The views in this piece are the author’s alone and do not represent the views of the WLRN Collective.

By aurora linnea

This year I made peace with something about myself that, as a younger woman, I would have denied, indignant at the accusation. Call it radical self-acceptance, call it a resignation to one’s limits, but the fact is that I am incurably simpleminded. I support good things, things that relieve suffering and nurture life. I oppose bad things: whatever wounds, exploits, disenfranchises or destroys living beings and the biosphere. I’m for right over wrong, morality over immorality, care over indifference, courage over cowardice, truth over lies. Thus, when it comes time to decide my position on a political or cultural issue, I begin by asking myself one simple question: what is real? Determining the answer may involve hours of careful research, or it may be that I just have to look out the window, or close my eyes and listen for the bloodtide cycling through me, the red flux that plaits me to this world. Then I base my position on a consideration of 1) reality, and 2) my will to uphold the good (life, synergy, communion, empathy, etc.) in struggle against the bad (cruelty, exploitation, violation, destruction, etc.). To the best of my ability, I strive to avoid formulating my worldview on a foundation of myths and artifice. Simpleminded as I am, I do not enjoy being wrong. 

Acceptance of my simplistic bias towards reality settled in gradually over the course of 2022, as I watched those around me turn tail on the factual and subside, complaisant, placated, into the prefab fantasies handed down to them by ruling dignitaries of the corporate patriarchal state. Though I’ve long been aware that men in power lie and the media disseminates their lies and for various reasons people find comfort in believing them, it was not until the past year that this awareness was thrust to the center of my understanding of manmade society. On three fronts I witnessed stampede-like retreats from reality that cemented my distrust in men’s empire of illusion (to repurpose the title of Chris Hedges’ excellent book). 

In March 2022, during the confirmation hearings that would secure her a seat on the Supreme Court of the United States, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was asked to define the word “woman.” “No, I can’t,” she responded. “I’m not a biologist.” Jackson’s elusive non-answer was as chilling as it was telling. Any straightforward statement of biological fact was off the table. Had she defined “woman” as an adult human female, she would have lost her nomination and suffered a swift, merciless social and professional death. Yet Jackson did not wholly concede to ideological lockstep and pronounce the catechism of “a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman, amen.” Because she is a woman, so of course she is intimately familiar with what a woman is, and if she had stated under oath that a woman is anyone claiming to be one, she would have been perjuring herself. Caught between the unutterable truth and an utter falsity, Jackson opted out by disqualifying herself from weighing in. And this forfeiting of reality in deference to the reigning obfuscating fiction – that sex is complicated and confusing beyond comprehension such that experts are required to explain it in all of its physiological, psychospiritual, metaphysical intricacy – was the Right Answer, the one men in power demanded of her and rewarded her for. Locked into a worldview that forbids her from speaking to the basic nature of her own being, Jackson was admitted into the upper ranks of male rule, to serve the state as a valuable token. 

Also in 2022: an octogenarian male who identifies as a lesbian was arrested for murdering his neighbor, dismembering her, and littering bits and pieces of her body around Brooklyn. The man had been previously convicted for murdering two other women, in 1963 and again in 1985. This summer he was quietly transferred into Rikers Island’s female jail facility. Incidentally, the female facility at Rikers Island made the news earlier in the year, after a male prisoner (who identifies as a woman) was convicted of raping a woman in the bathroom. In August 2022, a man was arrested on two counts of sexual assault he committed whilst housed in an Ontario women’s shelter. I could recite scores more news bites on the theme but no matter how many accumulate, their snowballing mass does nothing to shake official mainstream-liberal consensus, which insists that there is zero excuse for not opening women’s spaces to men who identify as women because these men pose zero threat to women because never has there ever been a man identifying as a woman who has harmed a woman in any way. Not in a women’s prison, nor in a women’s shelter, and certainly never in a women’s bathroom. 

Reality has no sway over the fictions men concoct. They are impervious to it. 

The same impotence of facts to disrupt agreed-upon fantasy was on show in the response to the covid-19 pandemic, particularly by the left-leaning professional class segment of the populace inclined to celebrate itself as “progressive.” Last year, during the initial roll out of the mass vaccination campaign, a central theme of public health messaging about the vaccines was that they would prevent transmission of the virus. By undergoing vaccination, the story went, you could protect not only yourself but your loved ones and your entire community; you’d be an Everyday Hero doing your part to Stop the Spread and Win the War against humanity’s viral rival. During a May 2021 television appearance, President Biden’s chief medical advisor Anthony Fauci assured viewers that, for the vaccinated, “[t]he risk is extremely low of getting infected, of getting sick, or of transmitting it to anybody else, full stop.” Since the vaccines’ effect on transmissibility was not tested during clinical trials, the theory that the vaccinated would not spread covid-19 was only that: a theory. Yet that did not stop (pharma-sponsored) public health agencies from launching a marketing psyop that mythologized the vaccinated as socially conscious, community-minded caring folks pitted against the murderous recklessness of selfish antisocial miscreants, conspiracy theorists whose disdain for science warped them into vectors of certain death. Appearing at CNN’s presidential town hall in October 2021, President Biden denounced objections to mandatory vaccination as amounting to a desire for the “freedom” to kill others with covid. For how they risked the lives of others, “antivaxxers” were deserving of condemnation and banishment. Famed leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky commented that the unvaccinated should “remove themselves from society” and perhaps even starve in pariahdom as punishment.

In the year since, both research data and real-world experience have undercut assertions that the vaccines prevent transmission. While vaccination may reduce transmissibility somewhat (though not much more so than immunity acquired through previous infection) by decreasing the likelihood of infection and the relative viral load, the vaccines do not “stop the spread.” Vaccinated people can still be infected, they can still get sick, they can still pass the virus on to others. Public opinion was, however, unmoved by these revelations. Rather than accept that humans have less control over disease (i.e., nature) than we’re entirely comfortable with, people clung to the belief system fed them by corporate media and compromised state authorities. Many carry on extolling the vaccines’ spread-stopping powers and the moral superiority of the vaccinated over irresponsible antivaxxers. The unvaccinated continue to be excluded from employment and social participation on the unscientific rationale that they endanger others. In reality, their exclusion is punitive, the penalty for noncompliance. 

But then reality is irrelevant. What matters is that everyone conforms to the story told by the powerful, even if it wanders far astray from the facts.  

Which brings us to Ukraine. Since the invasion of Russian forces in February, mainstream media in collaboration with U.S. empire has been churning out a neverending spate of pro-war propaganda, cannily weaving the narrative by which the American public is to understand the conflict. It’s a classic made-for-TV movie of a yarn they’ve spun, with a cartoonishly diabolical neo-Hitler (Putin) hurling random savagery down upon a scrappy underdog innocent victim (Ukraine), and a hero primed to ride in on his shiny white horse (or shinier yet: his Patriot missile) in principled defense of democracy, freedom and all that is right and good. Naturally, the hero in this Good vs. Evil fable is the U.S., with NATO as wingman. It is not a excusal of the Russian assault on the people of Ukraine to acknowledge that the conflict is more complicated. Military conflicts cannot be reduced so easily to Good vs. Evil, and anyone who tries to convince us otherwise is running a scam reliant on our cluelessness. In every war, there are baroquely convoluted histories of covert scheming by militarists and power-hungry men on all sides. Underlying agendas are a given. (For a helpful review of the historical context for Ukraine crisis, I highly recommend Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies’ War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict.) With the current war, history suggests that U.S. involvement and investment has less to do with concern for democracy, freedom, or Ukrainians than it does with preserving U.S. geopolitical hegemony. It also suggests that the Biden administration’s funneling of billions of dollars of weapons into Ukraine is not a charitable handout to the underdog. Instead, it is a money grab by the military industrial complex’s atrocity merchants, who reap recession-proof profits manufacturing endless war. 

Men in power are lying when they promise the American people that the war in Ukraine is the moral war, noble and necessary. The truth is that war is a dereliction of morality. All wars are male violence, and all are needless. There is no war that could not be avoided if the men who rule the world did not grapple for dominance through romanticized slaughter, and if the traffic in carnage were not such a cushy racket.

Regardless, the “good war” narrative has been embraced, or at least there is scarce public resistance to it. And again it is noteworthy that people on the left have shown themselves especially eager to dine from the state’s bottomless propaganda buffet. When Congress approved a $40 billion dollar aid package for Ukraine (over half of which went to military spending) in May, the only votes in opposition to massive war funding came from Republicans. On multiple occasions this year I’ve listened in alarm as people I know to have “Black Lives Matter” signs on their lawns and “Coexist” stickers on their Subarus griped about the state’s slowness to send U.S. troops into battle in Ukraine—never mind that escalating the conflict could spark nuclear holocaust. 

The end of the world is just one more reality to ignore. 

On the three fronts outlined above, delusion and fantasy seem immune to reality. Reality need not form the starting point for one’s arguments and it is of scarce use in contradicting falsehoods, since the very act of bringing it up is grounds for dismissal. References to unwelcome facts function as a “dogwhistle,” outing the dissident as ideologically deviant – “right wing” or a TERF, an antivaxxer, a conspiracy theorist or Putin puppet – and invalidating by default whatever it is s/he has to say. Arguing a fact-based challenge against the myths imposed by the powerful virtually guarantees that you will not be listened to. Reality has been rendered unspeakable. 

Likewise consistent is the way that the PR campaigns organized to promote transgenderism, the covid-19 vaccine push, and the war in Ukraine appeal to the target demographic through packaging acquiescence to falsehoods as virtuous. Denying the reality of biological sex is a kindness that signifies diversity and tolerance. Getting vaccinated to protect your community, whether or not the vaccine really prevents transmission, is coded as selfless sacrifice for the common good. Cheering on the war in Ukraine is shorthand for humanitarian sentiment, even if U.S. involvement is actually about reasserting hegemony and lapping up blood money. With each, the pledge to sustain an untruth gleams like a badge of an honor. The chance these campaigns offer to flaunt Good Person status is seductive, because one need exert minimal effort to be Good. All that’s required is conformist detachment from reality, a willingness to accept as truth exactly what you’re told. 

The male ruling class has plenty to gain from deluding the populace. Nearest to surface is the profit motive, dear to the heart of the corporate patriarchal state. The medical industrial complex raked in record profits because of the push for universal vaccination, while U.S.-backed arming of the Ukrainian military has meant a windfall for defense contractors like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. Nor can we forget the lucrative new industry that has blossomed around peddling cosmetic surgery and lifelong experimental hormone treatment to young people alienated from their bodies by a traumatically sexist culture. 

Power is another obvious motivator. State lies about Ukraine are in service of geopolitical power. At home, the powerful swindle us out of reality to inure us to falsehoods, eroding our aversion to duplicity so that we’re without critical faculties to question or resist top-down dictates. Instead we place our faith in authority and consent to be ruled. When people’s connection to the real world is so destabilized by a terrorizing deluge of nonfacts and pseudo-truths that they no longer feel competent to trust their own perceptions, interpet what is happening around them, or formulate independent analyses based on their own research or experience, they will turn in desperation to the masterminds of the status quo for the officially sanctioned view. It is difficult to imagine a more efficient colonization of the collective consciousness for the purpose of social control than to inculcate the belief that reality is extraneous, that the best anyone can do is buy into lies, regurgitate them, and dutifully enforce them among their peers. 

Yet there is something even more fundamental driving the mass abandonment of reality, a force deeper than capitalist avarice and state tyranny, since it seethes festering at the bottom of these institutions as well. 

Contemptus mundi, which means “contempt for the world,” is the principle of earthly renunciation that achieved its most explicit, exaggerated manifestations in medieval Christianity, though it has been a guiding theme of patriarchal ideologies both secular and religious since the Classical period. The doctrine of contemptus mundi calls on men to reject the material world in order to save their souls. The earth, and the life lived upon it, are denigrated as base, miserable, and corruptive. Wise men spent centuries penning gloomy diatribes against material reality, calling it “a desert,” “a vale of tears,” an “exile” and a “dangerous sea.” They bemoaned the miseries of living. Heat and hunger, storms and worms. An anonymous poet, likely a monk, writing in the 12th century scrawls the following execration of existence: “Life, stupid thing // Accepted only by fools // I reject you with all my heart. // For you are full of filth.” 

Man’s only hope of salvation from the fetid horrors of life on earth was to leave the world of mortal materiality and be received into heaven, a purely fantastical, immortal and immaterial otherworld that exists nowhere outside of men’s own heads. Performing a typical patriarchal reversal, he asserts that his made-up paradise is realer than the real world he despises. As in Descartes’ experiment in radical doubt, whereby he persuades himself that nothing exists besides his mind and God (the distinction between the two being slightly blurred), the substance of creation is eclipsed by the figments of men’s imagination. 

It is upon this hallucinatory, fear-propelled mission to sever himself from the real world and secure sanctuary in castles in the air that Man founds his vision of “progress.” Understanding this answers the question of why the fictions powerful men preach today are so readily taken as “progressive”—what Man has called progress, the destiny he has claimed for himself, is escape from reality. 

Contemptus mundi has pitched patriarchal civilization into a millennia-long offensive against real life. The hostilities are ongoing, and though ruling class males remain zealots for the crusade, there’s little to indicate they’re winning. The disastrous and pathetic consequences of Man’s outraged rejection of the material world surround us, apparent in our increasingly disembodied, screenbound way of life; in the “liberatory” mutilation of healthy bodies to recreate them in conformity to manmade fictions; and in the ruin of the biosphere, that base wasteland Man dreams himself destined to leave behind. What we are seeing now, from our vantage point poised on the edge of social collapse and ecological cataclysm, is that, in the war he has staged against reality, Man destroys himself, the victim of his own terminal deceptions. 

In 2022 I realized fully that it is self-delusion, above all, that has maddened the patriarchal mind to its current state of derangement. I have become convinced that to cultivate a reality-based worldview could itself be a radically feminist act. Adopting a pro-reality stance means not going along with bullshit to get along with the brainwashed, not allaying with anodyne untruths the fears and heartbreaks that plague us all as creatures alive in a world we don’t control, not stooping to falsehoods to console others. It is the paltriest possible kindness that depends on deceit to solace the afflicted. Lies do not serve “the greater good.” In truth, the flight from reality into male fantasies serves naught but male dominion, and even that it abets only in the short term, before Man blows himself away “progressing” off the planet. Refusing to follow men into the ether of their delusions, we find ourselves standing at last on solid ground, with the stability of the sure-footed, the clarity of those no longer racing after mirages. The simpleminded feminist commitment to reality is, for me, a defense of the earth, and of each living creature, the radiant whole of life—and because I love this world, I do not believe that there is any greater good. It’s that simple, really.

Aurora linnea is a radical lesbian (eco)feminist writer living at the ocean’s edge in the region of North America colonizers dubbed “Maine.” She strives to contribute to the global feminist struggle to end male dominion through poetic dissidence and uncompromising disloyalty to the necrophilic patriarchal empire presently destroying life on earth.