The Irrational Goes Mainstream

One of the more amusing features of the current era has been the emergence of witches as leaders of the “resistance” against Trump. Don’t laugh, these witches are not just resisting Trump they’re also putting hexes on the patriarchy and (of course) on Nazis. The New York Times is quite excited by all this.

In fact this kind of nuttiness has been with us for a long time. Superficially it seemed like the most crazy manifestations of the 60s/70s counterculture (astrology, witchcraft, silly eastern cults, psychoanalytic claptrap) were more or less swamped by the materialism, the hedonism and the naked greed of the 80s. But that’s not actually what happened. The really crazy stuff didn’t disappear. It infiltrated the mainstream. The craziness, the degeneracy, the toxic feminism, the homosexual agenda, the belief in occultism and psychic nonsense – all the seriously bad ideas of the counterculture became part of the mainstream.

The 1960s/70s counterculture did not disappear. It became the mainstream. What passes for respectable conservative mainstream culture today would have shocked and sickened ordinary people in the 1950s.

And the infiltration of diseased and depraved ideas into the mainstream has never stopped and it is continuing today.

The craziness became less obvious and less flamboyant compared to the 70s but when you scratch beneath the surface you’ll find that apparently perfectly normal people believe things that would have been considered insane prior to the 1960s. What was once  fringe is now firmly mainstream.

And as for the conservative backlash, it never happened and it doesn’t look like happening. The 80s did not represent a conservative backlash – it was simply crass materialism, hedonism and consumerism turned into a cult. There was no actual reversal of the follies of the 60s and 70s.

And included in this package of bad ideas and silly beliefs that have been mainstreamed are some seriously irrational beliefs. There is of course the very firm belief that feelings are more important than facts. But it goes way beyond that. Magical thinking is well entrenched in our society, particularly in the lunatic fringe of the feminist movement. Of course feminists in the 70s believed in all sorts of quasi-spiritual absolute nonsense like homeopathy, energy fields, magical female energies, etc. And the craziness imbedded itself in society. Not everybody believes such silliness but a disturbing number of people do. The widespread belief in conspiracy theories (unfortunately perhaps even more prevalent among right-wingers) is another symptom of the fundamentally irrational nature of our society.

The feminist witch thing is so loopy that it is tempting to think that such absurdities can simply be laughed off, but it’s simply a particularly extravagant manifestation of a widespread cult of unreason which afflicts the whole of our society (and is found in slightly different forms among both conservatives and liberals).

The 70s wasn’t just a phase our society was going through. It marked a permanent change, an irreversible turn towards irrationality and emotion, from which we may not recover (barring some ind of cataclysm).