It’s fashionable to admire, in the abstract, the iconoclasts, the rebels, the kids in high school fighting to keep their minds alive in the face of a system designed, consciously or not, to reduce them to mental servitude. As that Apple ad made plain some years ago, these figures are the idols of our age.

And yet, as is perhaps normal, the age has a sort of love/hate relationship with its idols. Sure, we idolize people who Think Different™, but do not try this at home. Or at least, if you’re going to think different at home, keep that shit to yourself. Because whatever the nominal values, the deeper values of mob mentality are always the real regime in power.

As Thomas Jefferson famously put it, more or less: No people are more fully enslaved than those who falsely imagine themselves to be free. It’s the sort of insight that easily devolves into gnostic uncertainty – am I really free, or do I just falsely imagine it? – but without getting into all that, I want to focus on the notion that the real values at play are not those espoused by the group, but the more general rules of group dynamics… that is, the mob mentality.

[ted id=341]

As social scientist Jonathan Haidt more or less puts it (and maybe he got this from someone else, I can’t recall), groups of people orient toward and revolve around a central, sanctified, value. This pattern of organization, in other words, operates independent of what the value is.

Those of us standing outside the orientation and rotation might notice this, and thinking that the espoused values are really the primary values, might feel moved to point the disconnect out. But, no matter what the espoused values are, the operative values are those governing the manifestation of the movement itself. Even in a culture, like ours, where the iconoclasts are abstractly, and retroactively, admired, to openly practice iconoclasm is to commit treason against the organizing principle.

And really, this is what being post-truth is all about. It is not, I think, ultimately about a will to knowingly champion the advent of FantasyLand, but about emotionally protecting that mass movement deemed morally necessary, taken to its logical end. Truth is the first casualty of war – and, I might add, the last body recovered. In effect, truth is the unknown soldier entombed around the world.