Now, I'm usually interested in psychological explanations of political stuff. Often, explanations of political stuff can draw upon history, and so for instance the Biden administration's foreign policy is descended from that of the first Reagan administration, and the Democratic Party is a product of the coalition between old money, wealthy suburbs, and weapons manufacturers coming out of the Northeast in the late Eighties. (Meanwhile the Reagan administration's coalition of fundies, former KKK, and "libertarians" survives to this day.) But history only goes so far and eventually we'll want psychological explanations. Why the insanity? And so here we have Moon of Alabama dabbling:

Transgender - The Inability To Distinguish Facts From Wishes

I do not think the transgender stuff is the big political issue here. Transgenderism is a political distraction, as RBN pointed out today. These days Joe Rogan tries to blame China for transgenderism. I'll update the link when I can get a link that isn't for a two- or three-hour RBN broadcast.

If there's anything awkward about transgendered people, it's that you have men who are anxious to become women and women who are anxious to become men when the technology to fully satisfy them doesn't exist just yet. It is, then, a matter of technology. When we get really effective gender reassignment surgery, we'll be able to choose our biological gender, biological age, skin color, eye color, hair color, and so on, and we'll be immortal. It will all be cool.

Full disclosure: I am currently just fine with my gender identity and sexual orientation. I could see becoming someone of the opposite gender, and I might even enjoy it, but it would really be too much of a bother with the way things are. Instead, I would like to be a trans-social-class person. After flying to some far-off country to undergo wealth affirmation surgery, I would like to inhabit the body of a billionaire. I could tell from an early age that I was born into the wrong social class, and I would like to rectify my social class dysphoria as soon as possible.

At any rate, after discussing transgenderism, Moon of Alabama pivots to a discussion of Emmanuel Todd's book "The Defeat of the West." I am going through a Google translation of it right now. It's a fun book. However, Todd makes too much of the persistence of formal religion in modern society. The God of the West is money, and it's been that way in the US since the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791. Or maybe the death of formal religion and the ascendancy of the Dollar God happened later when it was decided that the Constitution also had to apply to the states. Maybe it took a little longer elsewhere. The key fact about religion was and is that you have to have one if you want to be "in" with the "right" people. How important is it that you believe in your religion? Oh, sure, you might stamp your feet and proclaim in a loud voice that you are a believer and that God is real or something. But that's just foot-stamping.

At any rate, in his book, Todd goes through the whole idiocy of the Russia-Ukraine war and how it has poisoned the West. The West would like to pretend that it is toppling Putin. It would also like to pretend that it is "defending Ukraine," and many other delusions besides. But the West's fumbling militarism about Ukraine is supposedly an example of the inability to distinguish facts from wishes.

The Moon of Alabama piece then proceeds to discuss Todd's opinion on transgenderism (he's against it) before mentioning the famous Ron Suskind piece in the NYT which discussed the solipsism of the Bush Junior administration. Our elites, then, like the transgendered, are essentially incapable of distinguishing facts from wishes. I'm not going to discuss the rest of Moon of Alabama's piece. My attitude toward it is set.

What Moon of Alabama calls "the inability to distinguish facts from wishes" is really mere psychological projection. Projection is a normal human behavior. When you have some big thing you want to do, you project it onto reality before you act. You tell yourself, gee I hope everyone goes along with my ideas for a successful business and that I won't declare bankruptcy in five years. And so you spend some time pretending that that will be the case. Religion is also about projection: there is nothing particularly convincing about the Bible or about any holy book for that matter, and there is nothing particularly convincing about the notion that the world is in any way informed by "God," whatever that is, yet people persist in claiming they have religion.

What distinguishes the projections of the West about Ukraine from, I don't know, maybe Russia's projections about Ukraine, is: the West has no back-up plan. The West does not ask itself: what do I do if my ideas about reality are the wrong ones? Instead, its so-called leaders double down on their proliferation of ridiculous garbage.

We might also say, what if the transgendered also have no back-up plans? What if the trans women decide, after having altered their bodies, that they don't like being women, and what if the trans men decide, after having altered their bodies, that they don't like being men? Well, that's somewhat up to them to decide. As for the rest of us, having had to cope with the disasters of Biden administration foreign policy, well, we might want to have political elite reassignment surgery, and have a full leadership-ectomy. I can think of at least of a few political elites who should be surgically removed.