"Our Collective Theater Of The Mind"
by The Zman
"A recurring plot line in modern life is the famous person being exposed for some sort of fraud about themselves or their work. For example, the notorious race hustler Robin DiAngelo was found to have ripped off black writers for her PhD thesis. It seems that the only reason we hear about people in academia is when they have been exposed for having broken the rules of the academy. Christopher Rufo has turned this into a cottage industry in service to his campaign for a color-blind America.
We are seeing this in the election campaign. Tim Walz is a serial exaggerator. It seems that all of the important parts of his life story have been enhanced in ways to make him seem like a hero in various narratives. He exaggerated his military service, so he pretends to be a war hero and preach against guns. He likes to call himself “an old football coach” but he never really coached football. He likes to pose as Elmer Fudd, but people who know about such things see that it is just a pose.
Walz is not the first guy to enhance his resume. In fact, it is now the way things are done by the beautiful people. The current governor of Maryland, a guy some think could be president one day, has a stolen valor problem. Note that like Walz, his story about himself is not an outright lie, but more like an exaggeration, in the way a good storyteller fictionalizes events in order to make the tale interesting. For most of our public figures, their life story is “inspired by real events.”
The main reason they do this is they usually get away with it. No one in the media will ask Tim Walz tough questions about his biography. When J.D. Vance pointed out the exaggerations, the media attacked him for questioning the patriotism of Tim Walz, which is such an outlandish thing to say it should be followed with lightning bolts striking the people saying it. Even so, fudging the resume has become the thing people do if they want to make it to the big stage of life.
Part of this is due to the shift from authenticity to prolificity. In the prior age, morality required a person to live an authentic life and present their life honestly. You were a bad person if you faked your resume or faked your public persona. Increasingly, the path to success is in creating a public image that is pleasing to the crowd and disconnected from physical reality. The reimagination of Kamala Harris is an effort to formalize this in the first fully online election campaign.
Another possible cause is the fact that public life has come to be dominated by actors hired by the economic elites to play various roles in public life. The days of a man getting rich and then going to Washington to represent his community or rising up in state politics are long gone. Rich people hire people to play the role of politicians, and they hire people to pressure and influence them in what has become the theater of democracy, a spectacle staged for our entertainment.
For Tim Walz, the most important thing about his otherwise mundane life was getting into the circus of politics. To do that he figured out how to take the facts of his life, reimagine them so they fit the character of a woke prairie populist. This act has taken him from community theater to the biggest stage in the circus. The reason he exaggerated the resume was that the act required it. If the act needed him to become a transvestite, he would do it. There is no dignity in show biz.
This is also why our politics are supercilious and narcissistic. Actors have always been known as supercilious and narcissistic because even the lowest member of the show has had to overcome a lot to get on stage. Often, they have had to degrade themselves in order to get a break. This is possible because they are sure they are the person they imagine on the stage, wowing the crowd. The actor always has an exaggerated sense of self and when it works, they are filled with confidence.
It is why we have Kamala Harris a click away from becoming the first halfwit hapa to become president. There is nothing authentic about Harris, not even her DNA, so she could be viewed as the logical end point of a process that has sought to strip all reality from politics and replace it with emotive narratives. Her campaign is running on “good vibes” because a world detached from reality has only emotion. Kamala Harris is the ideal candidate for a world that can only exist in our imagination.
It is also why we get people like Amanda Gorman, the official poet of the United States, whose poetry is nothing more than emotive nonsense. As John Derbyshire observed, it fails to qualify as poetry. It is why an incoherent simpleton like Kanye West can pretend to be a genius musician, despite lacking a shred of musical ability. Our public life is overrun with carnies who think they are the role they play. The result is a public life not detached from reality, but at war with the concept of reality.
It is tempting to assume this cannot last, but reason says it should never have reached this point, so maybe it can last. The idea that reality may possibly be a figment of our imagination has been with mankind for as long as we know. Perhaps the long arc of humanity ends with proving this correct. The escape from the human condition is the embrace of the collective theater of the mind where all things are possible. Alternatively, maybe the machine just stops and then the theater goes dark."
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