Uncorrectable

WARNING!
The following piece will contain a common profanity.
For today, I found that profanity unavoidable.
Read on at your own risk. * * *

     There are two kinds of people: those who believe that there are two kinds of people, and those who don’t.

     Yes, yes: it’s an old gag. But I’m an old man; what do you expect from the likes of me? Anyway, I got up humming an old song, one that everyone has heard but is light-years distant from “the charts” in our time: this one. Being analytically inclined and surrounded by people desperate for an explanation for our current state of FUBARity, I gave it some thought.

     What’s that? You don’t understand FUBARity? Aw, c’mon! FUBAR is older than I am! FUBAR is a companion concept to SNAFU: “Situation Normal: All Fucked Up.” That droll assessment is commonplace these days:

• We know things are fucked up;
• We also know that fucked-upedness is “normal;”
• So we relax.

     But we’re not supposed to relax when things are fucked up. We’re supposed to fix things. Common though it may be, fucked-upedness is an undesirable state. So let’s get to work!

     Wait: there’s a missing step in the above: We can’t just blindly “get to work;” we must first understand why things are fucked up. Where is the error, the mistake, the wrong turning that led us away from acceptable conditions into the land of the fucked-up? We must isolate that first and foremost.

     So we try, and are repeatedly thwarted. Our search leads us to people much like ourselves, except that… well, they aren’t. They don’t respond to citations of that essential ingredient in all investigations of fucked-upedness: reality. We shower them with actual data drawn from the experiences of men and nations, and they dismiss it! They talk around it; they shrug it off; they change the subject, hurl imprecations, or both. There’s no getting them to live in the same universe as we do.

     Some of them counter-shower us, sometimes with inane platitudes, but at other times with “studies.” The conclusions of those studies strike us as perverse. But given our inclination to respect systematic investigations of any sort, we trace those studies back to the people and institutions that emitted them, and we find… more fucked-upedness!

     There’s an enraging circularity about it all. It can drive a sane man mad, a peaceable man violent. We resist those inclinations and try again. After all, we’re talking to people much like ourselves. They must be reachable! But nothing changes.

     Presently we give up. We accept that though we may have found the problem – indeed, we most certainly have found it – we cannot fix it without violating the “rights” of those people who, after all, are much like ourselves. We shy back from the required means. We look for other measures, but in vain.

     For what we have found is FUBARity: that condition of being which is “Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.”

     There’s a small dissonance in there. We recognize the fucked-upedness; it’s those who suffer it that don’t recognize it. But fixing the condition is what matters. Fixing it eludes us because of our respect for their “rights.”

     Our frustration knows no bounds.

* * *

     It’s time for a quote. This is one for which my source is hearsay. I’m told that the person who emitted it said it at a public appearance that I did not attend. I trust the person who repeated it to me, so I’ll give it to you as he did:

     “Savages have no rights.” – Ayn Rand

     Enormous dismay ensues. No rights at all? Not even the right to life? That can’t be right! Surely there’s some escape clause here.

     But there isn’t. The problem lies in the meaning of that term savages.

     A savage, in Rand’s lexicon, is someone who doesn’t recognize or honor rights as such. His ethical metaphysic is “What can I get away with?” Dangerous as individuals, savages are genocidally lethal when they band together. And there are bands of them ravaging our land even now.

     Savages yield only before overwhelming force. But we shy back from using force against them, because… well, they have rights! The right to life, at least. So running one over is out.

     But that yields the street to the savages. Unacceptable! What, then? Drive around them? Well, if possible… which it often isn’t. To get to where we must go, force will be required.

     You cannot concede rights to others who don’t concede yours.

* * *

     As you can surely tell by now, I’m not talking about the stereotype of a savage. That “black Sambo” figure in a loincloth with a bone through his nose blocks a lot of people’s thinking. I’m talking about people much like us in appearance and overall conduct, but who are willing to do anything and everything to get what they want politically. It doesn’t matter to them whose rights they must trample, or whether the end they seek is fatally unstable. They get their satisfactions from their political stances and those who share them. That’s the sustenance they seek: acknowledgement from their sort that they’re “good people.” Compared to that, what relevance has reality?

     There’s the core of FUBARity: it cannot be corrected by reference to reality. Those people who look like us and (mostly) dress like us yearn for acknowledgement that they’re good people much too strongly to be deflected by reason or evidence. Reality is, for them, an obstacle rather than a reference point. It must be defeated, and it will! Surely older and wiser heads who share their views are already working on it.

     I could go on, but I don’t think there’s a need. In closing, please have a look at two tweets: This one, which fancifully compares those people just like us to “large language models;” and this one, which invokes a term from systems theory for the self-referential defensive behavior of an institution that resolves to ignore reality to the extent it threatens the internal logic of the institution itself. Yes, they’re a bit fucked-up themselves, and they complicate something that’s really quite simple, but they illustrate how far reasonable people will go to explain the impenetrability of FUBARity.

     Have a nice day.