Unsanity; The great plague!

For the first time in the not so venerable history of The Long Hill Institute, our research has uncovered a malady that afflicts much of the population, often that segment that considers itself the most advanced.

The phenomenon is unsanity, that is, a condition where an individual believes feelings are thoughts, facts or arguments.  The Long Hill Institute explored the phenomenon in the April, 2015 issue of the Sturbridge Times Magazine.  Below is the article:

Call Me Crazy or Something

There is a vast population of high functioning  people who harbor ideas that seem valid, but are delusional.  They are everywhere, including the highest levels of government and business.  This class  are our friends and relatives, and sadly, you and I need only look in the mirror to meet them.

The folks under discussion are not people who need to be cared for.  Most can rise in the morning, competently dress and go to a business or place of employment and spend the day doing useful work.  Many attain success in their chosen field.

What is the horrible malady victimizing our population?  It is not insanity.  The afflicted need not be restrained from doing harm to themselves or others.  At large, they are not a threat to public order.  Indeed there is no description of the condition in the DSM-5(Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5^th Edition, it is used to diagnose and classify mental disorders).

As pervasive as it is, there is almost no discussion of it anywhere.  The only thing to be done was to engage the resources of our official think tank, The Long Hill Institute for the Study of Heretofore Unrecognized Psychological Conditions (LHIftSoHUPC for short).

A wonderful aspect of the LHIftSoHUPC is that the shoot from the hip methodology means there are never interminable hours of research.  A name for the condition and a definition of terms were arrived at almost instantaneously.

Thus we have Unsanity, that is, a condition where an individual believes feelings are thoughts, facts or arguments.

Your columnist is himself a victim.  I firmly hold that ingesting huge quantities of  Stonyfield Creme Caramel Ice Cream is healthy because it's organic.  Even worse, I trust and act on the advertisement that says “Guinness is good for you” because they wouldn't let them say that if it weren't true.

The cognitive aberrations of a scribbler at a regional magazine are of no import in the great world.  However, when people of position pontificate wildly, it should give us pause.

Marie Harf is deputy spokesperson at State.  In that position she has the unenviable job of defending administration foreign policy.  In a well-reported exchange with Chris Matthews, Ms. Harf suggested; “we cannot win this war by killing them. We cannot kill our way out of this war. We need in the medium to longer term to go after the root causes that leads people to join these groups, whether it’s lack of opportunity for jobs.”

So that's all it takes to win the War on Terror, a jobs program.  Forget that the guy known as Jihadi John, who beheads the hostages, is a highly employable tech grad.  Also put aside when suicide bombers blow themselves up they are yelling “Allahu Akbar” and not “if only I had a job at Goldman Sachs or flipping burgers or working as a spokesflack at Foggy Bottom.”

Marie, and one might guess a lot of Americans, might find it hard to grasp that not everyone in the world just wants wage slavery.  They would be well advised to read George Orwell's review of Mein Kampf.  Orwell, a man who was not unsane, noted that Hitler said, “"I offer you struggle, danger and death," and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.”  The lovely life of happy self-actualization the West offers is not a universal aspiration.  There is no lack of people who find it empty.

Then again, The Allies were able to disabuse Germany of the notion by killing one heck of a lot of them over five years.

 Ms. Harf accused her critics of not being able to understand “too nuanced an argument.” that would seem to be a new way of saying “I was taken out of context” except that she said it with not a little confidence.  On Long Hill, we agree the war is not going to be won by killing, but neither is the universal jobs idea a winner.  If after almost a decade and a half, all we seem to get is more war, maybe  the game is not worth it.  That's no more an unsane conclusion than any other.

Despite the fact that we have savaged conservatives such as Ann Coulter, Howie Carr and Mitt Romney in the pages of this magazine, there is the view extant that we are running a militia up on Long Hill.  Thus, we feel it incumbent on us to search to starboard for unsanity.  Fortunately, our country is a target rich environment across the board.

The Capo di Tutti Capi of conservative talk is a prime example of the phenomenon.  Rush Limbaugh rose to prominence in the early 90s when shilling for Gulf War I.  He has always been a self-proclaimed champion of liberty. His show is one long paean to freedom. 

Until it is time to hide under the bed in fear.  According to Mr. Freedom, in light of the Snowden revelations, “Our civil liberties are worthless if we are dead! If you are dead and pushing up daisies, if you're sucking dirt inside a casket, do you know what your civil liberties are worth? Zilch, zero, nada.”*  True enough as nothing matters at that point other than how you lived your life. The LHIftSoHUPC can only render a diagnosis of Grand Mal Unsanity.

     The LHIftSoHUPC can do little to help the high and mighty with the condition no matter how pervasive it is among the elite.  We are here for the citizenry of our region even if the fee structure has not been set and we are a bit fuzzy on treatment.  However, if a client is not satisfied, we offer a complimentary dish of ice cream or pint of stout.  Your choice.

*From No Place to Hide, by Glenn Greenwald reviewed in the Jul,y 2014 Sturbridge Times Magazine.

The Official Long Hill Institute Position on Global Warming

The Long Hill Institute position on Global Warming is, we don't know and you probably don't either.

The general consensus of the American bien pensant class is that it is not merely a thing, but a huge big thing that can only be cured if vast sums of moolah are thrown at it.

The Long Hill Institute has decided that unless we are willing to send a trusted staff member to become a certified climate science, we should not opine too heavily on the subject.  We did not dispatch a staff member to study the subject in depth because no one volunteered and if they did, they would not have been trusted anyway.

As the sky is falling narrative is the preferred media explanation of most everything, we leave you with a couple of alternatives to consult for the balance we cannot provide.

Richard Lindzen is an atmospheric physicist and was the Alfred P. From 1983^[1] until his retirement in 2013, he was Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at  a post-secondary school called the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  We aver he may not be a wild eyed nutcase as most deniers skeptics are characterized.  You can read about his views here.  He has been called a disinformer.

As to the famous 97% consensus, economist David Friedman rebuts that claim.  Is he right?  Up on Long Hill, we were lucky to get to the end of the article as we are on full dilettante mode.  If a respected academic wants to question the statistics, well there are two sides.

Below is the article that explains our position.  It appeared in the October 2009 issue of the Sturbridge Times Magazine.

WHAT DO I KNOW?

I tried to get my wife to take all the family’s money and put it into Mega-bucks tickets. My rationale was that I had always said it would be a cold day in July before I ever won any money. Well we had a lot of cold rainy July days this year. August, however turned out sultry hot.

 Still it is a summer like none that I remember. We have had rainy spells, but little as soggy as this year. The weather occasioned a debate on talk radio. The hosts generally take the position that the low temps prove global warming a hoax. Some callers will argue the other side, a few even positing the cold spell as evidence that warming is true.

 Which side is right? Beats me. My cousin in usually waterlogged Seattle tells me they are experiencing the warmest Spring and Summer ever. Well, that settles, exactly nothing. The only thing that is certain is that true believers on either side of the argument will not be swayed by anything said by the opposition.

Why not? Well why should they? What can one know? Unfortunately, not much in the modern world. The problem was best expressed by George Orwell over 60 year ago,

“Somewhere or other—I think it is in the preface to Saint Joan—Bernard Shaw remarks that we are more gullible and superstitious today than we were in the MiddleAges,and as an example of modern credulity he cites the widespread belief that the earth is round.The average man, says Shaw, can advance not a single reason for thinking that the earth is round. He merely swallows this theory because there is something about it that appeals to the twentieth-century mentality.”

Orwell then went on to prove the point that he himself had no reason to believe the world was round even though he accepted that it was. Of course we who are living now can point to pictures from space and all that, but we have to admit that few of us have made a study of it and are taking it more or less on faith. His closing paragraph sums it up:

 “It will be seen that my reasons for thinking that the earth is round are rather precarious ones. Yet this is an exceptionally elementary piece of information. On most other questions I should have to fall back on the expert much earlier, and would be less able to test his pronouncements.And much the greater part of our knowledge is at this level.It does not rest on reasoning or on experiment, but on authority.And how can it be otherwise, when the range of knowledge is so vast that the expert himself is an ignoramous as soon as he strays away from his own speciality? Most people, if asked to prove that the earth is round, would not even bother to produce the rather weak arguments I have outlined above. They would start off by saying that ’everyone knows’ the earth to be round, and if pressed further,would become angry.In a way Shaw is right. This is a credulous age, and the burden of knowledge which we now have to carry is partly responsible.”

 In truth, with my own unaided reason, I could not have figured out the Earth is round. As a child in elementary school, I did have my primitive sense of wonder piqued when Columbus was explained. Unfortunately, they explained it wrong. Columbus did not come up with something shocking in the world is round idea. Most scholars already believed it. Chris thought the circumference of the globe smaller than it was. He had made a mistake that gave us the New World.

So how does this connect to Global Warming. At a family gathering the various members were talking about the question. I won’t say discussing. Neither side answered the others’ questions other than to state a fact. My techie son asked a relative how they would explain that Mars is heating up at the same rate as the Earth. A statement was made in reply, but no answer. How do people become so doctrinaire over something even experts disagree about?

It is time to quote true experts on human nature. No, not Nietsche or Freud, but Gilbert and Sullivan:

That every boy and every gal

That's born into the world alive

Is either a little Liberal

Or else a little Conservative!

Fal, lal, la!

Yup, we’re born that way. I accept it and am waiting for my application to the Flat Earth Society to be approved. They have my solemn undertaking to agree with their official Global Warming Policy no matter what it is.