Inverted Reality
There are multiple versions of reality in 2022 America. Some have done a total 180.
I’ve understood in the past few years that the political divide in America was more about which version of reality you believe than anything else. I know plenty of people who are vehemently anti-woke, but parrot MSM propaganda on the Covid vaccine or Ukraine. Arguments often are about which version of reality is, you know, real.
“January 6th was an INSURRECTION!!”
“You mean those grannies waving flags inside the Capitol?”
*fisticuffs ensue
The two people in my hypothetical situation might share a lot of the same cultural values, but clearly they’re on opposite sides of Schmitt’s friend enemy distinction.
Some people take this a step further.
Twitter poster Covfefe Anon (CA) has coined the phrase “The woke are more correct than the mainstream”. His thesis is that super woke leftists with their hyperbolic language about racism and oppression accidentally get things right that the mainstream normie gets wrong.
This thread does a better job than what I would do at explaining this concept. While the “woke are more correct than the mainstream”, their reasoning is always flawed. Hence, they blame society (white people) for why a certain minority group may be under-performing in a certain area.
Today, I saw someone living in a 180 degree different version of what is observable reality, and it further reinforced that the woke are indeed correct, but in the absolute opposite way than what they think.
This looks like something that would have been posted by your typical conservative. A similar thing was posted by right-leaning actress Gina Carano last year, which got her in hot water with the wokes running Disney. This was posted by Susan Sarandon, an outspoken progressive. Clearly, Sarandon is insinuating that the right is actually in control of the media, is deciding what is true, and is dividing people into us vs. them. How anyone can imagine such a thing is beyond me. Sarandon is correct. This meme is accurate. Any regime looking to oppress its subjects has to first have hegemonic control over these things. She’s just living in an inverted reality, as are many people. This is another level though.
This is only possible with leftists however. There is an outsider mentality baked into leftism that prevents its adherents from ever acknowledging that their side is actually the one in control. As Spandrell said in his famous Bioleninism essay,
The left always wins. But once they win they become higher status. Come on, they got power. They try, very hard, to convince everyone that they're not really in power. No, the forces of reaction are lurking everywhere! We must keep on the struggle! 80% of the Left's energy is in producing propaganda about how the Right really runs everything. When the Left had 90% tax rates, they still talked as if they were in Charles Dickens world. After 60 years of feminism, affirmative action, and Jews in all resorts of power the Left of 2017 is obsessed with "systemic racism", "toxic masculinity" and "anti-semitism". Right.