Each of us has his own “world.” It’s made up of all the connections we use throughout our day. We’re connected to our families by each word we pass, every facial expression we use to communicate. After that the average man is connected to the world by his phone. It is the nexus for all the calls, texts, e-mails, YouTube videos, news items, tweets, Amazon purchases, Google searches and on and on and on. After that we have the relationships we have with our job, with the various government entities and the various corporations that we employ to provide us with goods and services to live our lives as consumers. All of these connections give us a sense of being connected and grounded to the world around us.
But lately more and more of these connections have started to have a disorienting effect. The head of the United States, Joseph Biden just gave a speech that declared, specifically that people like you and me are dangerous extremists intent on destroying the United States. And a while ago the top health expert in the federal government told us that unless we shut down our country and hid in our homes wearing masks over our faces, we would all die of a horrible disease. And around the same time, we were told that mobs of rioters looting and burning down the commercial districts of our largest cities were completely within their rights to do exactly that. But if anyone tried to resist them with a weapon that would be prosecuted vigorously by law enforcement as assault.
If you read the news and especially if you read the mainstream media you might begin to believe that the whole world has gone insane and that we’ll be headed for a new dark age any day now. Without a doubt, the people running much of western civilization have lost touch with reality and are trying to push the world in an unhealthy direction. I won’t go through the whole litany but looking at some of the worst aspects; green energy initiatives, defund the police and transgender affirming treatments for minors, we can see that dangerous ideas have been mainstreamed by people with great power.
All of this can make it seem like there’s no place to turn for a breath of sanity. Part of the reason it feels so dire is that for most of our lives we never had to worry about most of these institutions becoming unhinged. Most of the United States was remarkably well run. And even the bureaucracies, although they might be incompetent, uncaring or inefficient were never working to destroy us. Now we can see they are. And in addition, private companies have jumped on board the project to speed up our destruction. Once you internalize that perspective it becomes easier to deal with the problems.
Once you change your point of view and assume that none of these organizations is necessarily on your side, it frees you up to begin evaluating your environment dispassionately and systematically. This goes for all of the relationships you have. From top down you can start with your country, state and town. And from bottom up you can look at where you buy your coffee, what news you read and where you spend your entertainment dollar. Each of these is a choice. And granted, good options are hard to find in a lot of categories. But that doesn’t excuse us from at least looking at the options and choosing the least bad choice. And if you put in the work, you might be surprised at the good options you never knew existed.
Some of them are easy. Looking at movies and tv just read the reviews and you can pretty easily find out what sounds like woke propaganda. Another tactic is to buy local. Small stores are more expensive than megastores. But if you know for a fact that the owner is one of us then that’s got to sweeten the deal quite a lot and might put a small premium in price in perspective. And get involved in your local community. That can pay enormous dividends and will make you more aware of problems that may be coming your way. And finally, it extends all the way up to deciding what state or even country you should live in. It may seem extreme to contemplate such a huge change. But if you look at it dispassionately, it might be the best move you’ll ever make.