We’ve seen the same effect over and over again with people who comment on blogs (clears throat) both cultural and political, and even historical and that, no matter how often they’re proven wrong, keep coming back and stating the same thing they said in different words, as though that would make it true. They seem incapable of processing challenges, doubts, or even factual disproof of their charges.
Glamor. They’re under an enchantment. Something has affected them so hard, they can’t think, but can only repeat what they were told.
It’s not true, of course. Or not quite.
The enchantment of the “cool kids” is the glamor of social approbation and of opinions as positional goods.
People who have bought into an hierarchy of opinions, with some of the opinions “politically correct” no matter how factually wrong, have agreed to put themselves under the arbitrary power of others, and to subsume their reason and thought to them.
In other words, they have agreed not to think or see for themselves, because if they do they will be cast out of the “cool kids” and treated as pariahs or the enemy. And they’ve seen what happens to those (us) the calumnies, the big lies, the personal character destruction.
They’re so scared of it, that they’ll do anything and say anything and believe anything. Including changing their opinions on a dime, as the opinions of the “in crowd” change.
It’s hard to break enchantments. Particularly enchantments as ambitious as this, which attempts to make an entire culture see what isn’t there and ignore what is.
To cast it, it required tight control of mass media and gate keeping of culture, both powers that are fast running out on the gatekeepers, as the internet replaces their magic.
Some magic remains. Those organs of mass media that still have whatever power like their sources to have credentials: “editor at—” or even better “won prestigious award.”
Those awards, those positions are things to conjure with. Which is why the fight over the awards matters to the establishment, the “cool kids”. No matter how debased in the real world, those awards help them cast glamor over the unwary.
Which is why the screaming and the moaning, the gnashing of teeth and the politics of personal destruction over an award that has no monetary benefit.
Because it’s an aid to a glamor that’s fast fading.
Those involved would do well to keep their minds clear on two things: the instruments of the glamor are fading. You can’t keep them from fading, short of the sort of cataclysm that plunges the world into a medieval reenactment. And that too will take their instruments away.
Sarah Hoyt, “Glamor and Fairy Gold”, According to Hoyt, 2015-06-02.
December 21, 2016
QotD: The hidden hypnotic power of glamour
Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: Culture, Glamour, PoliticalCorrectness, PositionalGoods, SocialJustice — Nicholas @ 01:00
Comments Off on QotD: The hidden hypnotic power of glamour
No Comments
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
