delusion.
What would a Cambodian know about Buddhism?
uhh, that Cambodia is majority Buddhist?
There are many budd-ists in N. America today.
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OK I was born and raised in Arlington, both of my parents families have lived there since the 1800s, so it is place I know about.
Growing up it was a gritty blue collar town, when I was in High School in the 70s you could buy a three decker house for about 60k and live basically for free by renting out the other two units. Now they buy two or three of them and convert them to condos and sell each unit for a couple of hundred thousand. In 1972 my parents bought a house up on the hill by Robbins Farm for 32,000 they looked at a brick with a mother in law on Grand View, but they were asking 45,000. so my parent bought the 1930s colonial from the original owner whose son went to HS with dad on a little side street.
That brick house sold for 750k and last time it sold, the little three bedroom colonial sold for 550K
As for being white, well my High School class of 720 had less than a dozen Blacks and they were mostly MetCo students bused in from Boston, there was a family of Hatians, as for Asians I recall one Japanese student whose family moves to the US as his dad was a professor at one of the colleges, there were some Hispanics, one family was stranded in the US after the Castro revolution they had been wealthy and were all in Boston because one of them was seeing some medical specialist ant Mass General. Another was a former member of Allende’s Chilean government who managed to get out after the CIA coup.
It was a conservative Church going town, in an area of lees than five square miles there were four Catholic Churches, each one had multiple Sunday services, as well as a Orthodox church and a fair number of Protestant Churches.
In the 70s the Town started to clean itself up the big 1920s gas tank was taken down as were all the billboards. The train stopped running and the daily earthquake shaking of houses along the tracks ended
In 1979 I went off to college and then Grad school visiting only for breaks, when I returned in the late 80s, the place had changed, the hipsters from Cambridge who could no longer afford the rents or house prices started to move in.
Mass Ave went from being full of Hardware Stores, independent pharmacies, and independent food places like the House of Pizza to a hipster extension of Harvard Square. The Hardware store where My great Grandfather and grandfather bought tools for their Blacksmith WheelWrights Shop on Ryder Street is now a coffee shop.
I moved out in 1989, the place was not the place I grew up in, and if I had wanted to live in Cambridge I would do so, now they actually call Arlington West Cambridge, which was its original name before a bunch of the young men were killed in the early days of the civil war and buried in that cemetery, and the town was renamed to honor them.
Last time I was there, it was in 2001, i was there to bury my dad in Mt Pleasant I brought him back from Florida to bury him with his brothers and cousins, parents, as as he would say his comrades who are all clustered in the veterans area of the crematory.
The place was as foreign to me as the dark side of the moon, walking around the town I saw no one I knew, back when I was living there even in the 80s, I would walk down the hill to the center on a daily basis, multiple times a day, I used to work in the center, but that is also where the library was, the post office, et cet, in fact everything I needed could be acquired somewhere on Mass Ave, aside from going to the town line in Lexington to buy beer, because Arlington was dry, because I worked in the center until I went off to college I would never have to leave the confines of the town. Now you can get beer but you can’t get a Moxie in the home town of its inventor, they don’t even know what it is in the HajiMart in the former white hen pantry.
I would see at least a dozen people I knew also waling in town or in the shops.
In fact I was related to a fair number of them, once in the 70s I was walking with my mom down Mass Ave and across the street we saw a older man with his even older mother mom said there is you cousin, I said who? he is not one of my cousins she said yes second cousin removed then she explained the connection.
Anyway in 2001 I was there for a couple of days and except my cousin with whom I stayed I saw no one I knew, after dad’s buried I walked over to the VFW to get a drink, as I went in there were a bunch of folks I knew, even one of my HS class mates, it was right out of the last part of Steinbeck’s Travels With Charlie.
The conservative Christian town I grew up with had morphed into a Progressive Hive.
I can not even imagine how bat shit crazy the place has become since
If Conservatives wrote the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders instead of Liberals, a lot of Nuts would get diagnosed instead of drawing pay checks from Universities and for speeches at DNC and Journalist dinners and conferences.
Just curious Zman what part of Town has the Asian and blacks?
Didja ever notice how lefties always want to pick a fight, and it is always a battle over some other groups perceived problem?
the bleeding hearts are all up in arms about the plight of the blacks, but they support the worst kind of “family planning”, for the same group.
they support the alphabet army (lgbtlmnopQ who the f cares) even though they represent less than 2% of total population, but in fact is 70% of the hollywierd donor class
You can’t be friends with one of them, unless you become one of them. (or pretend to be sympathetic to what ever cause of the moment they are crying about)
The list of hypocrisy is endless with these butt munchers.