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[Editor’s note: Make sure to read Daniel Greenfield’s masterpiece contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]
Ersatz or artificial substitutes for products used to be a wartime necessity. Americans and other westerners have long since accepted the ubiquity of ersatz products for real ones. Everything from butter to maple syrup to meat is replaced with substitutes for dietary or economic reasons.
The ‘ersatzization’ of food has been more than overmatched by the same phenomenon in our culture. Artificially generated images and essays are treated as if they were the work of some higher artificial intelligence rather than just the digitally remixed work of actual humans.
And men are treated as women as long as they insist that they really are women.
Objective measures of reality have fallen by the wayside in favor of a subjective materialism in which it matters only what something appears to be or what we think it is, not what it really is.
The consensual illusion of ersatz foods in which we all know what we’re eating even if we occasionally pretend it’s the real thing has made way for ersatz money, ersatz art, ersatz science, ersatz politics and even ersatz women. With the latter the right to pretend, to pose as something you are not, has evolved into a civil right. To lie and be believed has eclipsed freedom of speech and the traditional rights of women, not to mention science and reality.
Illusion became delusion along a road that began with mass communications and ended with emulation in the entertainment and technology industries as the highest form of art. Emulation, like most subversive arts, required deconstruction. To duplicate a thing, whether it was a scream, a sentence or a human body, we had to deconstruct it into its components and, once deconstructed, it was all too easy to confuse the components and the illusion with the whole.
Transgender activists claim that they’re women because they wear makeup, put on dresses, adopt feminine mannerisms, and, in some cases, take hormones and get castrated. It is significant that the latter are not even real requirements. The only real requirements for transgender status are external imitation and internal conviction. In an artificial age, what we believe and what we pretend to be is what we are. Those who do this are the children of a world where fortunes, stock value, political office and academic credentials are built on illusions.
The dark side of the scientific pursuit of truth was the conviction that by understanding how things in the natural world were made, we could duplicate them and become gods. Our belief that we have achieved this has vastly outstripped the reality where our limited successes stalled early on in the atomic age. The triumph and horror of the detonation of the atomic bomb remains a compelling subject because it appeared to open a new age when it actually closed it. The everyday hard technologies that underpin modern civilization already existed then. All we have succeeded in doing since is to make them cheaper, more efficient and more accessible.
It took the evolution of computer technology for us to enter a world that seemed in line with our inflated sense of our capabilities. Within those systems, programmers appeared able to create worlds and rewrite the rules of reality. Outside them, radicals who had soured on the old socialist vision of industrial progress turned to romanticism and manufactured the myth that human technology, nuclear and industrial, was on the verge of destroying the world.
The myth of man as the destroyer of worlds, propounded by Oppenheimer, a weak man pretending to be terrified of his own strength, was not a response to technological potency, but impotence. Environmentalism was not a reaction to the accelerating speed of technological change, which was actually slowing down, but to a cultural response to the death of progress.
The atomic age’s conviction that experts and scientists would be able to solve all our problems and usher in a better world had faltered and that opened the way for the counterculture to make its case that technological progress was not the solution. While America had sharply reduced poverty, spread prosperity and increased lifespans, these great achievements in daily life had not fulfilled the promise of a future that would sweep away all the social problems of the world.
The promise of omnipotent technological man was replaced with the myths of omnipotent man who could change the world, not through actual accomplishments, but through conviction. Like the Communist dictatorships they were on the verge of defeating, Americans were persuaded through mass communications and educational indoctrination that it was more important to believe the right things than to do them because conviction could transform reality.
Every leftist revolution, beginning with the French Revolution, had begun with the slogan that will mattered more than any real world prerequisite when it came to changing the world. Leni Riefenstahl’s ‘Triumph of the Will’ condensed that central idea into its name. That reality could be overcome through the assertion of the correct principles took us from the horrors of the guillotine, the mass starvations of the Soviet Union and Communist China, and refracted through the advertising and entertainment industries, along with social media, into an American unreality where people can change their sex if done in line with identity politics principles.
Marxism had never been anything more than a 19th century crank’s pseudoscience wrapped in bad history and worse theory. Karl Marx had been a miserable student and never had any patience for learning anything. The genius of Marxism was that it asserted that the only way to understand anything was to do it. Instead of testing theories against practice, practice had to validate theory. Soviet agriculture was a miserable failure, but that was put down not to the failures of the underlying theory, but to the decadence and corruption of the peasants.
When reality failed theory, mass murder swiftly followed. Socialist theories were all big lies that were upheld with misery and censorship, at best, and with terror and murder at their worst. The intellectuals who studied Marxism either learned to kill or were replaced by those like Stalin whose understanding of theory might be poor, but who excelled at implementing it by redirecting blame for its failures through a French revolutionary drama of purges and random butchery.
In America, the lies still reign supreme from global warming to gender change. The varied lies have at their core the myth that man is omnipotent in both destructive and constructive realms. If man is not restrained, he will destroy the world, but if he is restrained through the right ideology, there is nothing that he cannot accomplish. The good kind of omnipotence comes from adopting a political dogma which when properly implemented can make anything possible.
Overcoming reality by embracing illusion is the test of faith of the dogma. Like the ancient pagans who castrated themselves and then threw the parts into the fire before worshiping the goddess, their modern counterparts embark on pretending to be women as an act of faith. To disbelieve is not just a hate crime: it questions the magical thinking at the heart of the Left.
Ersatz food, once a wartime necessity, becomes ‘sacred’ when eaten to overcome ‘climate change’. Reality becomes illusion and becomes reality again when imbued with virtue. The break between the Marxists and the Wokes over whether virtue signaling matters is emblematic of the larger conflict between industrial and post-industrial social media collectivism.
To ‘live my truth’ rather than the truth is a pivotal decision to change the world through delusion. The old school Marxists may decry a neo-liberalism of bumper stickers and hashtag activism, but it was the 60s radicals who failed at public activism and went into the system, became wealthy and successful, who claimed that they sold out externally, but not internally, who gave us the schizoid state of the postmodern western leftist and he/them fantasy collectivism.
Radical ad execs, coked out screenwriters, and fringe academics ushered in the exciting unreality all around us. Then, financed by Silicon Valley techtopians, social media offered a terrible version of the old vision of creating worlds within the old green and black CRT monitors. The world inside the now 4K monitors is not the same as the real world outside, but even before the arrival of everyday augmented reality wearables people have been conditioned to compare reality against the unreal world of social media, and to find reality, in which the people aren’t as attractive, wealth doesn’t come from imaginary currency and fringe sexuality just leads to unhappiness, as wanting. We live in utopia now and the real world is collapsing around us.
External reality is depressing. It kills dreams. Like the dream of having total power over ourselves and the world around us. The man who believes he is really a woman doesn’t want to be told otherwise. Neither does the politician who just proposed spending another trillion dollars because modern monetary theory tells him that government spending can be virtually infinite.
Children live in a magical world in which dreams mingle seamlessly with reality. Adulthood appears to be a distant mirage of unlimited freedom. The traditional process of growing up was the realization of the limitations and responsibilities of adulthood. Each generation of children has become slower to come to terms with these limitations and responsibilities. For as long as possible they inhabit a childish world in which they can do anything and may not be denied.
The unreal world, enhanced by pharmaceuticals, fantasies and entertainment, offers not freedom through responsibility, but freedom from responsibility by exchanging subjective reality and external mimicry for the basic truths of economics, biology and human nature.
The world around us appears insane because it has left behind reality for fantasy. Sanity can only come from coming to grips with the painful truths of reality all over again.
Seeez who “ It’s hard work fundamentally destroying a country founded on economic, religious, a Bill of Rights and social freedom.
No nook or cranny is too invisible nor unimportant enough to ignore.
The Left have taken hold against the will of the majority and they are not taking any chances. Politicizing music, lit, art, sports is standard on the totalitarian to-do list. Mores around sex, personal relationships and marriage have to be transformed like everything else. We are like Kafka’s Gregor, the U.S. has woken up, seemingly overnight, to discover we have morphed into a hideous looking insect. It’s not a good ending in the story either.”
Kafka was a prophet. Some of the best stuff I ever read. And true to life, even though fiction. More true to life than non-fiction books.
And the easiest way to transform something is by constantly attacking things as they are until people decide that an improvement may be in order or they come to despair of everything
And of course, Satan – the master liar – is behind it all
Yes, the road to hell is paved with Democ-rats.,
Now they want all boys to dress up as Girls or take up Ballet Lessons and hug Trees and be total Vegans and we see useful Idiots like Hogg and Thunberg and the results of Government Schools and the Brainwashing by Big Brother
Education systems are a reproductive method.
Like cuckoos, leftists reproduce by brainwashing other people’s kids
I love that analogy!
But sadly it’s not just kids.
I have a friend of 40+ years, who is becoming more of a leftard by the day.
She’s been completely taken in by the climate hoax, swears that the clot shots are not dangerous, and is now associating with tranny freaks who now insist they were born hermaphrodite, but we’re ‘interfered’ with at birth and changed to the wrong single sex, but never knew it til they met each other.
We can’t talk about reality anymore, she takes everything she sees on the news as absolute truth, and says that I get my information from an unregulated internet.
I fear a once dear friendship is reaching its end.
Ideally, they don’t want boys to exists at all. Why be a mere male when you can be Jazz Jennings, Lia Thomas, “Rachel” Levine or Dylan Mulvaney?. Their message: castration can be fun!
Brilliant analogies. Quite a talent to come up with those.
Even as a kid in the 1950s I didn’t like ersatz products, not just the taste, but an intellectual skepticism of the ersatz stuff. Like I remember I didn’t like margarine when it was pushed as a substitute for butter. And they had some awful substitute for mayonnaise. I stopped eating mayonnaise because of that. Haven’t eaten it since then. My Mom fell for all the advertising pushing the stuff. How many kids at that age are intellectually skeptical like that?
Now it is called plant-based, so therefore it is better. It’s all in a name.
Words matter! That’s why one of the first things these left wing progressives try to achieve is the change of the meaning of words. Gay is an example.
Thank you. They tried to spin artificial substitutes as superior to the real thing. Turn the spin went the other way now, hyping naturalness as the important value.
It’s all marketing m
My mother was a European immigrant. She breastfed her babies and only had real butter in the house. Everyone else in the neighborhood bottle-fed their babies and used margarine. I think that experience, while rather mild, made me skeptical of majority opinion.
Hollywood and the MSM are the greatest promoters of fantasy in the WEst , insomuch, they have created a virtual reality for postmodern man to dwell in . But this is what happens when you lack historical continuity and live in a hyper enlarged NOW with only hedonism and pleasure seeking as a aim
True. Much of the dream was endless reinvention . And who better than Hollywood to sell the dream based around celebrities who has reinvented themselves from ordinary people to gods and goddesses before, like Marilyn Monroe, killing themselves
Orwell was right.
Sanity can only return if people are less afraid of standing up for objective reality than being called a name.
DG at his most brilliant. Of course, wealth insulates individuals or collective entities from reality. Look at California!
Thank you. One of the purposes of wealth. And the best way to test its insulating powers is to set the rest of society on fire
“The magical thinking at the heart of the Left”
. Lord, Daniel, you just get better and better.
Thank you kindly.
“The central idea: reality could be overcome through the assertion of the correct principles …”
Brilliant point. Reality has billions of years of evolution baked in, like an AI machine that has been running for billions of years. And our puny intellectual theories are pitted against that. We have to try, but recognize our limitations.
I saw that in chess. Despite centuries of the best human minds trying to understand chess, when AI chess software came along it quickly far exceeded human performance, although noone knows exactly how the AI comes up with its moves.
Machines will always be better at calculating in an artificial world.
In the real world where not a the variables are known and intuition and gut instincts based on experience provide an edge, machines fail. Look at what happened to our inventory systems when the pandemic arrived.
I’d bet on a computer in a chess game, not on a battlefield
I just remembered the Truman Show, Pleasantville and a few other fantasy worlds on TV and in movies. Or perhaps Woody Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo, or perhaps TV shows like Quantum Leap or Meet Joe Black. They all in some way show the addiction people have to fantasy worlds and unreality.
Groups like Just Stop Oil or Extinction Rebellion, etc with their disruptive practices have not learned anything from history. Such as from the Unibomber who had a similar mentality and rationale to trying to wake up the ever-sleeping indifferent vast majority of people anywhere with his highly disruptive violent/murderous practices.
It went nowhere.
Because all these violently resistant people have not understood that “advanced” humans suffer from a fatal disease — The Soullessness Spectrum Disorder …. https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html
It also explains the following which is now going on with the Covid Holocaust…
“Our current ‘state’ is the dictatorship of evil. We know that already, I hear you object, and we don’t need you to reproach us for it yet again. But, I ask you, if you know that, then why don’t you act? Why do you tolerate these rulers gradually robbing you, in public and in private, of one right after another, until one day nothing, absolutely nothing, remains but the machinery of the state, under the command of criminals and drunkards?” (from a White Rose Pamphlet, the White Rose was a German resistance group fighting Hitler’s Nazi regime)
I have always believed the Baby Boomers (I am one) as a result of the Great Depression and WWII, were raised to be the “best educated”, and most protected generation ever. Well the Clinton/Kerry/obama part of that generation believed it, so that is why we are where we are. We are so smart we will redo 10,000 years of civilization in 40 years. I happen to believe the smartest people ever were our Founding Fathers. They tried to institute a way of government that could circumvent human greed and need for power. They never imagined we would elect people who would undercut our wonderful Republic. Unless we can change the socialist/communist trend in our country peacefully, I have the solution. A giant sunspot that knocks out all electricity/electronics in the world. Just be prepared and know how people survived in the 1800s. That would bring reality back immediately. It would also solve “global warming”. Of course I would survive but 50% TO 90% would not. I know that sound horrible and cruel but we would get over it. I am not nuts. I always wanted to be born 100 years earlier.
Daniel, have you thought about turning this into a book? I’d buy it.
Thank you. It’s an interesting thought
unfortunately for the west , and america is leading the charge , what we currently see in the ” insanity ” is that it is what the bible calls judicial judgement . it has been foistered on all nations by God . it is called a ” reprobate mind ” and cannot be rescinded . the nations of the world have gone beyond the point of no return . no political party be they liberal or conservative will be able to reverse the now rapid decline . same sex marriage , trans madness , abortion , the acceptance of islam over christianity , [ not the catholic version ] and the destruction of the family unit have all sealed the coffin . like the unsinkable titanic , it is now a race to the bottom . time to enter the only lifeboat available and its the one being manned by jesus christ . you don’t have much time , do it while you can .