Those who have tried to engage with hardcore civic nationalists or evangelical patriots will have experienced a strange phenomenon where they appear to be strangely blind to certain topics. For example, the story about the black seeking out and throwing a white child over a third floor railing at the Mall of America. These super-normies respond to it by blaming communism or democrats. It’s as if the facts cause their code to reboot and they start repeating whatever they saw on Sean Hannity the prior evening.

If you press them on the obvious racial angle, they get flustered and either change the subject or break into a different chant about how America is an idea. It’s an odd thing that suggests these people have some sort of shunt in their consciousness that prevents them from seeing certain aspects of life. It’s not just a matter of self-censorship in order to avoid taboo subjects. Something seems to have been altered in their brains that prevents them from seeing anything that contradicts the colorblind fantasy.

It is an important fact for dissidents to accept. A lifetime of conditioning, perhaps generations of conditioning, have made it impossible for some people to ever look up and see the great divide, much less cross over to this side. Part of it is the normal desire of most humans to belong to the pack. To stand outside the main, with regards to biology, is a dangerous place. It is a form of self-exile. Naturally, most people would not choose it, even if it meant degrading themselves by repeating what they know to be untrue.

For others, the blank slate, egalitarian creed is a religion now. It is what defines them, which is why Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson can have cult-like followings. There’s plenty of evidence that both know what they are telling their followers is false, but it provides them with a lifestyle they believe they deserve. That and the normal confirmation that comes from getting famous and building an audience begins to work its magic on them as well. They are now getting high off their own supply.

Outside of the grifters and hard cases, the inability to break free from the conditioning is something you see all over the legacy Right. Browse through the fashionably intellectual site Quillette and you see the same phenomenon. If you want to get a sense of what it was like for alchemists trying to turn base metals into gold, read some of the people from the intellectual dark web. They are working their fingers raw trying to create an alternative to Progressivism that accepts all of the left-wing assumptions about the human condition.

This post is representative. The writer starts off by analyzing a report from a left-wing outfit calling itself Data and Society. The writer, someone calling xerself Terry Newman, is baffled by the errors, but unable to come to the obvious conclusion that those errors are intentional. In other words, the fact that the Left does not argue in good faith and is willing to lie in order to further an agenda is beyond her event horizon. Read through her post and you keep waiting for her to notice the obvious, but that never happens.

Instead, just as one would expect her to exclaim, “Wait a second. I think these people are lying and doing so deliberately”, she veers off into some weird masturbatory guilt trip about how all sides are guilty of self-delusion. Her own thesis adviser calls her immoral for liking Joe Rogan and she cannot bring herself to return the favor. Instead, she apologizes for him and then spends the rest of the post trying to explain why these otherwise good people keep trying to destroy people like her. Battered women have more self-regard.

This inability to cope with reality shows up throughout the post as she, on the one hand, attempts to defend free expression, but then enthusiastically agrees that people like Richard Spencer are dangerous and should be silenced. Again, this is the bizarre habit of these people of fully embracing the principles of the Left, while trying to achieve non-liberal or conservative ends. She is like an old alchemist driven mad trying to turn lead into gold, not understanding that the rules in which she is working prevent such a thing.

The question, of course, is whether a site like Quillette is just a bunch of people blind to the reality of this life or is it a golden cage designed to keep people from waking up to reality. Mx. Newman gets published and gets the narcotic rush that comes from it, rather than peering out from the bars into the surrounding reality. These sites function as islands, tempting the intellectually curious to come along and partake of the lotus fruit. Rather than confront the harsh seas of reality, they can remain in the stupor of universal equality.

It’s why all successful revolutions offer an alternative to these islands, rather than simply an assault on them. Given the choice between the soothing answers of the lotus eaters and some hair on fire fanatic, most people will choose the former. In a way, the revolutionary is like a drug dealer, showing up with a better product. The choice on offer is not between reality and fantasy, but between an old fantasy that no longer works and new fantasy than has the kick the addict recalls from the beginning.