Pandemic-era instability drove people toward spectacular distractions and cosmic victimhood

Evidence

It’s tough to live in a moment when so many truths that had been sold as settled suddenly become wobbly and wavy under our feet. It’s especially tough at a time when a great deal else feels uncertain: the possibility of owning a home, or scraping together enough money for soaring rents, or holding on to any given job, or even knowing how much the basics of life are going to cost week to week. It’s all tilting and rolling, and so much, like the assumed predictability of seasons, will never be stable again, at least not for several generations, and that is in a best-case scenario. All of this destabilization places demands on us: to change, to reassess, and to reimagine who we need to become. It should not be a surprise that a moment this demanding is conjuring up some extreme behaviors and apparitions. It should not be a surprise that, instead of looking squarely at what has been revealed in wave after wave of unveiling—the nurses forced to wear garbage bags instead of proper protective gear; the cool hatred in Derek Chauvin’s eyes as he pressed his weight onto George Floyd’s neck; the perversion of the priests; the skies stained orange from wildfires—many are opting for some rather spectacular distractions. Including the distraction of casting themselves as cosmic victims of every crime against humanity of the past five hundred years combined. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 870

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘cosmic victims’ claim ties to Klein’s Mirror World metabolism thesis — grievance about real precarity gets redirected into appropriated victimhood. — connects to: Traumatic crises immediately spike public appetite for prophecy and prophecy-related searches — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic…, 772