When I was a kid, my mother was friends with a woman who was not all that right in the head. It was never discussed, but every once in a while I’d hear my father make mention of the fact that she was a nut. Even as kids we got the sense that she was a bit of a kook. At some point she went back to college to study psychology and it became her obsession. I recall she left her husband to go find herself or some such nonsense.
Looking back, the thing that was the root cause of her nuttiness was her difficult relationship with herself. She was always defining herself in some way. By that I mean every conversation would feature a section where she told you what sort of person she was as it related to the topic. As a kid I always found that to be very odd so I guess it’s why it stuck in my head.
Later in life I ran into other people like this and started to figure it out. People who are quick to sign up for the latest trends or join the latest fads are searching for an identity they can embrace. They either don’t know themselves or they hate themselves, I’m torn on the idea, but they seek to adopt an identity that they think is imbued with qualities they lack naturally. My mother’s wacko friend got into psychology looking for a cure and instead she joined a cult.
Anyway, that came to mind when reading this link I saw posted by a commenter on Sailer’s site. The post about Baltimore tells me the writer does not have any black friends as that’s the sort of thing I see from white people who love black people from a great distance. As a minority surrounded by black people, I know racism is the least of their problems.
I decided to look at his bio and that’s when I was reminded of the crazy women of my youth. These types of unbalanced people invest a lot of time in projecting their desired identity. You can be sure that within five minutes of meeting this guy for the first time he will tell you he is an atheist. After that it will be feminism, anti-racism, science! and whatever else the Left is peddling at the moment.
I have a friend that is a moonbat and he displays these same qualities. He’s mad at me for mocking his cult so he sent me a long e-mail declaring me a non-person the other day. In it he praised himself for science!, rationalism and lack of ideological fervor. Reading the Statement of Principles from that site, I wonder if my moonbat friend is one of his readers.
These guys always pitch themselves as perfect logic machines that arrive at the exact same conclusions as every other Progressive by pure reason. My moonbat friend got mad after I kept pointing out that his journey of self-discovery looks exactly like the op-ed section of the NYTimes. For some reason it is vital to the well being of the moonbat to believe they discovered these truths independently.
What I’ve always found amusing about my moonbat friend is the great gap between what he thinks he knows and what he actually knows. It’s fun to call it the Dunning-Kruger effect, and that may be the case, but I also suspect the Interwebs plays some role. My moonbat friend, like many of them, has declared himself a climatologist, sending me links from science articles that I know he never read. He thinks because he can find it on Wiki, he knows it.
This passage is a good example:
I suspect what the Internet has done for these people is make it much easier for them to get conformation. My mother’s crazy friend had to head off to college to find people she could join in a search for a new identity. Today, she would just join a Facebook group and read the array of moonbat sites on-line. David Lee spends his time reading fever swamp sites.
well said walt, it also appears that the sub group you have identified are now a significant voting block ie democrats
I meet punks who have never heard of Subhumans, they are more interested in studded jackets and getting mad. I’ve met bikers who sport the beard and tattoos but couldn’t change the tyre on their Harley. Surfers who haven’t seen the ocean since before iPods existed. They can’t wait to tell you about how good it is to be part of their sub-culture though. Most moonbatism is a fear of being left out and being the one guy at the bar who doesn’t suffer any cognitive dissonance over what they are saying. Just cling onto a group and fake your way to approval. I dare say low self-esteem humans have been doing for millennia.And once they are “members” of the cult, they will not consider the opinions of those outside it.
I Google, therefore I am.
I always thought, with no concrete data to support my thought, that a significant portion of the people who do crazy things in a “to search for themselves” were emulating bad plots in chick flicks. Hollywood strikes again.
It’s probably the other way around or perhaps a self-reinforcing dynamic. Most writers are poor and a little nuts. They tend to hang around “interesting people” looking for material, but also because they just don’t fit in with suburban white-bread social groups. People write best about what they know so that begets a lot of interesting stories about fringe people on quests. It’s also why Hollywood loves movies about Hollywood.
“You can be sure that within five minutes of meeting this guy for the first time he will tell you he is an atheist.” Reminds me of ” How can you tell if someone is a vegan? –Don’t worry, they will tell you.” When discussing various topics with a moonbat I occasionally run into, I asked if he only got his information from MSNBC to which he exclaimed, where else? I was being sarcastic, he was being earnest. We no longer discourse.
I haven’t met too many doers in any discipline that trend towards moonbattery, except when they have suffered some great moral injury like Rawlings. I knew a Korean War vet who’d been shot up pretty badly and had a doer’s ability to make things work, but had been a hemp-smoking beatnik and had no patience for God, traditional mores, or authority.
I’d like to think that investing a great deal of effort in the present, just to see something work* in the future, requires a certain amount of faith and tends to make one realize that “we stand on the shoulders of giants.”
* I mean work in the most elemental sense here: some process or mechanism that produces useful outputs given some defined inputs… not a book or a speech at a conference.
From the dictionary of Ambrose Bierce-
Logic–The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.
I like the exclamation point after “science.” 🙂
Reminded me of Thomas Dolby.
Was “conformation” a typo? You may have coined a good one there, in context.
I noodled over that for a while this morning. On the one hand, I figured exactly no one would catch it. On the other, I love the use of it in this context. On the other other hand, it is not proper English, but this is a blog so it probably carries a short prison term.
I spotted it immediately, but it worked on a couple of levels that it had to be deliberate and left alone. The exclamation mark after science is wonderful. This blog is coming into a special place all of its own.
I am sure it has occurred to you too, but don’t you think there is enormous evidence that in many moonbats, there simply is no mind at all.
I’m always tempted to say it is low-average-IQ at work. I’m not sure about that as I have known some very intelligent people who hold totally insane beliefs. When I was a kid I played chess with a rocket scientist from NASA. He was an excellent player. He also held two advanced degrees in right answer subjects, physics and math. My strategy to beat him at chess was to bring up Nixon. The guy would get so wound up over the topic he would make all sorts of mistakes and beating him was just a matter of waiting.
My amateur theory is that belief, reason and self-awareness are not interdependent traits. That said, the people in my post are mediocre minds.