Land of Inversions

It’s impossible not to notice the way things are unraveling. In our upside down world, a person can be fired for an ill-advised tweet, yet nobody expects accountability for the architects of lockdowns which caused untold social and economic distress while at the same time had no discernible effect on Covid mortality. Those who orchestrated the ill-begotten U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan are put in charge of sending well over $40B of military hardware overseas with almost no accountability. David Polansky captures the sentiment perfectly in the tweet below:

I don’t wish to sound apocalyptic about this, but one has the sense that at present our society is simultaneously characterized by wildly disproportionate accountability for trivial transgressions and zero accountability for profound institutional failure.

— David Polansky (@polanskydj) May 27, 2022

Speaking of profound institutional failure, consider the awful scene at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas where 78 minutes elapsed while armed police stood by as kids inside bled out. Police even had the gall to arrest parents who challenged them on their inaction. Uvalde, and Parkland before it, highlight two social ills at the same time. There’s the abject nihilism and resentment on display in the young shooters. And then there’s the cowardice and indifference by the authorities.

There is a tendency to write these events off as anomalies while at the same time believe we can somehow control all this if we just had stricter gun control laws or better access to mental health services. We subdue our young men with drugs like Ritalin and Adderall and then lament the fact that there aren’t any men of character and courage. C.S. Lewis offers an explanation as to how armed police cowered for over an hour while another type of coward slaughtered unarmed kids.

We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise… We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.

— C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

Ours is an era of selective morality. Words are condemned as violence while actual violence goes unprosecuted. We insist on the bodily autonomy of women when it comes to terminating a pregnancy. But we’ll force a pregnant woman to submit to an unproven vaccine if she wants to keep her job. It’s supposedly racist to expect people to show identification when they vote, but somehow perfectly acceptable to require proof of vaccination to eat in a restaurant or ride public transit. It’s appropriation to draw on the brilliance and creativity of other cultures, but somehow heroic when men invade women’s locker rooms posing as women. Welcome to the land of inversion.