What the Lonely Crowd predicted decades ago, is the Matrix. A mindless consumption Borg existing solely by and for maximized corporate profit. The industrial-scale extraction of humanity locked in a recursively imploding rat race to nowhere. There is no winner in a rat race, there are only spent rats gamed continuously by serial con men...
Which of these two echo chambers is exacting the greatest mental toll? Hint: It's the one that is continually attempting to explain away self-inflicted change, by way of returning to the greatness of the cannibalized past. The recursively imploding fantasy known as "MAGA".
The formal term for this fatigue is "cognitive dissonance":
"the mental discomfort (psychological stress) experienced by a person who simultaneously holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values"
The patently Idiocratic term "post-truth" gets bandied about freely now as if it's a legitimate concept. This human-arranged fake reality as an alternative to actual reality. The very term itself is an indictment of society and self-evidence of ubiquitous denial. Only a society in denial would deny that it's in denial by inventing such a specious concept.
The Lonely Crowd predicted the rise of the ubiquitous corporate sociopath. A cabal of Mad Men on a mission to corral society by dumbing down the populace to the level of a brick through relentless advertising and paid false information. Generating a society of externally gratified automatons who can never be gratified. Only an outer-directed society of aspirational Groupthink dunces floating in an unanchored sea of denihilism could get conned over and over again by the exact same psychopaths.
There are two ways of getting a point across: Appeal to emotion versus appeal to logic. Appeal to emotion is a form of manipulation deliberately intended to overlook fact. Storytelling is the delivery method by which appeal to emotion is deployed. Human beings are ruled by emotion - more so today than ever before. Successive rounds of corporate Shock Doctrine have inflicted widespread economic PTSD, which has left the populace susceptible to appeals by sociopaths to overlook fact. The mind is limited by what it can sanely conceive. It protects itself by refuting the unthinkable. Much of today's inconvenient reality is assiduously ignored because it's too traumatizing to face - even those realities that are manifestly ubiquitous, such as the surge in mass shootings and suicides. Therefore, story-tellers predominate, as fact-checkers are of no consequence.
Trump is an inveterate storyteller whose stories happen to be void of truth. He calls this "truthful hyperbole". Whereas by design it's factless hyperbole. He is the logical conclusion of a society ruled by sociopaths - a feckless dilettante effortlessly conning the naive with boundless fiction, unconstrained by the limitations of reality. A Great White shark swimming in a post-truth world, swallowing whole any opponent foolish enough to appeal to the unappealing truth.
Trump is this era's Bernie Madoff - but on a national scale. When the bubble burst in 2008 it was revealed that Madoff had been a fraud for decades. Investors who trusted him got wiped out. The same will happen this time.
Appeals to emotion override reality until the day that reality finally crashes through the Matrix like an unforeseen tidal wave. Wall Street calls this a Black Swan event - a term invented by Nassim Taleb, to absolve unbounded greed.
When the walls are breached, the delusion is once again destroyed like Zion in the Matrix. Unfortunately, recursive delusion spun by ever-greater degenerates, has finite limits which now hover at the zero bound. Since 2008, we discovered those limits and bounced off of them twice compliments of yeoman Central Bank sponsored delusion. This time, due to record levels of debt attended by an all-encompassing asset bubble, we break through.
Bringing the long-needed cleansing of sociopaths that should have occurred last time.
"2016's level of debt is 12 percentage points steeper than the last historic high seen in 2009"
2 + 2 = Bueller?
