Why do people follow autocrats (& wannabe autocrats) who quite palpably deny the facts in front of people's faces? How can they get away with denying climate change, even as their country is cleaning up after devastating hurricanes? How can they deny the existence of COVID-19, with bodies in the streets?
Well, in the U.S. we have a tendency to ignore data that doesn't square with our personal beliefs, predileciton, or convenience. So, nuclear power was safe. Prosperity was just around the corner. And hell, my gradma smoked a pack a day and lived to be 115! But a lot of it has to do with the followers' relation to the autocrat: he is them. Even if he doesn't produce the goods; even if he gets you killed; it's still somehow right. I can't think of a much better formulation than this: "Having fixed our faith in a father-figure -- or in a father, or in a mother or a wife -- we must keep it fixed until inexcusable fault (and what fault of a father, a mother, or a wife, is inexcusable?) crushes it at once and completely. This figure represents our own best selves; it is what we ourselves want to be and, through, identification, are. To abandon it for anything less than crushing evidence of inexcusable fault is self-incrimination, and of one's best, unrealized self."* I would demur only in this: that in some times and places crushing evidence merely bruises and inexcusable faults are not faults at all. ______________________________ * Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |