Politics

Ah... yes. I see something I'd been missing.

For anyone that does not believe that objective reality changes upon the whim of someone high in societal hierarchy, yes, it is absolutely blithering insanity.

Broadly, though more in the context of Nietzscheanism vs. stoicism, I'd noted the distinction between those who believe that reality can be forced into alignment with preconceptions and those who believe that conceptions must follow reality.

Sort of like the linguistic distinction between prescriptivism and descriptivism, but on a much greater scale.

(And as far as that goes, I think that prescriptivism is obvious bollocks).

I'd never really considered that same distinction in a broad political context though.

I suspect part of the problem is that I've never been even the slightest bit authoritarian. I used to be further to the right (never really past barely right-of-center, but still much further than my current hard left), but since I never had any use for authoritarians, my experience with the right was mostly old-school right libertarians - people who advocated for some government interference in private lives because they believed it to be necessary to mitigate harm.

I don't think I'd ever really considered the idea of people believing, if not stated quite this way, that authority can literally change reality - can force reality to take forms other than whatever it is by which they've chosen to be offended.

So... yeah. It's likely not that they so grossly misperceive reality but that the whole idea of trying to accurately perceive it in the first place is foreign to them, since they believe that it - whatever it might be - really is subject to the dictates of puffed-up egomaniacs in suits. So all they need to do is get the "right" puffed-up egomaniacs in charge, and it'll just magically change to whatever they prefer.

Oh... and....

Yeah - they stay trapped in that delusion because they never see their preferred puffed-up egomaniacs' failures to alter reality as a counter to their delusion. Instead, to them, it must be that the puffed-up egomaniacs with [D]s after their names have altered reality in the "wrong" direction. So the solution is to try even harder to get the puffed-up egomaniacs with [R]s after their names in office, so they can wave their magic wands and reshape reality into the form they prefer.

And that's another benefit to binarism too. I've been mostly ascribing the tendency to binarism to the need for self-affirmation and the benefits of backhandedly convincing oneself that one is a good person simply by dint of the fact that one is not part of the (falsely) dichotomous "bad" opposition.

But yes - it also undoubtedly spins off, to some degree, from the misconception that the only reason the world has problems is that the "wrong" puffed-up egomaniacs with magic wands are in power.

Mm... yeah. Things are falling into place. Thanks.