Induced Schizophrenia

yesterday's truth is today's utterly insane conspiracy theory

You’re born in Smalltown, and then you spend your whole life there: school, adolescence, adulthood, work, marriage, raising your own children. Fifty years, let’s say, all in the same place. And through all of it, the central street through the middle of town has been Main Street. It runs through the business district, past the big park and city hall and the fire station, out to the edge of town. Your first job was in a store on Main Street, and you got married in the church on Main Street, and you remember racing down Main Street to the emergency room the day your youngest child had that horrible fall.

You wake up one morning and find that all the street signs on Main Street say MAPLE AVENUE. And you ask your family and the neighbors and your friends at work when they changed the street signs — did we even know they were going to do that? Was there a thing at the city council that I missed?

They look bothered, all of them, and much more than the moment seems to justify. “What are you talking about?” they ask, and “What do you mean?” It’s always been Maple Avenue. There’s never been a Main Street, dude, are you okay?

You say that of course there’s a Main Street — I grew up playing in the park on Main Street, right next to city hall, over by the Lutheran Church. Everybody you talk to takes this poorly, because the park isn’t anywhere near city hall, and Smalltown has never had a Lutheran Church. Are you sure you’re okay?

So.

From 2010 to late 2014, Jonathan Gruber was universally hailed as “the architect” of Obamacare. Let’s use a single source to make this point, sticking with Politico headlines all the way through. November of 2011, for example:

The point of the framing was that the Affordable Care Act couldn’t be opposed, you moron, because it came straight out of the mind of a brilliant expert. Are you a genius at MIT with decades of research on the economics of healthcare? No? Then shut up and defer to the brilliant expert who designed this extremely important piece of legislation, the top economic scientist Jonathan Gruber. Bitch about Obamacare when you have a PhD and tenure at MIT, you goober.

Then Jonathan Gruber, having gotten high on his own press clippings, started running his mouth. He bragged, often and obnoxiously, that the Obama administration hid the real costs and purposes of the Affordable Care Act from the American people — e.g. by burying the tax on “Cadillac plans,” making insurers pay it while knowing that the insurers would just pass the cost on to consumers, those morons, who were such idiots that they wouldn’t even know we actually raised taxes on them, because Americans are so STUPID, can you even believe what morons they are!?!?

He did this in his own classroom, and at academic conferences, and he did it — over and over again — in front of video cameras.

So. Briefly, very briefly, the architect of Obamacare had been caught ranting and raving about how deliberately misleading the law was, and how completely the Obama administration shoved the thing up the ass of the idiot American voters who didn’t even know what appalling things had been done to them:

Ahh, but then. Suddenly, overnight, Main Street became Maple Avenue: Jonathan Gruber, becoming a political liability, instantly ceased to be the architect of Obamacare. In fact, the claim that Jonathan Gruber had any kind of significant involvement at all in Obamacare became a bizarre conspiracy theory promoted by idiotic far-right conspiracy theorists:

Note the dates under those last two headlines, by the way. In the second story, Gruber became merely one minor figure “among the legion of policy and technical experts who played a role in the massive legislation.” Sounding a note of distaste, Politico warned that conservatives “are using the controversy” by acting like Gruber was an important figure.

Then came Orange Man!

Suddenly, it was insane demagoguery to falsely claim that Jonathan Gruber had a significant role in Obamacare, like SCARY ORANGE HITLER was doing:

Jonathan Gruber? wHaT aRe yOu eVeN tAlKiNg aBoUt!?!?!? I mean, he did some analysis, but he didn’t do any design, and and and….

Another year on this trajectory, and Politico would have started running stories claiming that Gruber had never existed.

But then Trump won, and Republicans held the House and the Senate, and the possibility of repeal arose, so Politico needed an important expert to warn against the danger of repeal, so a mystical winged expert-creature arose from the ashes:

If you’re keeping score at home, Politico reports that Jonathan Gruber is the architect of Obamacare, and Jonathan Gruber is absolutely not the architect of Obamacare, and it’s completely insane to falsely claim that Jonathan Gruber is the architect of Obamacare, and Jonathan Gruber is the architect of Obamacare. I hope a close examination of this important topic has helped us all float away on a bank of tangerine clouds into an atmosphere made of bees, Lucy in the sky with diamonds.

This is the water we swim in, our daily world. A thing that is indisputably true on Monday, and indisputably true on Tuesday, and indisputably true on Wednesday, is a crazy far-right conspiracy theory on Thursday, and by Friday you can be arrested for thinking it. Anthony Fauci never supported school closures. Covid vaccines were never mandated anywhere. Teachers’ unions pushed to re-open schools as quickly as possible. No one ever claimed the vaccines would prevent infection and transmission. There were never any lockdowns.

I made exactly this point about the reporting on Hamas and al-Shifa Hospital, recently, and some of the point got lost in the emotional intensity of disagreement about Israel and the war. But the structure is the same. For years, reporters and NGOs like Amnesty International said, repeatedly and matter-of-factly, that al-Shifa Hospital was a de facto headquarters for Hamas. Journalists interviewed leaders of Hamas at the hospital, where Amnesty said Hamas tortured political dissidents. Then October 7 broke their memory, and they began reporting that there was no evidence — zero evidence, none at all — that Hamas had any connection to al-Shifa Hospital. X is true, X is true, X is true, X is true, X is not true. We have never said that X is true, citizen! Cease your conspiracy theories, extremist!

It isn’t possible to live like this. The constant outpouring of hyperemotional ranting on social media, the constant sense of crisis in media, and the batshit madness of college campuses come in good part from a life of unstable and disconnected symbols that can be casually repainted for new meaning between noon and sundown, having no connection to physical objects. We have no ground under our feet. All things that are definitely true are definitely false.

People who purport to have no idea what the difference is between reality and their mental fantasyworld are either placed on a 72-hour psychiatric hold or hired by the Washington Post. But their madworld act has costs. How long are we going to keep paying them? How long are we going to tolerate living in a world of free-floating empty symbols? Do we ever find the ground again?