Capitulation

How Carefully Curated Fantasies Can Ensnare Us

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This essay was a Facebook post I wrote in 2022.  I’ve been meaning to discuss the idea and figured this would be a worthy foray into the subject.

I see friends and family who have capitulated.  I notice public figures, once intellectually rigorous, who have fallen into charlatanism.  I see people give in and live small lives.  I wonder what's at hand when people acquiesce to the destructive forces of cynicism, of deception and of despair.

I know that I feel a sense of mounting dread at the collision-course upon which we find ourselves concerning all our cultural systems: politics, society, the environment, and the economy.  Personally, I dread a microcosm of said issues internally as well. Many of us do. We have our finances, our relationships, health and meaning to contend with.

Any one of these internal or external calamities are enough to make one hide under the bed.  The amalgamation of all of them at once can be too much to bear. As within, so without. As individuals, as a nation and as a planet, we are struggling.

But this all gets magnified by a non-stop disinformation campaign. For 10 years, a news outlet fused with a political movement pushes all those buttons to the point of madness, then offers a convenient cast of scapegoats and a Messiah to save us from all the problems they constantly portray.  "Only I can solve this problem" is a very alluring statement.  It's utter hogwash, but it must be fun to bask in the fantasy.   As our existence becomes more and more maddening, the urge to escape into such a fantasy grows. For some individuals, this urge must be satiated.  Like giving into an addiction.  This is capitulating. 

And just like an addiction, one eventually realizes they have been had, but are now fully invested in putting off the crash and the hangover, trying to ride the high that is quickly becoming a low.

When one capitulates he/she stops fighting, stops resisting, stops using critical thinking as bulwarks against these urges.  He/she gives in to the massive and insidious psy-ops program being used against them.  The more people who are lost to the propaganda, the more they feel safe in their numbers. It’s like a see-saw. A battle for what is real.

Remember: a whole nation of Germans capitulated to disastrous results.  The lesson?  We sometimes even acquiesce to genocidal killers, as long as they provide us with a suitable cover story, a narrative that rationalizes the inevitable killing of the scapegoats.  A story where we can believe in our nation again, and can see ourselves as an important cog in the wheel of its rejuvenation, its purification and inoculation.

Most of us have so much trauma that we are easy marks for this manipulation.  We just want the pain to stop.  I see the scapegoats as a ready-made stand-in for that family member who hurt us, for the lover who betrayed us and on and on.  It's our brokenness that so wants to heal via the fantasy of and affiliation with the movement.  The microcosm of our inner sickness, healed via the macrocosm of the nation defeating its supposed foes, internal and external.

Maybe the best medicine against this experiment is to not capitulate in our personal lives.  To communicate what we need.  To rest.  To call that old friend.  To believe we can have joy.  To face the issues we want to hide from.  To take political action.  To rediscover who we are and what our purpose is.  To reach others with the medicine that is our authenticity.  To laugh again.  To join our hearts with others in a hug.  To be truly accountable to ourselves and others.  To demand it from those around us.  To grow up.

Maybe then we won't be so susceptible to the soap operatic yarns being sewn and thrown at us via the 24 hour news cycle and the politician who uses it to his ends and at our peril.

There is still time.  There is still hope.

And those who have capitulate may always come back.

Let's all search ourselves for how we capitulate and how, in some ways, we may have capitulated long ago. If so, we can and must stand up again. This is the part of the movie where the hero rouses the complacent. What follows is uncertain.