Monday, August 1, 2022

"To spear the fact in the sea of grift is not an act of intelligence, exactly, but a kind of sensibility, a certain instinct for grasping the structure of the social world"

From a long article (from December) by Kerry Howley about the capitol rioters:

a country that protects the right to spin fantasy necessarily risks the well-being of those who easily lose themselves to it. Freedom isn’t free is a true thing the right used to say, and the costs of freedom of speech are real costs, borne, in part, by those unskilled at sifting fact from fantasy: the people who join MLMs, who become Scientologists, who lie awake in bed at night worrying over small children drained of adrenochrome. To spear the fact in the sea of grift is not an act of intelligence, exactly, but a kind of sensibility, a certain instinct for grasping the structure of the social world.