I’ve seen this before, but I have to wonder: has anyone actually tested it? Like sure, you can imagine what licking asphalt would feel like, but have you ever just done it to make sure your imagination is right?

The two are not in equal positions when it comes to keeping “cool heads”. Pretty hard to keep cool when you’ve grown up being shot at and starved and driven from your home. It’s easy to sit in a safe place and condemn someone else’s reaction to having their home conquered and their people slaughtered, but it’s another thing entirely to actually go through it.

Of course, targeting civilians and committing war crimes is bad. No contest. But people are going to fight like cornered animals when you try to genocide them. Let’s not pretend like Hamas came out of nowhere.

People are a product of their environment, and people who grow up while being exterminated become radical and violent. The way to stop that from happening is not to keep dropping bombs and blocking humanitarian aid and sniping children.

Simple solution: make the moon farther away.

You bring up a good point, but I don’t think religion necessarily involves the kind of unreality I have in mind.

A lot of religious claims deal with things that are unfalsifiable. Invisible forces, unreachable gods, consciousness after death, things like that. Not the most rational stuff in the world, but not obviously false on the face of it either.

Now, though, we’ve got folks believing things that are easily disproven. Climate change denial, anti-vaccine bullshit, the never-ending parade of moral panics churned out by the above mentioned propaganda machine, Jewish space lasers, pet eating immigrants, etc.

I won’t go so far as to say that religion never causes people to deny observable reality; it surely does. But I think the right wing media empire we have now does so intentionally and on a scale greater than any religious movement I can think of.

The bad news: The most evil people in the world spend billions every year on the largest propaganda machine in the history of man, and it enthralls a large minority of us.

The good news: That’s what it takes to maintain this! This many people living in a bubble of unreality is not natural! It is the product of a machine built by man, and all machines built by man are destined to eventually fail. Maybe the right person dies at the right time. Maybe the conflict between their narrative and reality eventually becomes too much. Maybe they lose control of the story and the movement splinters into hundreds of contradictory conspiracy theories that no longer move in lockstep. Maybe the magic just wears off one day.