If you’re not feeling overwhelmed, you might not be paying attention

By David McElroy · July 13, 2020

This society is rapidly becoming a place where I no longer want to live — and it’s happening far more quickly than I expected.

It’s hard for me to be certain whether the world is the problem or if it’s really just me. Maybe what we’re going through is normal and I simply hate “the new normal.” (I detest that phrase.) Maybe I would deal with it better if it weren’t for my childhood programming.

I’m sure it’s some of both. But wherever the specifics lie, I’m feeling overwhelmed and so are lots of others. Maybe you’re feeling a bit of the same. Or maybe there’s some feeling in your gut that you’re trying to ignore.

In 1970, the futurist Alvin Toffler published a book called “Future Shock,” which he described as a psychological state of individuals and entire societies — who are experiencing “too much change in too short a period of time.”

The world was already changing quickly, but it’s accelerated. What‘s worse, it feels as though we’re passengers in a car being driven by a madman — and the madman is gunning the engine as he steers us all off the edge of a cliff.

If you’re not terrified, you’re not paying attention.

Everybody seems eager to blame somebody.

For some, the villain is Donald Trump and all will be right with the world once he’s defeated. For others, it’s the “fake news” or the “deep state” or whichever way they want to see the evil liberals who oppose Trump. The Neo-Marxists of the Black Lives Matter organization are the villains to other people, but those who are essentially mirror images of these people think there’s a “white supremacist” hiding under every rock.

We could go on and on. The Chinese government. Some shadowy international “new world order” conspiracy. Atheists. Christians. Muslims. Somebody seems to blame almost everybody, both real and imagined.

The truth is both simpler and more complicated. It’s simpler in the sense that there isn’t any grand conspiracy. It’s more complicated in that we are facing the forces of history that were put into place — completely unknowingly — by arrogant and ignorant elites more than a hundred years ago.

Bad ideas have bad consequences. Lousy economic ideas of the past and idiotic socialist nonsense today are pointing us toward failure.

One country after another debased its currency by destroying a system which tied the value of money to real assets. The world was hitched to a fiat currency system which was irrational for the long term but which allowed economists and bureaucrats to believe in the short term that they could perform magic through ignoring reality.

There are economic bills which are going to come due, but there are many demographic groups which see themselves as victims which are demanding power — and they’re demanding the right to take what they believe has been taken from them. The Marxists will slowly take over in the coming decades, regardless of what they call themselves.

It’s not worth trying to untangle the blame for all of it here. I could write many thousands of words and not make everybody happy. All you need to know is that almost everybody feels like a victim of somebody.

But as we’re all about to go off the cliff together, the last thing that really matters is what got us into this position. I have some pretty good ideas. Other people have their own ideas. We would disagree. But what matters is figuring out how we can avoid destroying ourselves.

The best thing that individuals can do is to save themselves and their families. The world is going to burn — to one extent or another — and there’s nothing you and I can do to stop it. I don’t think anybody can stop the destructive conflicts that are coming.

And I have a serious personal problem in dealing with all the conflict around us. I am wired to hate conflict and to feel as though conflict is always an attack on me. I learned that from my childhood. I assume this isn’t an issue for you — unless you were raised by a narcissist — but the current conflict in the world has pushed some childhood programming buttons for me.

Disagreement and conflict feel like betrayal to someone who was raised by a narcissist. Those things feel like an attack and they require an angry response and counterattack — because they hurt badly in ways that I can’t explain.

There is more disagreement and conflict today — even among people who have known one another for years and who care for each other — than I have ever seen. And feeling the slings and arrows of that conflict all around me leave me feeling shellshocked.

If I express a thought and don’t feel support from those around me, that feels like betrayal to me. It makes me feel very small once again — and it makes me feel as though I’ve done something wrong. For years, I assumed that everybody felt these ways. Those feelings — those fears — were so much a part of my “normal” that their existence was invisible to me.

It was only after I came to understand narcissism — and understood what narcissists do to their victims — that I came to understand how this process works. And because of understanding this, I know how narcissists around me act. I know why they do the insane things they do. They do these things because they feel irrationally attacked — just as I did.

I was lucky enough to come to understand the psychological process — so I could watch it happen in my own head — and stop myself from becoming the narcissist I could have been. But as I’ve told you before, I was bitten by the narcissistic vampire. I was damaged. I just didn’t become the monster that I could have been.

All of this might be irrelevant to your life. It probably is. But for me, it makes the chaos around me far worse.

We all have different personal baggage that we’ve brought with us to this chaotic point in history, and that means we’re going to interpret things differently and act in different ways.

Some will go into denial, because it’s their only way to deal with the chaos. Others will angrily become part of the conflict. They will become killers and destroyers, and they’ll justify the evil things they do in the name of their cause. Others will be victims. Still others will react in dozens of different ways.

Many of the people I know want to get away from what’s going on. Even if they have different ways of explaining what they’re scared of. Even if they have different things they want to escape. They all feel the desire to run — to go somewhere to avoid the chaotic collapse they feel coming.

If I had the money to run and a partner who was willing to escape, I would be gone. I know things are going to get bad and I’d rather find someplace to hide that might be safe.

But I don’t have the money I need. I don’t have the partner I need. I don’t have the solution I need. So I watch with growing apprehension as things get worse every day, wondering why so many people don’t realize that we’re heading for a cliff at high speed.

We have to find ways to save ourselves, but that can’t happen until you acknowledge that there’s a once-in-a-lifetime emergency going on — and nobody is coming to save you.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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