“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds …” – Ralph Waldo Emerson.
It seems pointless by now to cry about this new flavor of tyranny that we have so eagerly embraced. It is here and it seems nearly impossible to divert the juggernaut; people are going to do what they do. If it means ruining families, friendships, freedoms, social justice, liberty, then that is what will be done to obtain this foolish consistency that we desire. Whatever it takes to obtain our consistency now seems well worth the sacrifice, because it seems the only thing we can do to allay our fears. And with no real collective ability to discern the lies of poorly wrought statistics, the fears will undoubtedly be with us for a while.
But is this new method do effective because of fear, or is it something more?
I have long been amazed, and I have even noticed it in myself, how “little” my mind can be with these foolish consistencies. I remember running through hundreds of pages of legally-binding documents, with no intention other than to the make sure all the spaces between paragraphs were the same size, or that only one space came after the period at the end of a sentence, rather than two. Certainly there was little need for me to do this, but it seemed to give me some comfort at the time, at least I was “doing something.” I could avoid thinking about the pointlessness of my tasks, if I simply scoured the world for inconsistencies. I could avoid thinking about how miserable I was in those jobs if I could successfully divert myself to the necessity of ensuring that the capitalization of certain words remained consistent across documents. The emotional disorder in this activity was not mine alone. In fact, my entire corporate department shared my dysfunction. It seemed normal because none of us wanted to contemplate our general misery, our children raised by strangers, our debt unrelieved by our long hours on the job. The foolish consistency seemed no longer foolish, but rather prudent.
Now the world is again on the precipice, we happily ignore the coming catastrophe to the natural world as we bulldoze pristine African wilderness to make way for the rare earth element mines, so we can drive electric vehicles to save the planet. We ignore our children who can no longer see each other’s faces, behind their COVID masks, an entire generation with a form of contact Asperger’s Syndrome from lack of facial connection. We ignore the debt, we ignore the lack of manufacturing, we ignore the looming humanitarian crisis of dissidents who stand up to their totalitarian lords. As long as we can create this foolish consistency in our little minds, we can ignore all of it. Throw the conscientious objectors to the new Transgenic Warfare under the bus, let the wheels crush their skulls, at least we won’t have to worry about catching their nonexistent disease.
We crave this compliance because we can’t fathom how to solve our real-world problems, how to extract the rare earth elements in a clean and sustainable way, how to respect others who don’t share our decisions, how to clean the air, clean the water, keep food on the table, keep a three year old Haitian child from death by diarrhea, or a 90-year-old woman who has had her home taken by the State to pay for the fees of the group death home into which she has just been rolled. Our training primarily consists of an ability to find a new television show on the computer, or purchase something on Amazon. We have no clue how to save that child from the diarrhea, so we don’t try and we instead kick in the head of anyone who dares to challenge the status quo.
These mandates, this demonization of people who have chosen a different path, even a more prudent path which we do not have the expertise to understand, these are necessary actions to help us avoid the realities of the world we have inherited.
We crave consistency in our neighbors and family not because it actually matters, but because it is easier than the alternative, and we have lost the ability to parse the information that is beamed into our heads through our eyeballs and our earholes. We can’t possibly know what to believe, so we let politics define the science, we let politics define the statistics, we let politics define the law, and we let politics define our ideals of social justice.
We will come out of this mess at some point … hundreds of thousands of Europeans have taken to the streets to protest. But we will lose a lot more before we can hold back the juggernaut. But as long as we allow the lens of politics to define statistics, science, rational decisions, and safety from the hints of disaster, we will not come out of this mess any day soon.