re: #348 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

When you are in possession of a “Higher Truth” then facts become malleable and fungible.

Fanatics—people who really believe something and rigidly operate within that framework—definitely exist, but many people who act out strong belief are in fact utterly full of shit. What you have to look at is the interaction, over time, between what they say they believe, what they do, and what they do when they’re caught between the former and the latter.

In the case of Gorka et al, I’d say the signs point to the second thing; they have no Higher Truth at all. They want power, and appropriate the thin exterior of belief—the buzzwords, the tropes, the rituals—to obtain power. Some are self-aware, and thus acting as cynics, some conflate narcissism and genuine belief…but many lack self-reflection and thus exist in a state of constant self-bullshitting. What the cynics and the bullshitters share is a recognize the utility of Higher Truth—big concepts like “God,” “family,” “freedom”—as a justification, but they in practice have no interest in actually defining those words, let alone generating a coherent worldview in which a big concept constrains their wants (or, more precisely, the emptiness inside them that requires a constant supply of new and varied forms of self-gratification).

(Also worth noting is that the line between cynicism, the vainglorious believers, and self-bullshitting is not a hard thing. Many people start off as one and then become the other.)

This is why—observing from the outside—there’s a fractal-like recursion across levels of magnification (from individuals to government to internationally) of exceptions to the inviolable rules that look like hypocrisy. They evoke big concepts and perform belief to the extent that they have utility in getting what they want. But any time a big concept might impose a constraint on their libertinism, they just ignore the big concept’s supposedly-solid rules, or claim the right to change the rules and declare the exceptions to the rules. This is also demonstrated in how often they argue—apply ideas in rhetoric—in bad faith.

What’s super fucked up is that fanatics, the cynics, and, erm, the full of shit go together really well, creating especially fucked-up social chimeras that channel their energy outwards, towards the common enemy…the rest of us human beings who stumble about trying to be good and trying to care about other people.