 Insanity from the inside The blogger Superb Owl went mad, for a while. “After an intense LSD experience, I had what I’ve previously called a ‘spiritual crisis,’” he writes. A doctor would have probably diagnosed psychosis. Superb Owl masked the symptoms, but was a “confused mess.” After two years, he escaped the disordered thinking, only to fall into depression. The whole thing was “an experience I wouldn’t wish on anyone, but I’m strangely grateful for it,” he says. He discusses what psychosis feels like from the inside. The key aspect, he says, is that your beliefs about the world are loose, unstable. When something unusual happens to someone, like a car following you for a few corners, most of us can shrug it off as coincidence. But not a psychotic person. “A psychotic episode would typically start with one of these coincidences, leading me to concoct a bizarre hypothetical explanation,” he says. “It feels like you’ve broken through into a new world, or like you’ve been let in on some cosmic secret. It can be exhilarating or terrifying, inspiring or paralyzing.” The Trump trap Donald Trump has been an electoral drag for Republicans. He underperformed congressional Republicans in both 2016 and 2020, and in the time he has been the face of the party Democrats have exceeded expectations in midterms, gubernatorial races, and special elections. That remained true last week, when Democrats “had a pretty darn good night,” the politics analyst Nate Silver writes, which is “part of a consistent pattern.” But, says Silver, the problem for the GOP is that their results do not improve without him on the ballot. They select poor candidates, often Trump-endorsed, and have unpopular policies, such as on abortion, but lack Trump’s celebrity and enthusiastic turnout. So “they often wind up with weird nominees that repel swing voters and motivate Democratic turnout without exciting their own base.” It is, he says, “one hell of a devil’s bargain: a choice between mediocre results with Trump on the ballot or outright poor results without him.” Think global, vote local Local elections seem like small beer. And voters treat them as such: Just 18% of the electorate turned up to vote in the runoff to determine the mayor of Austin, Texas, last year, between the liberal Celia Israel and the conservative Kirk Watson. “In a city of one million people, Celia Israel lost the mayoral race by less than 1,000 votes,” writes the local-government blogger Ryan Puzycki. It’s true that U.S. President Joe Biden can decide to launch a nuclear weapon or invade Guatemala. But “he can’t find you childcare, or dispatch an ambulance, or cut your property taxes, or make it easier to build more housing,” says Puzycki. These things seem unimportant, until you need an ambulance or want to buy a house. But U.S. voters, asked to vote on everything from school governors to county judges, tend not to bother. The electorate needs to become informed at the local level, and to exercise its democratic power: “Joe Biden can’t pave your potholes,” he says. “You’ve got to go to City Hall for that.” |
