Typically, I stay away from most political matters on this site, save, of course, my comments about two claims running rampant through media and politics: Claims that socialism is a panacea and claims that climates should not change. But I’m driven to share something the famous American essayist H. L. Mencken wrote in the 1930s that seems applicable to those two claims.
If Mencken lived in the twentieth-first century, he would lose every public job he once had; his books and essays would be anathema on the grounds that they offended just about every group. He was not given to political correctness. He was in some ways anti-Semitic and racist, but he argued that the Jews persecuted in Germany should be welcome refugees in America, and he did say that every race has its outstanding representatives. Apparently, he didn’t trust people like me, one of the commoners who believes citizens should vote and that individuals, whoever they are, have both potential and talent. I think he would have considered a commoner like me to be somewhat moronic, a simpleton among simpletons. Yes, Mencken was a bit of a snobbish elitist, but he could turn a phrase, and his essays, regardless of his Nietzschean affinities, sometimes hit the nail on the head. One of those times is, I think, now.
Here’s what Mencken wrote: “The average American…does not really prefer the true to the false; he prefers the false to the true, for the false is always more comforting.” * He then writes that truth is “uncomfortable.” According to H. L., what we crave is “solace, relief, assurance.”
So, how do we satisfy the craving for solace, relief, and assurance? To paraphrase him—and extrapolate—we seek satisfaction in theology, poetry or music, alcoholism, drugs, pseudo-science, and “such quackeries as communism, fascism, Nazi-ism, and the New Deal.” (135) He writes that those quackeries are “foolish on their faces, and they never work, but nevertheless there is a powerful soothing in them, and so, at least transiently, they help their converts to bear the unbearable.” (Ibid.) Now here’s where Mencken would lump us into a crowd of simpletons:
“…when the common will to believe and be fooled is whipped up by a preliminary sounding of fire-alarms…and every evil is magnified to cosmic dimensions, and every fear pushed on to paranoia…then the great masses of confiding anthropoids are willing to believe anything, and to be led anywhere. The present becomes completely intolerable to them, and the future looks as sinister as the entrance to a coal-mine. Show them the gates of Utopia, and though the turnstile be built like a rat-trap and the gilt be shabby and the plaster breaking through, they will swarm in with loud hosannahs, seeing glories that are not there and hoping hopes that are hollow and vain.” (136)
Although I’m not a Mencken fan, I have to say that he appears to be onto an analysis of our times. I added above three solaces that Mencken didn’t mention: Music, drugs, and pseudo-science. I reason that music provides another form of poetry and that drugs prove to be a substitute for alcohol. As for pseudo-science, I'll simply refer you to multiple studies that indicate the limited understanding of Earth history that characterizes the minds of most people. Mencken seems particularly set against seeking solace in religion, poetry, and alcohol, but he lived in a time before tens of thousands of Americans died from opioid overdoses each year. If he were writing today, I feel certain he would include music and drugs, and he would also include addiction to social media and entertainment media. Mencken wouldn’t suffer us very well or without acerbic criticism.
And maybe Americans have always sought solaces that were comforting regardless of their relationship to the Truth. We can see today, however, the power of the few to lead masses of people almost instantaneously through social media and main-stream media. Once we adopt a point of view, we find ourselves confirming it by steeping like a tea bag in the words of those with whom we have sided, regardless of what is true. If a belief is comfortable, we wear it.
So, we find many who now flock to the solace of socialism in spite of the misery it has wrought over the past century. And we find those who know little of Earth’s history easy to lead into a belief that climates should be unchanging, regardless of the major change all climates underwent long before humans even knew what fossil fuels are. And all who accept what the socialists and climate doomsayers advocate, continue to do so without critically examining the histories of both socialism and climate.
Interestingly, Mencken, who seems in his statements to be opposed to alcoholism, was not opposed to an occasional drink, as he writes of “dilute ethyl-alcohol.” He says that all of us are bewildered by the enigmas of life and death that drive us to seek solace and comfort. But he also says that “the demand for these invaluable anodynes tends to diminish…with the progress of knowledge.” (137)
Anodynes come in those two forms: 1) something tangible like drink or drugs and 2) something intangible like a comforting belief. Knowledge reduces our reliance on both such tangibles and intangibles. Look at the anodynes of your society. Think of them the next time you’re given to panic over your condition or your society’s condition, and ask yourself whether or not you are seeking comfort in the hollow and vain or in the truth.
*Mencken, H. L., “The New Deal Mentality,” originally published in The American Mercury in 1936 and reprinted in The Anxious Years: America in the 1930s, Ed. By Louis Filler, New York, Capricorn Books, 1964, 126-140.
If Mencken lived in the twentieth-first century, he would lose every public job he once had; his books and essays would be anathema on the grounds that they offended just about every group. He was not given to political correctness. He was in some ways anti-Semitic and racist, but he argued that the Jews persecuted in Germany should be welcome refugees in America, and he did say that every race has its outstanding representatives. Apparently, he didn’t trust people like me, one of the commoners who believes citizens should vote and that individuals, whoever they are, have both potential and talent. I think he would have considered a commoner like me to be somewhat moronic, a simpleton among simpletons. Yes, Mencken was a bit of a snobbish elitist, but he could turn a phrase, and his essays, regardless of his Nietzschean affinities, sometimes hit the nail on the head. One of those times is, I think, now.
Here’s what Mencken wrote: “The average American…does not really prefer the true to the false; he prefers the false to the true, for the false is always more comforting.” * He then writes that truth is “uncomfortable.” According to H. L., what we crave is “solace, relief, assurance.”
So, how do we satisfy the craving for solace, relief, and assurance? To paraphrase him—and extrapolate—we seek satisfaction in theology, poetry or music, alcoholism, drugs, pseudo-science, and “such quackeries as communism, fascism, Nazi-ism, and the New Deal.” (135) He writes that those quackeries are “foolish on their faces, and they never work, but nevertheless there is a powerful soothing in them, and so, at least transiently, they help their converts to bear the unbearable.” (Ibid.) Now here’s where Mencken would lump us into a crowd of simpletons:
“…when the common will to believe and be fooled is whipped up by a preliminary sounding of fire-alarms…and every evil is magnified to cosmic dimensions, and every fear pushed on to paranoia…then the great masses of confiding anthropoids are willing to believe anything, and to be led anywhere. The present becomes completely intolerable to them, and the future looks as sinister as the entrance to a coal-mine. Show them the gates of Utopia, and though the turnstile be built like a rat-trap and the gilt be shabby and the plaster breaking through, they will swarm in with loud hosannahs, seeing glories that are not there and hoping hopes that are hollow and vain.” (136)
Although I’m not a Mencken fan, I have to say that he appears to be onto an analysis of our times. I added above three solaces that Mencken didn’t mention: Music, drugs, and pseudo-science. I reason that music provides another form of poetry and that drugs prove to be a substitute for alcohol. As for pseudo-science, I'll simply refer you to multiple studies that indicate the limited understanding of Earth history that characterizes the minds of most people. Mencken seems particularly set against seeking solace in religion, poetry, and alcohol, but he lived in a time before tens of thousands of Americans died from opioid overdoses each year. If he were writing today, I feel certain he would include music and drugs, and he would also include addiction to social media and entertainment media. Mencken wouldn’t suffer us very well or without acerbic criticism.
And maybe Americans have always sought solaces that were comforting regardless of their relationship to the Truth. We can see today, however, the power of the few to lead masses of people almost instantaneously through social media and main-stream media. Once we adopt a point of view, we find ourselves confirming it by steeping like a tea bag in the words of those with whom we have sided, regardless of what is true. If a belief is comfortable, we wear it.
So, we find many who now flock to the solace of socialism in spite of the misery it has wrought over the past century. And we find those who know little of Earth’s history easy to lead into a belief that climates should be unchanging, regardless of the major change all climates underwent long before humans even knew what fossil fuels are. And all who accept what the socialists and climate doomsayers advocate, continue to do so without critically examining the histories of both socialism and climate.
Interestingly, Mencken, who seems in his statements to be opposed to alcoholism, was not opposed to an occasional drink, as he writes of “dilute ethyl-alcohol.” He says that all of us are bewildered by the enigmas of life and death that drive us to seek solace and comfort. But he also says that “the demand for these invaluable anodynes tends to diminish…with the progress of knowledge.” (137)
Anodynes come in those two forms: 1) something tangible like drink or drugs and 2) something intangible like a comforting belief. Knowledge reduces our reliance on both such tangibles and intangibles. Look at the anodynes of your society. Think of them the next time you’re given to panic over your condition or your society’s condition, and ask yourself whether or not you are seeking comfort in the hollow and vain or in the truth.
*Mencken, H. L., “The New Deal Mentality,” originally published in The American Mercury in 1936 and reprinted in The Anxious Years: America in the 1930s, Ed. By Louis Filler, New York, Capricorn Books, 1964, 126-140.
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