"Of Two Minds"
by The ZMan
"Everyone in every time has thought that his time was crazier and less predictable than the times that came before him. Much of this is due to recency bias, but another cause is the sense that things were better in the past. This sense that the past was better is a part of the human makeup. There is not only a nostalgia for the our own past, but for the past we never experienced. That is because the past seems more certain than our present age and the near future.
People who lived through the Great Depression and the Second World War looked back at those days with fondness. These were people enjoying 1950’s America reminiscing about one of the worst times in American history. Many even lost family members in the war, but those war years felt like the best of times. Our minds seem to have evolved in such a way that we cannot remember pain. That means what we can recall about our past is only the good feelings we experienced.
It also depends upon who you are at the time as well. If you were a black person in the 1950’s then it was a wild time to be alive. The civil right revolution was getting going and the role blacks were given was to riot in the streets. The typical white guy living in California was just enjoying his time. On the other hand, the war years were a good time to be black in America as the war economy needed labor. Millions of black people found lucrative work in northern cities.
That is something to keep in mind while watching present events. It certainly seems like it is a crazy time to be alive. The whole Trump thing is wild, just from the perspective of American politics. People also seem nuttier. This was evident during the Covid panic when millions of otherwise normal looking people revealed themselves to be bitter paranoid cranks. Now the
anti-Trump loons are going into hiding, by which they mean the latest alternative to Twitter.
It is not just the usual suspects losing their minds over the election. The British tabloid The Guardian has
announced on Twitter, oddly enough, that it is stomping off in a huff, presumably to set up shop on the alternative to Twitter. They claim it is because of the “far-right conspiracy theories and racism.” That means a publication that traffics in conspiracy theories about the imaginary far-right and racism is abandoning the one place they are sure such things exist.
Even putting aside the natural bias described at the start, this is crazy behavior that did not exist just ten years ago. The crazy times ten years ago were both sides meeting in the streets to point fingers and maybe scuffle a bit. More important, the people we call the left had institutional support, so they controlled the battlefield. This fact has been true for as long as anyone has been alive, so seeing them abandon the battlefield and go into hiding qualifies this as a crazy time to be alive.
Of course, the reason this is happening is the big election victory of Donald Trump and the temporary ascendency of his party. It was not just a big win for Trump on Tuesday, but also a big win for the movement that made him possible. The reason that movement exists is the growing insanity of the people we call the left. In other words, we probably do live in a crazy age, even when people have the ability to step back and look at it from a distance. This really is a crazy age.
The thing about this crazy age is that not much is happening. The exciting times a century ago revolved around the Great War. The mobilization of America for war in Europe was unprecedented. The war itself was unprecedented, and its aftermath was also unprecedented. Enormously important things were happening. In this present age, everything happens on the internet and slightly affects events outside the digital space, but only in superficial ways.
Put another way, we live in a crazy time because this new virtual reality we created called the internet has sucked into it many of our least stable people, empowering them to unleash their craziness in this virtual realm. Imagine a version of the past twenty years in which the crazy people were denied access to the internet. Imagine if all the foreign policy debates since the Cold War had been conducted online by people like John Mearsheimer rather than crazies from the Kagan cult.
What makes this a crazy time is we are living in a unique period and what makes it unique is this virtual realm we call the internet. Everyone is forced to one degree or another to live with two minds. There is the mind that exists in the virtual realm and then there is the mind that exists in the physical realm. Note that you rarely discuss with people in the physical realm your life in the virtual realm. These are two distinct worlds that require two distinct minds.
On the other hand, the growth of this new virtual world has had the effect of collapsing the two minds for some people. The crazies online are made crazy, in part, by the invasion of the private space by the public space. Prior to the internet, these people could only do politics by participating in it publicly. Most just avoided politics and remained privately nuts, but free of public politics. Plugged into the internet, the public rushes into the private and the private becomes public.
This may explain the phenomenon of the seemingly stable person heading off into crazy land as they get increasingly online. People like James Lindsay or Keith Olbermann are good examples of people who started out a bit odd, but not so odd that you questioned their sanity. They steadily evolved into crazy people online. When there was separation between their public and private mind, we did not see the madness, because it existed outside of public view.
In the fullness of time, people may look at this time and think it was the calm waters before the terrible rapids. Maybe they look at this is as a gentle adjustment period between the Cold War and whatever comes next. it is also possible that it is the crazy time when people had to adjust to the two-mind problem. The growth of the virtual realm created a need for an entirely novel mode of thought, the mind you activate when inside the internet, along with a way of isolating it from the other mind.
It may be that we arrive at a new way of judging people. At the top of the hierarchy are those who master both minds, deftly balancing them to be high status in both the material world and the virtual world. At the bottom are the people who allow the virtual realm to take over their mind entirely, making it seem that they are as crazy in real life as they seem online. In the middle are the vast majority who struggle to balance their internet mind with their material mind."
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Interested in the virtual world? I highly recommend Second Life, and
I've have been an active resident there for 12 years. This is NOT a game...
- CP
"Second Life"
"Second Life is a multiplayer virtual world that allows people to create an avatar for themselves and then interact with other users and user-created content within a multi-user online environment. Developed for personal computers and owned by the San Francisco-based firm Linden Lab, it launched on June 23, 2003 and saw rapid growth for some years; in 2013 it had approximately one million regular users. Growth eventually stabilized, and by the end of 2017, the active user count had fallen to "between 800,000 and 900,000". In many ways, Second Life is similar to massively multiplayer online role-playing video games; nevertheless, Linden Lab is emphatic that their creation is not a game: "There is no manufactured conflict, no set objective."
The virtual world can be accessed freely via Linden Lab's own client software or via alternative third-party viewers. Second Life users, also called 'residents', create virtual representations of themselves, called avatars, and are able to interact with places, objects and other avatars. They can explore the world (known as the grid), meet other residents, socialize, participate in both individual and group activities, build, create, shop, and trade virtual property and services with one another.
The platform principally features 3D-based user-generated content. Second Life also has its own virtual currency, the Linden Dollar (L$), which is exchangeable with real world currency. Second Life is intended for people ages 16 and over, with the exception of 13–15-year-old users, who are restricted to the Second Life region of a sponsoring institution (e.g., a school)."
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