"The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms -- he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization."
- Hofstadter
When I read Vox or other libertarian blogs, I always think, "Chicken Little - The sky is falling! The sky is Falling!", not because Vox an Co. are paranoid or nuts or way out in left field on issues concerning liberty and the results of the lack thereof, but because they are often jumping the gun on them. It's seems true to me that most of what the government does is leading us to destruction and misery, but these fellas seem to think it's "just around the corner" or "any minute", often making predictions of immediacy. Whether it's economic disaster, martial law, or the instant extinction of mankind they see it pending post-haste.
I have always attributed this to a sort of short circuit of intuition. As I understand it intuition is the brain subconsciously assimilating seemingly random and unrelated data into a sudden conclusion or solution, and I think being around others of libertarian mindset increases the relative frequency of occurrence of ideas related to eventual catastrophic failure of social/economic systems. This frequency adds urgency to the equation and the result is eminent dire predictions.
And you thought they were just paranoid.....
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