Balanced Evaluations

Post #1312

Over at the Racket News substack, Matt Taibi just reported about how positivity might be considered a thoughtcrime in the USA — up to and including an extreme position where no amount of optimism could be considered to be allowed in civil discourse, because it supposedly detracts from the “lived experience” of others.

This is a tricky situation though, because of what is best called The Fog of War. Matt’s point is well-taken, and, in general, it should not be considered a thoughtcrime to tell people to look on the bright side of things. The downside of looking on the upside of things is not so bad that we ought to declare optimism outside of the bounds of discourse.

But imagine a scenario likened to a football game, where there are normally 11 members from each team on the playing field, opposing each other:

Counting up the X’s and the O’s reveals a level playing field. Now imagine a different situation where an individual has been targeted for political persecution, with just one O on the field, competing against eleven X’s. Each play ends the same way, the eleven X’s “dogpile” onto that only O on the field. It sucks to be that solitary O.

Now, if O complains to the people sitting in the stands, and those people then tell O to “suck it up” and to “quit whining about being a victim” then there is a disconnect. This is a time when “optimism” is not warranted. It is not proper to give an “optimism speech” to a solitary person being targeted for persecution by 11 others.

The situation requires a proportionate response. In those rare instances when a solitary person has ~11 people working against him full-time (when each of their 40-hour work-weeks has the single objective to harass O), then a speech about “Just look on the bright side!” falls short of reaching an appropriateness for the situation at hand.

Yes, optimism is good. It can be thought to be good more times than it is expected to be bad. But we currently live in a peculiar situation, sometimes called The Fog of War, written about by the likes of George Orwell:

"The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it."

and

“At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation. In the face of the Thought Police there is no other way.”

If the only possible way forward is “to extend the area of sanity little by little,” while a majority in society will be indoctrinated by the Powers-that-Be to hate both you and the products of your thought, then it is a marathon and not a sprint. A sprint is over in 10 seconds, a marathon takes much longer to accomplish. It involves prolonged pain.

If 10 million persons in your country are here not because they love your country, but precisely because they hate it, then there is enormous capacity to induce suffering on the patriots, making use of the 10 million persons willing to act in an extra-legal manner in order to accomplish the dark goal of ending what the USA stands for.

Like machine guns shot from fox-holes, the louder voices will inadvertantly give away their position, allowing themselves to be targeted by the hoard of invaders who have made it behind enemy lines. Telling those loud voices to “look on a bright side” can be inappropriate. It can mask what is really going on. They require a “battlefield sense.”

Someone on a battlefield taking fire from the enemy does not need a speech about “hope and positivity” — they need a shield from the bullets flying into their vicinity.