battle of the centuryTM
Seeing vs Believing Edition
as the pox unfolds, there is an epidemic of cognitive dissonance that may just be our greatest obstacle to actually getting a living future
The next big battle of the centuryTM takes place inside each of our heads
Of course, you don’t really need to “see the big picture” to know how fucked we are. Everyone knows it and no one is handling it well. But I’m not talking about the kind of knowledge that can be filed away to become cognitive dissonance fuel. I am talking about a way of perceiving the world that cannot be turned off or even ignored – hence the big sads all the time.
[I gotta pause here and say that I think the youths have this same problem (of not being able to turn off the perceptions of doom), but for a slightly different reason. Whereas I am saying that doomers are this way because of skills and techniques they have developed over time, the youths don’t need a lot of these techniques because they haven’t formed as many of the (idk cynical?) filters and strategic blindspots that people (especially empathic and otherwise sensitive folks) need to develop in order to function in a society based in large part on a variety of structural cruelties. Btw if this little fact ain’t becoming more and more obvious to you on a daily basis then you need to stop reading this and ask yourself seriously if maybe you aren’t part of the problem after all. seriously.]
This is one of the problems with people telling us that it’ll be okay or that we don’t actually know the end is nigh; if you have a tapestry the size of the World then having a firm grasp on a few threads, or even a few thousand threads, doesn’t give you the slightest hint about what the picture is. But if you have gotten yourself to a vantage point where you can see the picture (even just in part, but still clearly and more than enough it), what does a few strands really mean? What if you were slightly off about a few of their specific shades of grey? Would that make you question the picture you saw? It wouldn’t me. Not even for half a fucking second.
And of course, not everyone who sees the Big Picture sees it the same. It’s a big fuckin picture with lots of interconnected parts that can be approached from an endless number of angles. It is not about how many pieces or which ones you are familiar with. Again: it is a way of perceiving where every time you come across a new piece of the puzzle you can’t help but spontaneously place it in the Big Picture – to see what each thing means. Context is everything, and the more context we have the more of the everything we have access to. So you can see how this might be an issue: every break in a supply chain; every unseasonable storm or dry spell; every oversized truck or suv; every viral video of people acting like complete shit heels to each other sends your brain into an unstoppable cascade of associations that all lead to the cliff – full speed with no breaks and the parachutes are all made of tissue paper. Unpleasant business for real.
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