Imagine you’re on a big wooden boat out at sea, far from the distant whale-oil lamps of the harbor. Maybe in the 1600s, like you’ve seen in dreams. There are a ton of yahoos on the boat with you, and two groups of them are standing on either side screaming and rocking the boat side to side. They claim they’re rocking the boat against each other, but the end result is the same. Soon the boat will tip over and there are no lifeboats. In reality, subconsciously, they are working together, driven by chaos or the death drive, who knows.
In the great Hitchcock movie Lifeboat, there are good and bad and ambiguous people trapped in the boat. Trapped together.
The virtuous get applause for performing their virtue, and are incentivized to appear (or actually become) more and more good and righteous in the eyes of the watchers. Contrarians don’t know they’re contrarians until they get applause and attention and hate for speaking the unspeakable, but then become addicted to performing, and are also trapped by having to constantly ratchet it up higher and higher to get any response.
And the two groups become symbiotically intertwined and addicted to playing off of each other to maintain the positions they have built and keep their audiences or livelihoods engaged.
But they are also trapped, they have to keep dancing, to keep performing greater and greater contrarianism or virtue.
This death dance above. That is allegedly meant to entertain us and enliven us and edify us. That allegedly has meaning and value. And it never ends.
But they don’t see that the watchers below are quietly festering, developing a disdain and hostility for all of them, regardless of political stripe or which side they’re on—for The Loud in general to suffer, people who feel sure of themselves and fight it out like Greek Gods with thunderbolts with each other above, and think that this has meaning.
They don’t see the infinite patience and decency of the medieval peasantry below.
But the resentment is festering there at the bottom of the world, like after too many wars and parades.