Our Sense Un-Making Institutions

The sense un-making institutions are at work trying to shore up the cracks, and to keep reality hidden behind the walls of their deception. But the walls will not hold.

The first visible cracks in the dam of nonsense that “protects” us from the ravages of reality first became visible in late 2023, with the release of the Twitter files. At that time, it became clear to any who were willing to look, that much of the utter insanity of the preceding three years had been created by an aggressive and coordinated censorship regime initiated within the U.S. bureaucracy, and executed on its behalf by the sanitized hands of the private sector—often with lavish funding by the U.S. Government.

For me, this was a watershed moment. It was the get-out-of-jail-free card I had been looking for. Not for me, but for the so-many putatively kind, well-educated people in my milieu who had vigorously supported the harsh social solvents that had so totally disintegrated society during the preceding several years, from lockdowns, to mask mandates, to school closures, to vaccine passports, and so many other great and small anti-society super-solvents to which we were exposed. The coordinated and well-documented censorship regime revealed by the TwitterFiles threw out a decency-preserver that ought to have been reached for by every news organization, ever civil society organization, and every person who had supported the society-dissolving policies of the COVID era, policies that not only atomized, alienated and radicalized us one from the other, but policies that ravaged the middle- and lower-classes whilst enriching both the bank accounts and the lives of the rich at the formers’ expense. And yet the decency preserver of the TwitterFiles was not simply ignored, but violently spurned. People who had clearly felt a cognitive dissonance with their claimed “liberal values” and the obvious illiberalism and illogic of COVID policies recoiled from the decency-preserver provided them by the Twitter Files. Rather than viewing the gross violation of their first-amendment rights that the TwitterFiles exposed—the right to hear dissenting opinions—rather than viewing this as the way to square the circle of their blatant logical and moral contradictions, they plugged their ears, and covered their eyes.

This surprised me. But then I put myself in their shoes, in their media landscape, and found the culprit. I had expected that the news agencies, who had been duped by our mendacious government and suffered a near mortal wound to their credibility as a result, would grab onto the TwitterFiles not just as a decency preserver, but in this case as a very literal lifeline that might allow them to reverse a seemingly terminal decline. Instead, these groups demonstrated that their core competencies were non-existent, and their professed core values completely inverted. Rather than holding the government and its various puppets to account, they went to work explaining why we needed censorship and those who claimed otherwise were simply the beyond-the-pale people who always exploited free speech protections.

And then came last week. As someone who spent literally years teasing apart daily the government propaganda published under the banner of “science” that was used to prop up the great COVID dissolution, I knew well that propaganda was on the obverse side of the censorship coin. What I didn’t know, was that the coin of this realm was no less base than the coin of any other. Last week showed us that the exalted “sense-making institutions” could be bought as cheaply as any thug—and without any violence.

Last week, things finally made sense. It made sense why Politico, The New York Times, the AP, the Guardian, and literally thousands of other “journalists” had stepped into the fray to defend policies and views which were antithetical and actively harmful to those they had held sometimes as recently as the day before. It made sense because now we could see that tens of millions of dollars had been spent to purchase these ready and reliable reversals, a payment which, however paltry it may have been, was clearly enough to lubricate and loosen the bonds that bound their scruples. Again, as one of the few thousand people who fought in the rhetorical trenches of Twitter during the early COVID reality battles of 2020 - 2022, this was a watershed moment. It finally made sense why academics argued the opposite position of their published papers. It made sense why journalists had been utterly obtuse, impenetrable to the logic of their own erstwhile arguments.

Then, within hours of this burst of light, the “sense-making institutions” stepped in. The media, the academics, the experts, they all stepped in. But they didn’t step in to make sense of the situation. Instead, their very clear goal was to un-make the sense that had been finally made of the situation. Their purpose was not to shine a light on the truth, but rather to dim and obfuscate any and all truths that might have been revealed.

Feeling very viscerally that the job that was being done was quite literally to un-make sense, I started thinking about the term “sense-making institutions.” My sense was that it was a rather new phrase. I hadn’t heart it until COVID, and of course it was always applied to those people and institutions tasked with the job of undermining confidence in the truth that your lying eyes might be telling you. Then I realized: there is no need of sense-making institutions when things make sense, when we hew to reality. We only need sense-making institutions when we are flying in the face of truth and reality, when we are living in a dystopian space whose brittle lies are protected from destruction by a dam of censorship, obfuscation and propaganda.

The dam is not yet fully broken. The sense un-making institutions are at work trying to shore up the cracks, and to keep reality hidden behind the walls of their deception. But the walls will not hold. Already the peril to which these sense-un-making institutions have exposed us by denying reality is coursing through our communities. Already, too, the force of truth and reality is sweeping away the brittle lies. When the dam breaks, we will no longer need these so-called “sense-making institutions” because reality will be restored to us, and we will be able to make sense of things on our own, un-mediated by the nonsense and logical perversions of the “sense-makers”—just as we did in the past. For my part, it can’t come soon enough.