And not nuts like the slightly ditzy Grandmas of stage and screen were but dangerously—try to hurt you if they get the chance—sometimes psychotically, off kilter.
And it doesn't matter whether they are Karens or Authoritarians or Totalitarians—those are just gradations of their power, if they think they have the advantage and perceive that you aren't fully participating in their delusions, they can seriously damage you.
Many of the greatest horrors of the history of humanity owe
their occurrence solely to the establishment and social enforcement of a
false reality. With gratitude to the Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper
and his important 1970 essay “Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power” for the
term and idea, we can refer to these alternative realities as
ideological pseudo-realities.
Pseudo-realities, being false and unreal, will always generate
tragedy and evil on a scale that is at least proportional to the reach
of their grip on power—which is their chief interest—whether social,
cultural, economic, political, or (particularly) a combination of
several or all of these. So important to the development and tragedies
of societies are these pseudo-realities when they arise and take root
that it is worth outlining their basic properties and structure so that
they can be identified and properly resisted before they result in
sociopolitical calamities—up to and including war, genocide, and even
civilizational collapse, all of which can take many millions of lives
and can ruin many millions more in the vain pursuit of a fiction whose
believers are, or are made, sufficiently intolerant.
The Nature of Pseudo-realities
Pseudo-realities are, simply put, false constructions of reality. It
is hopefully obvious that among the features of pseudo-realities is that
they must present a plausible but deliberately wrong understanding of
reality. They are cult “realities” in the sense that they are the way
that members of cults experience and interpret the world—both social and
material—around them. We should immediately recognize that these
deliberately incorrect interpretations of reality serve two related
functions. First, they are meant to mold the world to accommodate small
proportions of people who suffer pathological limitations on their
abilities to cope with reality as it is. Second, they are designed to
replace all other analyses and motivations with power, which these
essentially or functionally psychopathic individuals will contort and
deform to their permanent advantage so long as their pseudo-real regime
can last.
Pseudo-realities are always social fictions, which, in light of the
above, means political fictions. That is, they are maintained not
because they are true, in the sense that they correspond to reality,
either material or human, but because a sufficient quantity of people in
the society they attack either believe them or refuse to challenge
them. This implies that pseudo-realities are linguistic phenomena
above all else, and where power-granting linguistic distortions are
present, it is likely that they are there to create and prop up some
pseudo-reality. This also means that they require power, coercion,
manipulation, and eventually force to keep them in place. Thus, they are
the natural playground of psychopaths, and they are enabled by cowards
and rationalizers. Most importantly, pseudo-realities do not attempt to
describe reality as it is but rather as it “should be,” as determined by
the relatively small fraction of the population who cannot bear living
in reality unless it is bent to enable their own psychopathologies,
which will be projected upon their enemies, which means all normal
people.
Normal people do not accept pseudo-reality and interpret reality more
or less accurately, granting the usual biases and limitations of human
perspective. Their common heuristic is called common sense,
though much more refined forms exist in the uncorrupted sciences. In
reality, both of these are handmaidens of power, but in
pseudo-realities, this is inverted. In pseudo-reality, common sense is
denigrated as bias or some kind of false consciousness, and science is
replaced by a scientism that is a tool of power itself. For all his
faults and the faults of his philosophy (which enable much ideological
pseudo-reality), Michel Foucault warned us about this abuse quite
cogently, especially under the labels “biopower” and “biopolitics.”
These accusations of bias and false consciousness are, of course,
projections of the ideological pseudo-realist, who, by sheer force of
rhetoric, transforms limitations on power into applications of power and
thus his own applications of power into liberation from it. Foucault,
for any insight he provided, is also guilty of this charge.
It must be observed that people who accept pseudo-realities as though
they are “real” are no longer normal people. They perceive
pseudo-reality in place of reality, and the more thoroughly they take on
this delusional position, the more functional psychopathy they
necessarily exhibit and thus the less normal they become. Importantly,
normal people consistently and consequentially fail to realize this
about their reprogrammed neighbors. Perceiving them as normal people
when they are not, normal people will reliably misunderstand the
motivations of ideological pseudo-realists—power and the universal
installation of their own ideology so that everyone lives in a
pseudo-reality that enables their pathologies—usually until it is far
too late.
As a result of this failure of perspective, many particularly
epistemically and morally open normal people will reinterpret the claims
of pseudo-reality into something that is plausible in reality under the
usual logic and morals that guide our thinking, and this
reinterpretation will work to the benefit of the pseudo-realists who
have ensnared them. This sort of person, who stands between the real
world and the pseudo-real are useful idiots to the ideology, and their
role is to generate copious amounts of epistemic and ethical camouflage
for the pseudo-realists. This phenomenon is key to the success, spread,
and acceptance of pseudo-realities because without it very few people
outside of small psychologically, emotionally, or spiritually unwell
people would accept a pseudo-reality as if it is a superior
characterization of the genuine article. Clearly, the more plausible the
account of pseudo-reality on offer, the stronger this effect will be,
and the more power the ideologues who believe in it will be able to
accrue.
Pseudo-realities may have any degree of plausibility in their
distorted descriptions of reality, and thus may recruit different
numbers of adherents. They are often said to be accessible only by
applying a “theoretical lens,” awakening a specialized “consciousness,”
or by means of some pathological form of faith. Whether by “lens,”
“consciousness,” or “faith,” these intellectual constructs exist to make
the pseudo-reality seem more plausible, to drag people into
participating in it against their will, and to distinguish those who
“can see,” “are awake,” or “believe” from those who cannot or, as it
always eventually goes, will not. That is, they are the pretext
to tell people who inhabit reality instead of pseudo-reality that
they’re not looking at “reality” correctly, which means as
pseudo-reality. This will typically be characterized as a kind of willful ignorance
of the pseudo-reality, which will subsequently be described
paradoxically as unconsciously maintained. Notice that this puts the
burden of epistemic and moral responsibility on the person inhabiting
reality, not the person positing its replacement with an absurd
pseudo-reality. This is a key functional manipulation of pseudo-realists
that must be understood. The ability to recognize this phenomenon when
it occurs and to resist it is, at scale, the life and death of
civilizations.
Adoption of a pseudo-reality tends to hinge upon a lack of ability or
will to question, doubt, and reject them and their fundamental
presuppositions and premises of the pseudo-reality. Therefore, the
“logical” and “moral” systems that operate within the pseudo-reality
will always seek to manufacture this failure wherever they can, and
successful pseudo-realist attacks will evolve these features like a
social virus until their effectiveness is very high. This deficiency is
often the direct result of mental illness, usually paranoia, schizoidia,
anxiety, or psychopathy, however, so maintaining and manufacturing
these states in themselves and normal people is strongly incentivized by
the false “logic” and false “morality” of the ideological
pseudo-reality. That is, the methods and means applied in service to a
pseudo-reality will create and manipulate psychological weaknesses in
people to get them to carry water for a destructive lie. The nicer, more
tolerant, and more charitable a community is, supposing it lacks the
capacity to spot these counterfeits early on, the more susceptible its
members will tend to be to these manipulations.
Pseudo-realities and Power
The ultimate purpose of creating a pseudo-reality is power, which the
constructed pseudo-reality grants in many ways. Though these means are
many, we should name a few. First, the pseudo-reality is always
constructed such that it structurally advantages those who accept it
over those who do not, frequently by overt double standards and through
moral-linguistic traps. Double standards in this regard will always
favor those who accept pseudo-reality as reality and will always
disfavor those who seek the truth. An ideological pseudo-reality must
displace reality in a sufficient population to grant itself power to
succeed in its goals. Linguistic traps will often employ strategic
double meanings of words, often by strategic redefinition (creating a motte and bailey), will beg the question in ways that forces people to participate in the pseudo-reality to respond (often by Aufhebung-style,
i.e., Hegelian, dialectical traps), or will begin with an assumption of
guilt and demand proof of innocence such that denial or resistance is
taken as proof of guilt of some moral crime against the moral system
that serves the pseudo-reality (a kafkatrap). Demands will be
made with sufficient vagueness such that they can never be said to have
been met and such that responsibility for failure will always be the
fault of the enemies of the ideology who “misunderstood” them and thus
implemented them incorrectly.
Second, the very assertion of pseudo-reality demoralizes all who are
pressed into engaging with it by the mere fact of being something false
that must be treated as true. We should never underestimate how
psychologically weakening and damaging it is to be forced to treat as
true something that is not true, with the effect strengthening the more
obviously false it is. Despite the fact that obviousness of the
pseudo-real distortion concentrates its demoralizing power,
pseudo-reality is only pseudo-real when the distortion is not
immediately and wholly transparent and also when it is sufficiently
widely socially accepted to become a socially constructed pseudo-truth.
Whether or not the distortion is apparent, however, the situation it
creates is most demoralizing for those who see through it because making
the distortions of a pseudo-reality apparent to those who do not
already see them is always exceptionally tedious and will be vigorously
resisted not only by adherents but by useful idiots.
Thus, third, by trading off normal people’s assumptions that
seemingly serious people care about what is true, they successfully
force normal people to verify aspects of the pseudo-reality even in the
act of denying it by getting the normal person to meet the ideologue
part way. This is the relevance of pseudo-reality being pseudo-real,
with greater plausibility strengthening the effect. That is, many
normal people will fail to realize the pseudo-reality is false because
they cannot see outside of the frame of normality that they charitably
extend to all people, whether normal or not....
