{"id":61827,"date":"2022-02-09T08:14:05","date_gmt":"2022-02-09T13:14:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=61827"},"modified":"2022-02-09T08:14:05","modified_gmt":"2022-02-09T13:14:05","slug":"the-revolt-of-the-imagination-part-one-notes-on-belbury-syndrome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=61827","title":{"rendered":"The Revolt of the Imagination, Part One: Notes on Belbury Syndrome"},"content":{"rendered":"<header class=\"entry-header\">\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ecosophia.net\/the-revolt-of-the-imagination-part-one-notes-on-belbury-syndrome\/\">The Revolt of the Imagination, Part One: Notes on Belbury Syndrome<\/a><\/h3>\n<p class=\"entry-title\">Maybe it\u2019s true that life really does imitate literature. Over the last week or so, certainly, a detail from one of my favorite works of imaginative fiction played out at least twice in the real world, with microphones live and cameras rolling. I\u2019m thinking here first of German Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach, who promoted vaccine mandates with this bit of fascinating logic:\u00a0 \u201cNo one will be vaccinated against their will; the vaccine mandates will simply lead people, ultimately, to accept voluntary vaccination.\u201d\u00a0 See if you can find a way to parse those words that makes sense of them. I can tell you already that it doesn\u2019t help to read them in the original German.<\/p>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p>Then there\u2019s Jen Psaki, spokesflack-in-chief for poor bumbling Joe Biden. She was asked by a reporter at a recent presser about the people, and of course there are a great many of them, who are increasingly worried about the future of the United States under Biden\u2019s inept leadership.\u00a0 Her response? \u201cMy advice to everyone out there who\u2019s frustrated, sad, angry, pissed off, feel those emotions, go to a kickboxing class, have a margarita.\u201d For sheer crazed detachment from the world the rest of us inhabit, that\u2019s hard to beat, especially when you recall that her boss campaigned saying he would, you know, fix the country\u2019s problems. Maybe her words make more sense in German, or for that matter in pig Latin, but I doubt it.<\/p>\n<p>What all this brings to mind, of course, is the climactic scene in C.S. Lewis\u2019s tremendous fantasy\u00a0<em>That Hideous Strength<\/em>. The villains of the piece, a collection of arrogant technocrats among whom Psaki and Lauterbach would fit in seamlessly, are gathered at their headquarters at Belbury for a banquet&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Revolt of the Imagination, Part One: Notes on Belbury Syndrome Maybe it\u2019s true that life really does imitate literature. Over the last week or so, certainly, a detail from one of my favorite works of imaginative fiction played out at least twice in the real world, with microphones live and cameras rolling. I\u2019m thinking [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[32630,15417,1758],"class_list":["post-61827","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-belbury-syndrome","tag-ecosophia","tag-john-michael-greer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61827"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61827\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61828,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61827\/revisions\/61828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}