Views from Crestmont Drive

• Conceptual ceiling and conservatives;
• Thoughts about how humanity might survive, via deliberate cognitive dissonance: “One mindset to maintain the tribe and ensure near-term survival; another to solve problems that threaten long-term survival.” Which one is right? Both are, in different contexts.
• Can people thrive in a secular society?;
• Items about the anti-vaxx playbook; Trump and the Smithsonian; Trump and heaven; Gavin Newsom’s trolls; and several others.

I’ve written before about how maybe humanity may have hit a sort of conceptual ceiling, where not enough of us are able, or willing, to understand the complexities of the modern world and would prefer to turn the clock back to simpler ways of life, or reject reality entirely in favor of the local mythology or religion.

But today’s thought, distilling dozens of examples of political behavior every day, is that — of course, since humanity is a spectrum along many dimensions and not everyone is the same — is that many people have already hit this ceiling. To them, everything old and simple is better than anything new and complex. Raw milk, good. mRNA vaccine, or any vaccines at all, bad. The Nazis were the good guys after all, because they hated the same icky people, more or less, that MAGA and ICE hate. Our authoritarian president is preferred by millions who claim to venerate the principles of the Constitution, but by doing so show that they don’t. The flat earth is intuitive–just look out the window. Don’t believe anything you can’t see with your own eyes. Climate change is unreal, because the evidence is too complex to understand, and anyway, father god will take care of us.

These are the conservatives.

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