The Danger Of Delusion

There have been crazy people for as long as there have been people. It is part of life. Insane asylums are full of people who think they are Jesus or Napoleon. Prisons are full of people who hacked their mom apart with a hatchet. Deluded and deranged people are dangerous but normally their delusions are localized and can be contained by the mechanism of society designed to protect these people from themselves and to protect normal people from them.

What happens when a delusion spreads across millions of people? Now we are dealing with a serious and existential danger. When millions of people start to act as if the real world is fake and their delusions are real, it can be lethal.

A delusion impacting millions of people is widespread in America. It has existed on the fringes for decades but over the last few years it is spreading rapidly and in 2020 is raging out of control. This fever dream is that black people in America are under constant threat of violence from White people and the police. People who should know better repeat this lie, people like LeBron James who claimed in the wake of the Ahmaud Arbery shooting….

Black people are “literally hunted”. LeBron knows this isn’t true. As I mentioned in my post earleir this month Once Every Minute….

Keep in mind that LeBron James bought a $23 million mansion in Brentwood, a Los Angeles neighborhood that is 84% White, 6.5% Asian and only 1.2% black. It seems that if White people are hunting down black people EVERYDAY/EVERYTIME blacks go outside, black people with the means to live anywhere would want to live where there aren’t many White people. Anyway.

LeBron could buy a whole city block in Detroit, the blackest city in America, and build a grand palace for $23,000,000. Instead he lives in a mostly White exclusive suburb. The cognitive dissonance required to claim on the one hand that White folk are “hunting” black folk and on the other hand choose to live in a lily White neighborhood must be driving him insane. What is worse is that I think he really believes this is true in spite of all of the evidence around him and in spite of 35 years of experience with the difference between living in a White neighborhood versus living in a black neighborhood.

Why does he believe this?

LeBron believes he is “literally hunted” because he has endured a lifetime of being told this. In school, in the black community, in the entertainment world. It is all he has heard and voices speaking the contrary are silenced and censored, considered traitors and Uncle Tom’s.

It isn’t true but in 2020 what is true is only determined by how you feel. If you feel that you are hunted by White people, then that is your reality. Pointing out statistics that show that blacks aren’t really more likely per capita to be shot by cops and that blacks who are shot by cops are, in all but a few cases, shot while in the commission of crime and usually while armed and dangerous, falls on deaf ears. Believe me, I know firsthand. People swear that isn’t true and when you show them that, for example, blacks commit around 75% of all mass shootings their programming kicks in and they short-circuit. The response is usually rage.

It isn’t just black people, many and perhaps most younger White people think that what LeBron said is true. Their response when confronted by facts and reason is blind rage that always teeters on the razor edge of violence. Many have limited experience outside of the White neighborhoods, in homes and schools chosen by their White parents to limit their exposure to the real world. What they know of black people is mostly driven by the media and “education” system and that message is simple: White people are violent and dangerous, the cause of all that is wrong in the world but black people are helpless victims who cannot stand on their own.

It is madness and it is not true but in their twisted minds it is true because that is how they feel. More and more that madness is taking form in actual violence. The examples are many but here are a few.

Man stabs AutoZone employee 7 times, tells police he “felt the need to find a white male to kill”

The black man in question, one Jayvon Hatchett, 19 years of age, apparently chose a White guy at random to attack. What drove him to do this? The story tells us:

“Jayvon Hatchett stabbed an AutoZone employee seven times after watching Facebook videos of police shootings,” local news reported on Facebook, citing Columbus Police Sgt. R.S. Mills’ court testimony. “Hatchett smiles telling Detective he chose white man at random and stabbed him in the neck. Victim’s critical and traumatized by attack according to court testimony.”

This White man might die. He was just doing his job when he was attacked and statistically speaking he has probably never done anything bad to any black person in his life. His “crimes” are the result of a fantasy but that fantasy might lead to his death. While it is a lot easier to find endless video clips of blacks attacking White people, we are told that judging all black by those videos are racist. But the rare cases of blacks being killed by cops means that “All Cops Are Bastards” and leads to people saying this sort of stuff:

“I love being black. I love black people. I know some of you may not want to say that … You tell us how to behave when you have taken our lives. The black man is worth something. His life is worth something. I have to say god damn it – if you kill one of us, it’s time for us to kill one of yours. I know everybody don’t want to hear that. But damn why are we the ones who have to keep burying ours and got to keep clean for you to see us as being human? We ain’t never did nothing to nobody.”

We ain’t never did nothing to nobody. Setting aside the double negatives, is that true? This was a march for Jacob Blake and he most certainly did something to somebody, at least according to his alleged victim who claims that Blake sexually assaulted her and wasn’t supposed to be around the place where he was shot. Police reports indicate that he attacked officers, shook off being tasered twice and was retrieving a knife from the car when the officer shot him. Based on those events, this speaker seems to be making the case for killing cops even though Jacob Blake isn’t dead.

While blacks are mostly in danger of violence from other blacks and at the same time Whites are in far more danger from blacks than the reverse, the popular narrative is of innocent black victims of racist violent crime. Those statistics are readily available to anyone who asks but even showing the evidence is a waste of time. The delusion is too strong and people are getting hurt because of it.

Popular culture plays an outsized role in spreading this delusion. A wildly popular (we are told) new show titled “Lovecraft Country” is set in the 1950s and while the works of H.P. Lovecraft were populated by more traditional monsters, most notably Cthulhu, the new show has a different monster: White people. From the IMDB page for the show:

Lovecraft Country follows Atticus Freeman as he joins up with his friend Letitia and his Uncle George to embark on a road trip across 1950s Jim Crow America in search of his missing father. This begins a struggle to survive and overcome both the racist terrors of white America and the terrifying monsters that could be ripped from a Lovecraft paperback.

While the show is set in the 50s, many people assume things are the same today and White people are apparently portrayed collectively as monsters. In a review at Counter-Currents, Alex Graham writes:

The dominant theme of Lovecraft Country is the association between white people and all that is sinister and dark. Scenes involving white people are accompanied by ominous music and distorted sound effects. In case it wasn’t clear enough, a white man even transmogrifies into a monster at the end of the episode.

Subtle but effective. Popular culture is full of depictions of black people being victimized by White people.

Is it any wonder that so many black people hate Whites and that likewise so many Whites hate their own people? If a fraction of what is said about White people in the popular culture was accurate, I might have a different viewpoint regarding my people. But is isn’t true. Delusions are not true but that doesn’t make them less powerful.

A crazy person is a danger to those around him.

A group of crazy people can be dangerous to larger numbers of people.

Millions of crazy people? That is the sort of danger that can cause even the greatest of civilizations to collapse. We are not quite to the “Caligula making his horse a Roman consul” level of crazy yet, but we are getting pretty close.

What happens when a delusion becomes the law of the land? That is something I will explore in my next post.