On MAGA Indifference: A Reply to Daniel Pinchbeck
Daniel Pinchbeck asks his MAGA-supporting followers why they are indifferent to facts and arguments, and why they see everything in black and white. I have some ideas.
It's no good closing your eyes, you must leave them open in the dark, that is my opinion. I am not speaking of sleep, I am speaking of what I believe is called waking.
Samuel Beckett
Nobodaddy is an artifact of having once been a lifeform known as a baby
Timothy Morton, Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology
Earlier today, Daniel Pinchbeck, a commentator on the psychedelic counterculture, told his followers:
One thing I am finding notable… is the complete denial or acceptance of ambiguity or complexity in how they think… If I bring up a well-researched essay from The Atlantic or The New Yorker, I receive howls of derision… about how these magazines… have no value whatsoever… This also seems to be part of the total rejection of critical thought I am seeing in people as they become fixated, mind-warped, by the ‘outrage machine’ of social media… I would love to discuss with any MAGA… supporters how their attempt to think seems to have become constrained by a need for simple dualisms and how this doesn't allow us to critically evaluate or discern what's happening.
Daniel Pinchbeck, Facebook 2025-02-08
The answer consists of the fact that the MAGA crowd cannot accept clearly-argued, well-researched and documented criticisms, since the whole point of MAGA is to raise its supporters above criticism. They are sick of being criticised – criticised for being racists and homophobes, for being white (as they see it), for their feelings of hostility towards trans kids, for not listening to women talking about their bodies... whatever. There is no point in engaging with possibly complex arguments which, presumably, will just try to make them FEEL BAD all over again.
Instead, they repeat the meta-arguments they’ve absorbed – there are only a few, trivially easy to learn, they are really unholy fascist mudras, postures to ward off evil rather than arguments as such – about how anyone who criticises them is on the dark side, how mysterious forces on that dark side are manipulating events, how all media that dares criticise them is coming from the dark side, and how Trump is secretly fighting to undo the dark side: facts and arguments, complexities and dialectics, have nothing to do with it.
Regarding this terrible 'darkness', it is to do with black people, even if MAGAs enemies are often also queers, Jewish financiers, Colombian gangs, the International Court of Human Rights, the disadvantaged, do-gooders, health-workers, the defenceless, climate scientists.... behind it all is a 'fear of the dark'.
Behind it all is white supremacism.
They are sick of arguments and facts from 'so-called experts' because the result of all that expertise came in years ago, and it did not go in their favour. On every matter that counts, they are hugely, demonstrably, wrong. They do not care. At this point in the game, the MAGA way is to overturn the tables, knocking the pieces to the floor, trash the room and claim victory... screaming all the while about having been betrayed, cheated and let down by anyone who ever criticised them by opposing their prejudices in any way. It makes them FEEL BAD.
All of this is fuelled by their terror of white privilege coming to an end. Blame Barack Obama - he really scared them.
Fuck!... a change is gonna come!
This crisis of their cosmically-inflated masculinity is existential. They respond by refusing to engage. They do not want to know any more. They boast about this, of 'owning the libs' by refusing to engage meaningfully and ignoring truth, empathy and compassion. Instead, they pose as the aggrieved and inflate reason to fantastic proportions with their conspiracy theories (as Chesterton noted, people often suffer not from too little reason but too much); Urizenic reason in the service of angry Nobodaddy.
It's all about (narcissistically) defending a (narcissistic) self-image. They are currently enacting the civilisational equivalent of a narcissistic rage. Their self-image was dented by their realisation that they too are just people, like those they despise, and thus that ultimately they too may be 'replaced' (as they see it), just as they sought to replace others. It turns out they are not special after all. That is enraging. And that is why they see everything ‘in black and white’.
The USA has NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder) which in politics is called fascism, and where fascism perfects the indifference of capitalism toward both reason and suffering. Capitalism is their AI system, and their tiny diodes are lit spontaneously by aligning themselves with power, like iron filings around a magnet.
