Remember the 1980 movie, “Altered States”?
In it, Edward Jessup, a Columbia University psychopathologist, is studying schizophrenia, and begins to think that "our other states of consciousness are as real as our waking states." His research continues using a sensory deprivation chamber until at the end of the movie, he not longer needs a tank to be transported to his alternate reality. He even has the power to transport his love interest, Emily, into his reality simply by touch and seeing her enveloped in that transformation shocks him back to his human reality, bringing Emily back as well.
The problem the Democrats face isn't an easy one to solve, especially in the near term.
Edward Jessup came back because he loved another. The Democrats can’t do that because they only love themselves. They have no trigger.
It is more than electoral defeat, more than messaging – which they think are the problem.
The problem is even more serious than being outed as serial liars.
Of course, the reality is that they have always been serial liars, mostly because lies don't exist for progressive postmodernists who never believed in truth in the first place. For them, there is only the "Revolutionary Truth" - which are just lies that support the glorious revolution.
This time, tired of having their agenda set back every so often and to satisfy their desire for permanent power, they had to find a guaranteed way to win elections without destroying the Constitution completely (that comes later, after they have fully captured everything and created a fear of punishment for disagreement).
So, they decided to craft a version of reality that fit their needs in every way. It had to cast America and its founding as uniquely evil, its people as racists, and the Republicans as white supremacists. They were brilliant in doing that by redefining every single American tradition, every single common-sense reaction, and due to the pandemic, even redefining math and science in racist terms.
It worked.
But perhaps all too well.
They began to drink their own Kool-Aid. They came to believe their own lies – and again, from a postmodernist view, if you really feel strongly about “your truth” it IS real. They lost the ability to see the world in anything other than their terms, a world where a president could strangle America’s energy resources, then go out tree days from midterm elections, say the quiet part out loud that he was going to further fire the kill shot by shutting down all the coal-fired power plants, thinking that was a good idea.
Now, that they have seen the reality they created, it can’t be unseen, and they are trapped in it. For them, the panic isn’t panic, it is real threat. Their fear is real, so real that they are acting on it. This is literally about the survival of their world, and by extension, themselves, and in the battle for survival, there are no crimes.
This won’t go away soon, nor will it go away easy. Shocking a delusional person out of their delusion is dangerous – but not as dangerous as letting the delusion continue until the person’s mind is completely lost.
This is one of history’s most important examples of mass psychosis – more even than the bouts of St. Vitus Dance that broke out across medieval Europe.
And yet, that’s where we are.