Sentimentality

It hit me that sentimentality, which appears to be an overabundance of emotion, is really a lack.  It is to honest and mature emotionality what so-called ADD/ADHD is to healthy attention. Why do they give uppers to kids who are already bouncing off the walls?  Because their excessive activity is related to the inability to focus, which is related, effectively, to inner dullness and lack of energy.  You put them on speed, and they become normal.  They have to be accelerated to get there, not slowed down.

Likewise sentimentality, which surrounds us, is a lack of substance.  When I see something like “love is all you need”, or whatever they spelled out at the Superbowl, I see vapidity.  I see cotton candy.

We have become a nation which loves to have its emotions manipulated.  It has perhaps always been so.  I don’t know.  I haven’t lived in any other time, that I can remember, but as just one example I just watched “Slumdog Millionaire”, and it could not have been a more American ending.  Yes, it was set in India, but it was sugar coated.  Their movies may well be like that too–everybody loves a happy ending–but it seems to me the task of a genuinely Liberal culture is meeting and understanding life on its own terms.

For every hero there are many losers.  I cannot look at the poverty in India and not think that from 1948, when they got their independence (thereabouts) until 1990 or so, they pursued socialist programs to elevate the poor. These efforts were miserable failures.  About 1990, they got the government out from the middle of everything, and implemented free market reforms.  As they said in that movie Bombay became Mumbai.

China pursued a Communist agenda over roughly the same time frame.  They pursued it much more vigorously.  Far, far more people died, were tortured, were imprisoned for political crimes, and were forced to live lives of abject fear, and in the end, they had to implement some free market reforms.  China now is much more akin to a Fascist economy than that of Communism.  They retain, of course, a disdain for Fascists, because truth, common sense, the OBVIOUS, are all punished very vigorously.  This is how the mediocre protect their infantile egos, and of course their police-backed claims on absolute tyrannical power, which is used against the People, and contrary to most of their interests.

But Socialism appeals to sentiment.  Wouldn’t it be NICE if. . . .

Mature people deal with the world as it is.  Fools hyperventilate about how it should be, act as if it were the way they think it should be, and are stupid and craven enough to be surprised when water, again, flows downhill.