As the United States moves closer to becoming Arrakis, its citizens will gradually come to think that “this is the way the world always was.” We regenerate ourselves in such short turnaround times that, hard to believe, a full generation was not alive on September 11, 2001. To them, what America became over the last two decades as a result of the terrorist attacks on that day is “what America is,” and it helps little that the country’s educational system refrains from including more information about what led to, occurred during, and evolved after those infamous plane crashes.


But I mention Arrakis, the site in Frank Herbert’s Dune that is the source of the drug Melange. What’s the connection? Am I on drugs and this the rambling of a hallucinatory man? No, actually. The connection lies in the next generation’s inevitable ignorance of how their society evolved (devolved?) to include the previously “abnormal” or “anomalous“ as “normal” and “regular.”


Marijuana Legalization


Was there a time before marijuana smoke wafted over the marketplace? Yes, but at this time about 55 million Americans use marijuana according to the National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics. * That’s almost 17% of the citizenry, and at least 45% have used the drug at least once (Remember Bill Clinton’s “But I didn’t inhale”?). We’re beyond the Cheech and Chong “stoner” era of Up in Smoke. Marijuana isn’t a drug of a few hippie outcasts. Imagine 55 million Americans. That number exceeds the populations of most countries. If they migrated to a single region, they could name it Stoner Land.


After the Cheech and Chong generation, this is where America is in 2023: According to Ben Lesser, writing for  DualDiagnosis.org “Marijuana is perhaps the substance that best represents the US switching its sentiment. In 1969, for example, only 12% of Americans supported legalization. According to Pew Research, this figure increased to 61% in 2017.” **


Although there are statistics that indicate some serious deleterious effects of marijuana use, the Administration of Padishah Emperor Biden intends to pursue a course that will make America a real-life Arrakis. And, ramifications for the general population be damned, most of the country will become marijuana users by secondary smoke. If as many as 1 in 6 Americans currently use the drug, the easy bet is that that proportion will increase, and it will increase more rapidly among those who have no sense of history—typically, the youngest generation. They will grow up on a planet suffused by marijuana and think little of it, just as generations before them grew up in a cloud of cigarette smoke, leaded gasoline fumes, and coal dust.


Parallels


Fashion is the easiest parallel to draw. When I was young, women and girls wore skirts to their ankles. That lengthening was sandwiched between the Roaring Twenties’ shorter skirts and the miniskirts of the late sixties and early seventies. Those who “came of age” during any of those three periods probably took skirt length as “normal.” Today, modesty has at least temporarily given way to partial to full nudity in public, and bikinis on the beach that reveal just about everything make the original bikinis look like Sister Mary Milk of Magnesia’s habit. As a particular fashion makes its way through various levels of culture, it generally becomes the “accepted fashion.” Young women, even girls, feel that strings are acceptable beachwear—and in some instances, “everywear.”


The same can be said for attitudes toward drug use. We know that all times are sandwiched between other, usually different times, so we know that the commonplace smell of marijuana in public places might be a temporary phenomenon, and one rejected by the next generation mimicking the overturning of the Eighteenth Amendment by the Twenty-First Amendment. Or not. In the interim there will lie a generation these next twenty years that grows up thinking that the status quo du jour has always been the way things are. As a kid growing up in a western Pennsylvanian town before gas furnaces, I thought that coal smoke and soot were “normal” and that all trees naturally had black bark, a color that rain washed off trees during the subsequent demise of home coal furnaces.


Bans


In the realization that some people just don’t want to breathe other people’s smoke and that secondary cigarette smoke can cause lung cancer, the country went through a period of banning smoking from buildings without infringing on the rights of cigarette smokers to fill their respiratory cavities with tars and nicotine outside or in designated areas in casinos. That is an ongoing practice that makes the area immediately outside external doors smell like the inside of a casino where people are free to smoke.


As a nonsmoker, I initiated a ban on smoking inside buildings on the university campus where I taught, a ban that did not ingratiate me with my smoking colleagues. But I remember the days of classrooms filled with blue smoke and with the need to clean that smoke from my clothes. I pressed the college administration with a petition to ban smoking in the building where I taught, and over the course of several ensuing years, the administrators effected a ban in all college buildings.


The draw of cigarette smoke is a powerful stimulus in the brains of smokers. Biologists were also housed in that initial smoke-free building—smoking biologists. You can imagine, even if you are a smoker, my surprise that I could not elicit signatures for the petition from smoking colleagues who, as biologists, would have been knowledgeable about cigarettes’ link to lung cancer and heart failure. Such is the draw of the draw. Smoking is as difficult a habit to break as any habit. “I won’t sign it,” one colleague said. “Where would people smoke?”


Smoke-free college classrooms, office buildings, and airplanes seem to be small victories for those who don’t smoke, but they do represent a problem that faces Americans with every new ingestible and breathable substance: How do we allow people the freedom to indulge and still maintain the freedom to refrain from indulging?


And then there’s that generation-thing I mentioned above. How is it that after years of court cases and research that centered on the nastiness of cigarette smoking, that so many young people still smoke. No history, of course. No cultural memory. Today’s marijuana smoker has no memory of the less potent form of the drug that Cheech and Chong smoked. And no effective education reaches this or the next generation eager for legalization: Those known 110 carcinogens, mutagens, and teratogens in marijuana smoke aren’t unlike those in tobacco smoke: both cause illness.


Freedom “to” and Freedom “from”


We could ask the question about freedom in the context of alcohol use. People in a free country drink, especially since the bar scene is ubiquitous and alcohol stores dot the streets of cities. Even late-comer Pennsylvania, long a stronghold of state control of alcohol, now allows grocery stores and six-pack shops to sell wine and beer (though hard liquor is still controlled in the Commonwealth’s “Wine and Spirit” stores run by state employees. Shouldn’t the same laxity in law that led to wine and beer sales in grocery stores be the driving force in marijuana sales and use, particularly since more car accidents result from drinking than from smoking? Isn’t alcohol of more serious concern?


And shouldn’t Americans have the right to abuse themselves? According to the NIH, these are the abusive effects of marijuana:

• altered senses (for example, seeing brighter colors)
• altered sense of time
• changes in mood
• impaired body movement
• difficulty with thinking and problem-solving
• impaired memory
• hallucinations (when taken in high doses)
• delusions (when taken in high doses)
• psychosis (risk is highest with regular use of high potency marijuana)

More specifically, the NIH says that long-term marijuana users, particularly those who began smoking it prior to the age of 18, have a greater risk of

• temporary hallucinations
• temporary paranoia
• worsening symptoms in patients with schizophrenia—a severe mental disorder with symptoms such as hallucinations, paranoia, and disorganized thinking ***

There is, of course, an association between alcohol and “impaired body movement,” “difficulty with thinking and problem-solving,” “altered senses,” and “changes in mood,” this last often related to anger and violence; thus, the almost daily news reports of a shooting outside or inside a local bar in just about every major city. Maybe the argument should be that given the choice between alcohol and marijuana, a society should choose the lesser of two evils—though labeling marijuana “an evil” probably doesn’t apply in the minds of its users.
​
So, now the question comes to “Given all the bad stuff associated with marijuana (or alcohol), should a society permit unbridled use?”

The Usual Arguments

I see two kinds of arguments for legalizing. A general argument that encompasses the right of anyone to smoke tobacco or pot, ingest paper clips, or wear a thong on a public beach. The other type is more specific: It encompasses rights with certain restrictions, smoking in a casino section labeled “Smoking” and not smoking in a casino section labeled “Nonsmoking”—similar to hotel room designations. The general argument leads to unbridled behavior. The specific type leads to cooperation and compromise.

But the many advocates who push for legalizing marijuana are the same people who pushed for masks and grocery store floor arrows, for six-foot separations, and for closures because they didn’t want to breathe someone else’s air. And if the objection to this criticism is that COVID kills and marijuana doesn’t, then those making the argument should ask whether or not what they argue is based on time. Is death and respiratory illness that appears in weeks different in kind from all those effects of marijuana that occur over longer periods? And doesn’t secondary marijuana smoke also have some rather immediate effects in getting nearby strangers high when they have no desire to get high?

Reality, Can’t Live with It; Can’t Live without It


Under some ideal legalization of marijuana, the state governments would be in control of production and sales. The “ideal,” however, is rarely manifest in the “real.” “Officials have calculated conservatively that there are 1,400 unlicensed [cannabis] shops in the five boroughs [of New York City].” **** Control of production and sales is thus, in light of all practical assessments, a myth that ranks with the complete control of gambling through state, national, and local lottery and casino betting. But I’ll bet you already know that.

Frank Herbert was insightful. America will soon become Arrakis. Almost everyone in the coming generations will think the haze of marijuana smoke that wafts over their hometown streets has always been there just as I as a little kid thought that all trees had black bark.




*https://drugabusestatistics.org/marijuana-addiction/
**https://dualdiagnosis.org/the-history-of-drug-abuse-and-how-its-changed/
***https://nida.nih.gov/publications/drugfacts/cannabis-marijuana
****https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/weed-is-legal-in-new-york-but-the-illegal-market-is-still-booming-heres-why

[BACKGROUND: When he was VP, the current POTUS used aliases for emails. “JRB Ware,” one of Biden’s  pseudonyms, is shortened here to JB Ware in keeping with the iambic lines]


The doddering President JB Ware,
When asked, does little more than stare.
He checks his watch in times of trouble;
The Media keeps him in a bubble.
His faltering climb upon a stair
Will we recall about old Ware.
Unless we think of all he’s done,
To change the victories we had won.
Think Taliban, now rich in bombs
We left behind; he was aplomb
That he was right and we were wrong;
This wisened fool has made them strong.
Or think cartels that now run wild
Abusing every helpless child
And selling drugs to kill us all;
Our people dead from fentanyl.
And then there’s oil that’s now quite pricey;
No bother, for his cone’s quite icy.
“What flavor do you have now, Joe?”
That is the depth the Press will go.
He’s spent his time upon the beach
As millions crossed each border breach.
No worry for a dozing brain
Old Joe will simply scowl again
If someone asks about the border
He'll say it’s good; it’s all in order.
But as he dodders through his reign
Most unaware of all the pain
That he has caused with high inflation
To young and old across the nation,
He offers more to those abroad:
“Come right across.” Then off he’ll nod.


And when a fire burned Maui down
He deigned to leave a Tahoe town.
“At least,” we’ll say, “he made the suff’ing
“Seem little worth his mindless mutt’ing
“About the blaze within his kitchen,
“The fire that almost hurt his kitten.”


We’ll all remember his first day,
When he shut Keystone all the way,
And put us on a spiraling track
To save the planet and turn us back
To beg the Saudis, “Give us some slack.
“We need your oil; we cannot drill;
“Just raise the price.” You know they will.
Yes, senile POTUS JB Ware,
Will wander round most unaware
Unless his staff give him some cards:
“You walk right in, sit down, with guards.”
“They’ll see you stand in the right place
“And usher you to save your face.
“And if the Press is there today,
“Then this is what we’ll have you say.
“America can be defined
“In one word that slipped my mind.
“You know the thing, no joke, I say.”
His sycophants will hold their breath
And ask if he speaks shibboleth.
They’ll look at one another now
To question handlers that did allow
His wand’ring mind to go off script,
Revealing that he's nondescript.
“But please dear POTUS stay on cue
“Especially since you have no clue.”


This doddering fool of an old man
Whose mentor once had led the Klan,
Now lectures us about our bias
And says he’s Catholic and is quite pious--
Except for that abortion stuff
“It’s just some cells.” He’s in a huff.
He claims he’s best at women’s rights
But makes them pee within men’s sights.
He says he's for the unions, too,
And even for the men in blue.
But actions are as we all know
The proof that Biden is all show
For crimes are up and wages down
I hate to say, “This guy’s a clown.”


I could go on, and maybe mention
The debt, e.g., and Taiwan tension.
The laptop, too, and hoax collusion,
And family money in profusion.
I could say more about his tales
And more about his gaffes and fails,
But telling all would make a book;
All one needs to do is look.


I’ll leave you this iambic verse
Your brain will mimic; so now you’re cursed.
Throughout today, you’ll think in rhyme
Because with me you spent some time.
But as you think of JB Ware
You’ll have some fun; of that I swear.

When one of my children was about four-years-old, I posed this question: "Are cars alive?"


The answer surprised me: “Yes.”
I asked why.
The reasoning seemed sound. “They move.”


They are, of course, auto-mobiles, the key part of the word being auto, “self.” And although we adults know that they are “not alive” though capable of “self propulsion,” we recognize the difference between their inorganic nature and our organic one and the necessity of a force of some kind to imbue an object with motion.


With regard to my question, note that I am not some Skinnerian experimenter, so my asking one child one question doesn’t constitute a “scientific inquiry” about the human brain and perception or about any system in the brain, such as the limbic system. But that question I posed decades ago now resurfaces in the context of an article by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, “evolutionary psychologists” at the University of California at Santa Barbara, * a book by Jean Baudrillard **, and my 11-month-old great granddaughter’s first trip to Disney World.


Not-So-Auto Automobiles: A Context for Our Simulated Lives


As children riding in cars, we gradually recognize that some human is in control of the movement. Eventually, we recognize the complexity of the processes involved in the context of adults taking the wheel. When we move from the back to the front seat, we observe hands on steering wheel, maybe on gear shift, and, if we can see over the transmission hump, feet working accelerator and brake, and in stick shifts, the clutch.

​
Wow! These hunks of metal require a great deal of human attention. Who thought to name them “automobiles” way back in the nineteenth century? Didn’t people also drive those first cars?


Maybe it’s from the perspective of the sidewalk that we learn about the difference between a hunk of metal moving itself voluntarily and a hunk of metal under the control or out of control of a human. Somehow we come to the realization that inorganic objects don’t move without some force moving them and that they don’t stop without a counter force or resistance, such as friction applied by road and brakes, uphill’s downhill pull of gravity, or a solid object like a utility pole, wall, or other car. And although motion is often a part of life, we learn to distinguish the reality of what it means to be alive from the concept of motion.


In this fledgling era of self-driving cars, the distinction between auto and controlled might be even more difficult to distinguish for a young mind. If I remember writing this in a couple of years, I might ask that same question about cars and life to my great granddaughter. Again, my asking will lead to a mere anecdote and not some research in evolutionary or developmental psychology worth publication.


But the answer that a three- or four-year old might be typical of how a young brain sees the world, particularly how it might associate moving with living or moving as a representative parameter of living. And it might also be indicative of how we come to relate objects to objects and objects to ideas as representations of “real things,” even representations of life.


Art as Representational of Idea


Sculptures and paintings represent the real world, don’t they? But what of a Jackson Pollock painting, such as “One: Number 31, 1950” hanging in MoMA? What does it represent? Or what of a Barbara Hepworth’s “Mother and Child” and “Pierced Form” sculptures with twists and holes? Are we looking at representations of ideas and feelings and not actual objects upon which we can stub a toe in the dark? Think of Picasso’s “Guernica,” called by some the best of anti-war art. What does it represent? The pain caused by war? If I go to the doctor with a pain, I might have to rate it on a scale from 1 to 10. But what if on some medical form I am asked to “paint” my pain? Should I hand in a picture of Picasso’s picture? Should I paint in light gray, gray, dark gray, charcoal, or  black, using shading to represent pain’s intensity?


Adults can comprehend “pain caused by war” as a “reality.” They can see the relationship between the art and “something real.” But that “seeing” the reality of a chaotic phenomenon like war requires either direct or indirect experience. I can read about destruction, injury, and death caused by a specific war, and I can see the connection between a work of art created to represent those products of war and the war that caused them. I understand that representation can occur between symbol and simulacrum and something I know in my “real world.” The Statue of Liberty doesn’t represent a woman; it represents liberty, an intangible, but nevertheless a “real” intangible.


Disney


Among the topics Baudrillard discusses in Simulacra and Simulation is Disneyland (read  Disney World, also). During my granddaughter’s first visit to Disney World, her mother carried her to see Minnie Mouse. As Minnie waved to the approaching child, the baby waved in return, and upon getting close, reached out to touch Minnie’s plastic nose. She obviously recognized Minnie from the Disney Channel’s programming, that recognition evidenced by her beginning to wave and point as she waited her turn.


But what did she think? I assume she will never remember the incident because our memories don’t go back to 11 months of age. At least, mine don’t, and I haven’t met anyone who can actually remember the specifics of the first year of life. But I do know that she appeared to recognize Minnie even though she had only seen her simulacrum on TV, a big TV, but nonetheless, a TV, and therefore a two-dimensional simulacrum. In Disney World she encountered a three-dimensional Minnie who moved and returned her “hello” wave. Was Minnie as “alive” for her as the car was for my talking toddler all those years ago?


My great granddaughter was in full recognition mode. And Minnie was “larger than life,” waving, and putting out a big white gloved three-fingered hand to touch this little human’s outstretched arms and pointing finger. The question I wish I could ask is one that adults could ask about monsters in the closet or under the bed. “Is Minnie Mouse alive?” has a corollary in a question that could be posed to almost any child who grows up in a home that has a Christmas tree and cookies laid out on Christmas Eve: “Is Santa real?” Had anyone asked me that question when I was four, I would have answered, “Yes.”


Art as Nonrepresentational


As Baudrillard points out, a Disney character like Minnie ISN’T A REPRESENTATION OF REALITY, unless one counts art that represents art as such. In fact, Disneyland and Disney World represent a world that doesn’t exist, but a world that seems very real to those who go to the parks. When one enters the parks, he encounters “a play of illusion and phantasms” (12). And simulated experiences abound: Mission Space gives one the feeling of weightlessness and space travel; Test Track gives one the feeling of race car driver; Soarin’ and Avatar’s Flight of Passage give one the feeling of flying over this world and over a fictional world. And throughout the parks there are rides that fool the brain by the subtle manipulation of moveable seating, lighting effects, and tracked cars. Disney World’s and Disneyland’s thrill rides are representations of extreme movements that we imagine occur in the “real world.” In Disney’s rides one can experience Einstein’s equivalence principle: Acceleration is not different from gravity. That begs a question from me: Is a model the equivalent to a real-world phenomenon? 


Can we assume that adults can distinguish representations of the “unreal” from the representations of the “real” just as we can distinguish between an object that moves and a living being that moves? Baudrillard wrote his book at the beginning of a new era of movie-making. In the 1980s the advent of computer generated imagery (CGI) led to representations that appear to be “real” and indistinguishable from actual actors. Directors can now film whole scenes knowing that CGI editors can eliminate certain realities like wires and microphones and insert “human figures” doing the impossible, as in Spiderman’s leaping from building to building. We adults know that such representations represent no real-world phenomena. But Baudrillard makes another point, and this one is a serious assault on our supposed “adult” view of the world.


“Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation” (12).


I’ll restate: We have put the cart before the horse. We have “models” of reality, and we interpret them as reality. And we are so convinced that our models are real that we prefer them over what is truly real. And now we live according to models imposed by those who control entertainment, the media, and government. If you doubt this, I invite you to revisit the history of the recent pandemic, when all of the above forced Americans and Europeans into obeying intrusive restrictions on individual freedom, like making people wear masks, getting vaccinated, closing their businesses, following arrows on the floors of grocery stores, and restricting their travel. Sold by the idea that they knew best, the “authorities” mandated their ideal rules—though many of them believed themselves to be above restriction (Thank you, Gov. Gavin Newsom for enjoying a meal at an expensive restaurant and Speaker Nancy Pelosi for getting your hair done at a salon while the rest of America hoped the bare grocery shelves would soon be refilled and the beauty salons would reopen for the ordinary citizen). The “authorities” and their “minions” had models of the ideal protective world to follow, and they made everyone save themselves follow those models. Baudrillard cites this form of control as “the invisible violence of security” (57).


Climate and Socialism Models on Autopilot


To date many climate predictions have proved to be as unreal as Minnie Mouse. Remember Al Gore’s and the IPCC’s predictions? Remember how sea level rise on an ice-free planet would inundate all coasts? Remember the associations with extinction as embodied in an “existential threat”? And every time some heat wave or cold spell, some hurricane or tornado, or some drought or flood occurs, the alarmists look to the models, the representations for confirmation that the models were the reality. Under the tyranny of models no amount of pointing out that the climate systems of the planet are more than a product of atmospheric composition dissuades the believers that they might be taking representation for reality, simulacrum for reality, just as no amount of pointing to the many failed models convinces any climate alarmist that his faith in those models is unwarranted.


And the same can be said for almost all modern peoples. Everyone everywhere can be programmed by models even when models model nothing real, such as the socialist model of economy, a model that time after time has proved to impoverish rather than uplift a people. But regardless of representations that reflect the lives of those who have lived under socialist, communist, or fascist societies, the Left and the Left-leaning cling to their models. They are on autopilot.


Like so many who see the Climate Minnie Mouse as real, modern democrats have accepted the wholesale disruption of fossil fuel use in America as a panacea in itself. In obedience to the model, they have chosen to impoverish the country while other countries power their economies. And among the disruptions they have willingly accepted is the abrupt transition to electric cars.


In the nineteenth century another term associated with automobiles was electromobile. Yes, some 124 years ago there were EVs. But the superiority in ease of use led to the internal combustion engine’s dominance. Not now, however. The model that says carbon dioxide will kill us all has generated an artificial demand for electric cars whose mileage doesn’t match that of gasoline powered cars, whose energy must come from some abundant source, and whose pollutants are every bit the equal of poisons that gasoline-powered cars empty into the environment. Can anyone say “lithium and heavy metals and rare earths in landfills and ground water”?


But Hollywood style, Disney style, CGI style, a large segment of population has taken the model of a booming fossil-fuel-free economy as the reality, and increasingly more politicians have accepted this simulacrum of a reality that really doesn’t exist. It’s a model of a model they believe is real, and to support the model they will use any particular, such as an individual storm or an unchallenged assertion that the Great Barrier Reef will soon die.


Control


Who is the driver? Or should I ask, “What is the driver?” Baudrillard discusses the Left’s obsession with the “evils” of capitalism (except when the Left profits). He writes that capitalism, which the Left sees as an evil, is, in fact, an unthinking “monstrous unprincipled enterprise, nothing more” (15). But true to their sense of superiority, the Leftists under the guise of being “the enlightened” seek to control capitalism by imposing constraints and bending its knee to their various social contracts. And as recent times attest, those controls amount to full control by the few over the many in the name of equity. It’s the runaway car of capitalism, wildly driving through the streets without their control that they fear and claim has a purpose to oppress, whereas in their responses, they seek total control under whatever cause of the day they support: BLM, Defund the Police, Equal Pay for All, Free College, Free Food, Free Houses, Free Whatever, all in the name of the ideal equity and all designed to destroy the unbridled freedoms associated with a chaotic capitalist society that generated the unprecedented wealth of the modern world. They want us all in a self-driving car of their design with a pre-programmed route and destination—and no questions, mind you.


And the modus operandi is always that “we know better” than you. “We have ‘science’ and economic theory to back us even though our science and our economic theory can’t be questioned or checked without serious consequences to the questioner, doubter, denier, and fact-checker. The models are everything. They are reality.” Minnie Mouse is real because she moves. Minnie is real because we say she is real. The ideal has become the real.


So, now American society is on autopilot, driven by models of models, driven by phantasmagorical ideas. We’re living in Disneyland and Disney World. We’re living in a CGI film. And the mainstream media, the embedded Leftists in the government, and the social media denizens have put themselves and the rest of us into a self-driving car over which we have no control and whose destination we can surmise won’t be as productive, healthful, or free as the American Dream that has been associated with abundant energy since advent of coal mining, the discovery of petroleum and natural gas reserves, and the inventions of the steam engine and the internal combustion engine. Instead, the model is some “ideal” that exists in the minds of those elites who seek to control us by taking our wealth and redistributing it as they see fit (e.g., $500 million thrown into Solyndra).


How Did We Let Them Fool Us?


Think reality TV. Or, rather, I should use an interrogative: Do you think reality TV with its producers, directors, editors, sound mixers, casting directors, publicists, advertisers, etc., is reality. Are the characters playing themselves or parodying themselves? What should we think when reality catches up with TV reality as it did with Todd and Julie Chrisley, both sentenced to prison after a long-running series about their perfect lives? Regardless of reality TV’s fictions, many fans of such shows wish to emulate those on the screen, little girls, for example, who want to be “just like Kim Kardashian." And that desire to emulate, to imitate, extends beyond getting plastic surgery. Disney now has biological men with mustaches playing Disney princesses for little girls wanting to be princesses. And that same blurring of reality has become an agenda of some educators and a cause célèbre that embroils people in unresolvable debate and episodes of targeted “cancellation” with accusations and labels like “homophobic,” “transphobic,” “xenophobic,” “supremacist,” and “anti-science.” When make-believe is reality, no previous forms of logical discourse apply. You accept a position you don’t believe, or you suffer ostracism.


Our models of models are often far removed from reality. In fact, like many Disney simulacra, they refer to nothing real. That’s a problem for us. Our brains, having evolved to face “the real” over hundreds of thousands of years to support survival of the species are now faced with “the unreal.” As Leda Cosmides and John Tooby write, “Modern environments differ importantly from ancestral ones, particularly when it comes to social behavior. We no longer live in small, face-to-face societies, in seminomadic [sic.] bands of 25–200 men, women, and children, many of whom [sic.] were close relatives. Yet our cognitive programs were designed for that social world.”


Now we all live in not only a more populous environment, but we also live in one that has removed “reality” from daily survival: I don’t farm or raise cattle, but I have eaten well; I don’t sleep with a fire at the cave entrance to ward off wolves and bears. My life and yours differ significantly from the lives of those nomadic and semi-nomadic people that gave rise to our brains. And the selection of men as hunters and women as gatherers no longer applies to modern urban life.


Just by living and reproducing in challenging environments over thousands of years, our hunter-gatherer ancestors unknowingly shaped our brains. They evolved our ability to adapt to a real environment. My brain and yours still harbor the adaptive nature we need to survive in a hostile world. We attend to an animal more readily than an inanimate object in our field of view, for example. Your brain still contains an ability to adapt to that hostile world filled with threatening real beasts from spiders and snakes to bears and lions.


For a contrast, think of how briefly a Disney World of models with and without referents has existed. After millions of years of brain evolution, most of them under “real” conditions, we have entered a relatively recent world of simulacra. Even if one goes back to the first sculptures of gargoyles or farther back to those of satyrs and centaurs which have no real referents, the time for evolutionary change in neural networks has been short by an order of magnitude when we look at 200,000 years or more of human evolution—and that doesn’t take into account the preceding millions of years of hominid evolution.


And to draw a short comparison: The cave art at Lascaux represented for the artists the actual objects and beings they tried to draw. Our art can be “abstract.” We don’t need physical or actual referents or antecedents; we make up our referents if we choose. We model models in the modern world of Disney-like lifestyle. We simulate simulacra.


Baudrillard notes that not far from the Lascaux Cave there now lies a replica cave, a museum that has copies of the Lascaux art. Yep, that’s what we’ve become. Who needs the original when we have the imitation? Las Vegas has an Eiffel Tower, a Statue of Liberty, a Pyramid; one half of EPCOT replicates an Aztec Pyramid, a bazaar in Morocco, the Eiffel Tower, and the bell tower in St. Mark’s Square in Venice among other models of buildings. Who needs the reality when we have the ideal? We have models with actual referents; we have museums filled with imitations, such as Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum’s and Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry’s “trip into a coal mine.” We don’t need the “real thing” because we have a model of it.


In this context of modeling models, we find the Leftists. They want us to live according to ideals that have nowhere and at no time been proved to be either useful or uplifting. They dream of a world without carbon dioxide when most life on the planet craves it. No doubt they would do away with photosynthesis if they did not also include a population of vegans. Certainly, they now want us to do away with cheap abundant energy unless we are Chinese or Indian or any other population attempting to acquire the same wealth and lifestyle Americans have represented for more than a century.


Who needs capitalism’s wealth when we have socialism’s ideals in spite of the latter’s history of impoverishment, enslavement, murder, and even genocide? If one judges by recent surveys (many online), he or she will find that the model of ideal socialism has attracted America’s youth. Yet that model is based on nothing “solid,” nothing historical.


Terrorism of the Mind


Toward the end of his book, Baudrillard addresses a key procedure adopted by those who would impose their models on the rest of us, a procedure that applies very well to climate alarmism. He writes, “If every strategy today is that of mental terror and of deterrence tied to the suspension and the eternal simulation of catastrophe, the only means of mitigating this scenario would be to make the catastrophe arrive, to produce or to reproduce a real catastrophe. To which nature is at times given…” (57).


Have you noticed that one of the chief mechanisms that Democrats use to control the populace is fear? He writes, “Closer to us, this is what terrorism is occupied with as well: making real, palpable violence surface in opposing tone invisible violence of security” (57). The Left imprisons by offering “security,” and it controls by suggesting that such security is threatened: “The Republicans want to take away your Social Security and your health care.” That’s exactly what happened during the lockdowns, the mandated vaccinations, and the masks. They offered security under terroristic threats. In following the Left’s mandates, the masses made themselves prisoners to the “ideal.”


And that’s what happens under socialism’s vehicle. The populace merely rides in a fully auto car which now has assumed a life of its own.


Takeaway


We are besieged by models of worlds that do not exist. The process started with the rise of civilization in the last ten millennia forcing us to adapt our brains to those models as “realities” of our world. The problem for us lies in the nature of brains that evolved more to survive real-world situations than to survive models of the real world, or models of models and models with no real-world referents. Add to this need to adapt to an unreal world the pressure imposed by tyrannical Leftists’ minds that seek to control through adherence to ideals, and one can see the dilemma we all face: Obey and accept the models, or disobey and risk retribution by those in control.


*Annual Review of Psychology, 2013 (January). Vol. 64:201-229. Evolutionary Psychology: New Perspectives on Cognition and Motivation. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.121208.131628  Online at https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev.psych.121208.131628  Accessed ten years after its publication, 2023 and still available for your perusal.


**Sheila Fabia Glaser, Translator, Simulacra and Simulation. 1994. Ann Arbor. University of Michigan Press. Original French version, 1981, published by Editions Galilee.

Editors love the persistent narrative. It makes their jobs easy. “MAGA people are white supremacists,” “Tea Party people are revolutionaries,” for example, or “more African-Americans than European-Americans are shot by police.” The many narratives of our times, both true and false, are easy to promulgate because most of the media’s minds are locked into them, like those who echo the climate change narrative, a story that ties almost anything—droughts, floods, fires, snowfall or lack thereof, hurricanes, migrations, wars, asteroids—to temperatures both warm and cold. There’s a danger in supporting any such narrative, and that lies in implanting false information that can, in some circumstances, result in unnecessary hardship for individuals and groups, real tragedies for real people, as in the bias against a particular race that makes the crazed injure or kill total strangers. No better example of the latter can be found than in Hitler’s blaming Jews for his country’s problems, a narrative supported by propagandist Joseph Goebbels.


A Famous Example from the Bard


Even Shakespeare addresses the impact of a narrative. In his eulogy for the slain Julius Caesar, his friend, Marc Antony keeps repeating the narrative spread by Brutus and his co-conspirators, those who assassinated Caesar. Caesar had to go because he was an ambitious man. You probably know its opening line “Friends, Romans, countrymen…”


    The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest–
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men–
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.


If you know the rest of the soliloquy, you know that Antony goes on to question the veracity of the claim of Caesar’s ambition by giving examples of his humility and compassion, but always ending each example with “Brutus is an honourable man.”


But I mention this not for anything profoundly political yet; l’ll do that in a bit. Rather I  just want to note the apparent need for many to “support the narrative” of the day. “Urban legends,” unsupported beliefs, and practices are the products. Take the many YouTube videos on diet and dietary supplements as examples. “Take berberine.” “Take taurine.” Take this or that. All such videos give advice driven through anecdotes. If the storyteller is believable, is honorable, then the story must bear some truth. Besides, isn’t the narrative on just about everyone’s lips? Certainly, so many people can’t be wrong.
But you can fool most of the people most of the time: Hitler’s Germany is a prime example.


Blue moon and Laptop


On the silly side of narrative support are the false assumptions that influence beliefs. In articles on August, 2023’s second full moon, some online news reports show a “blue” moon—literally, a blue moon. The term blue moon, grew from the chance rising of two full moons in a month, not an impossible occurrence given the length of, say, August with its 31 days, but difficult for a short month like February, since a lunar synodic month is 29 d 12 h 44 min and 2.9 s and the sidereal month is 27 d 7 h 43 min 11.6 s.


There’s some speculation that after some spectacular volcanic eruptions, like Tambora’s in 1815 and Krakatoa’s in 1883, the volcanic dust might have tinged the color of the rising moon, making the “different” color associated with a “blue moon” a perpetual expectation. Anyway, the point is that the people who have posted a photo of a colorized or filtered picture of the moon showing it as “blue” is germane to the opening paragraph above. Someone heard that such a second rising was called a “blue moon” and decided the best way to spread the news of this celestial phenomenon was by posting a picture of a blue moon. And especially since the most recent rise occurred when the moon was at perigee, its closest point to Earth, the story had an added draw. This past full moon was not just a “blue moon,” it was also a Super Moon, one that appears to be larger than average.


Someone says “blue,” and the color becomes the reality in the mind even though blue color contradicts experience. A rising “blue moon” could look orange with enough scattering atmospheric dust. The brain becomes primed for blue and confused by the reality. The confusion generates a story to fit our observation: “Maybe I’m not in the right place to see the blueness.” “Maybe it appears blue through some illusion that I don’t see, much like those pictures that subtly hide a figure, those ‘magic eye’ pictures of the 1990s.” * And because we seem to be inherently lazy in an age when so much information hits us daily, we look up, see the orange moon, undergo a momentary confusion, and then go off to other matters as more information suffuses our brains.


In that laziness we discover how we can continue the narratives of the day. Tie our laziness to confirmation bias and it’s easy to “see” how members of one political party or another can promulgate “the narrative” regardless of a later discovery of its falsity, regardless of what our actual observation tells us. “I was told it was a ‘blue moon,’ so there must be something I’m just not seeing. The fault lies with me so I shouldn’t let anyone know I see orange instead of blue.” Brutus said Caesar was ambitious. Fifty intelligence officers said the Hunter laptop was Russian disinformation.


Remember how Shakespeare continues Antony’s soliloquy? Two words become the narrative: “honourable” (British spelling) and “ambitious.”


    Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest–
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men–
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
​
Fifty intelligence officers. Fifty signed a letter stating that the laptop story was Russian disinformation. And “so are they all, all honorable men.” Why shouldn’t we believe their story, their claim. The President of the United States referred to them in answer to a debate question about Hunter’s laptop. Isn’t he “an honorable man”? Why shouldn’t we believe that a “blue moon” has to be blue?


The Other Narratives     


Someone says climate change, and the phenomenon becomes reality when the weather turns hotter than average, an average kept for a sketchy 150 years, only 70 years at best, and without ubiquitous coverage by calibrated instruments placed in zones unaffected by urban heat islands, pavement, or direct sunlight. The narrative will continue because now most of Earth’s population carries that narrative in their heads. Someone says Russian collusion or Russian laptop disinformation, and that becomes reality for most people because the counter-narrative never receives the same coverage and because infused belief is difficult to displace without expending energy—energy that has to be spread out over a complex day with a constant inundation of information.


So, there will be people who will with the announcement that a blue moon will rise, go out to look for a moon that appears to be blue. And when they see a yellowish or orangish moon, they will quizzically shake their heads and move on to the next narrative, never questioning in depth the detail of the misinformation. And when the next election rolls round, there will be those who carry the belief that the laptop story was Russian disinformation.

That inherent laziness of the mind is the reason that false narratives persist. It's only "once in a blue moon" that we spend the mental energy necessary to see the moon as it is, that is, to see the stories for what they are.


* Illusions that take a bit of concentration: https://graphicdesignblog.org/optical-illusion-pictures-hidden-figure.html ; and “magic eye” pictures of the 1990s: https://www.magiceye.com/stwkdisp.htm