For some people in my life, there is no longer a space for persuasion. The voices that fill their heads have constructed a new reality which runs parallel to the real timeline. Dr. Emmett Brown explained this effectively in the image below.
I was raised in a milieu of conservative talk radio, 2000s-era Fox News, and a chorus of men (and they were almost exclusively men) who would explain "how things are" with folded arms and tut-tutting at the dangerous "liberals" who dared offer opposing perspectives. When you haven't heard any differently, why would you question this thinking?
I went to a conservative university (it is, despite some detractors who assert it is otherwise), where I began to grapple with questions such as my church's explicit support for California's Prop 8 to abolish same-sex marriage (even then I questioned whether it was the state's proper role to mandate how people should act) and whether the GOP would accept Mitt Romney as a presidential nominee (even now I had to look up and remember that he did indeed run in 2008). I immersed myself in a collection of blogs on Townhall.org, hoping that there I would find the intellectual fortitude that would backstop the beliefs that I had inherited.
I graduated. I left Provo, Utah and entered the lone and dreary world of Houston, TX. I met far more diverse characters there than I ever could have encountered in Utah County. I wanted to understand how people thought, why things were the way they were. I listened to local public radio. I read the books I had heard of at my university, but never had opportunity to as part of my curriculum. I spoke with coworkers. I learned that the world was more interesting and nuanced than what I had been led to believe. I don't think Alison and I would have worked out if I hadn't tamped down my natal politics (and abandon my designs on purchasing a handgun).
Yet I still held that strong national defense and responsible fiscal policy were important to national politics, and I didn't believe I was getting that from Barack Obama. I already had wished for Romney's success in his previous run, so of course I was going to support him again in 2012. The nomination battle was the ugliest stretch of politicking I'd seen to that point. The anti-Mormon bigotry was to be expected, although sorely disappointing. But there was abject stupidity (oops, Rick Perry) and sadism (let the uninsured die!) that I just couldn't tolerate. The seeds of doubt were laid in the Republican primary campaign of 2012, that blossomed into unadulterated loathing of the man who became the standard-bearer of the party in 2016.
And here we are again in 2024, like the world's stupidest game of Wheel of Fortune, landing on the peg straddling "Moral Bankruptcy" and "maybe things stay the same or get better slightly." And it's a coin-flip which side we're ultimately going to land. The Republican nominee for president advocates tariffs on foreign goods, withdrawing from NATO, and blaming Zelenskyy for the war in Ukraine (a topic which I can barely find the spiritual energy to speak about due to my outright depression at the significant anti-Ukrainian sentiment on the US right). The Democratic nominee for president advocates incentives for first-time homebuyers, a commitment to NATO, and supporting Ukraine in its struggle against invading Russian forces. Maybe it's a weird collection of issues, but these matter the most to me. Oh, and I guess I kind of a have a problem with the Republican nominee's loose grasp on how elections work.
All of this is just to describe the years-long process that I have followed and my relation to reality. I found that it is frighteningly easy to lose touch and burrow into a rabbit-hole of sclerotic ideology, repeating the same arguments over to like-minded people who nod along and reinforce your views. I'm not perfect by any means, but having been on "both sides of the fence," so to speak, I feel like my experience can be instructive.
What follows are a collection of quotes that touch on various aspects of our collective grasp of the world in which we live and our relationship to one another. Marty McFly found a way to collapse the timelines between 1985a and 1985b, but he had a time machine. All I have are my words...
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'...Now we have a new slogan on the part of the obscurantists: 'Don't trust the experts!'"
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