“Nothing is inevitable,” Solnit says. “I use the word ‘evitable’ often.” It’s a familiar idea, that the far right creates chaos in order to distract and thereby upturn productive change, but Solnit dwells on the mechanics: “Authoritarianism always sees fact and truth as delivered by journalism, by history and by science as rival sources of power. Those are radically democratic things. You can be a king or a commoner, and the rules of gravity are still the same. So they attempt to undermine those things.” The politics of chaotic spectacle, disinformation and outright untruth leaves you endlessly trying to prove gravity, your own priorities derailed. The pattern is similar to that in an abusive relationship: it doesn’t matter what you say, and it doesn’t matter whether or not gravity exists. The purpose is to lock you into the engagement so that it becomes your reality.
. . . “I often quote my friend Bill McKibben [the environmentalist]. We were sitting on a concrete floor at an activist space during the Paris climate treaty process [the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015]. Somebody walked up and asked him a question he gets asked all the time. ‘What’s the best thing I can do as an individual?’ He said, ‘Stop being an individual.’ You may have your own quirky playlist and eye-makeup techniques, but you also have this solidarity. When you act, you act with others.”
Combine throttled to non-existent critical thinking skills, normalized and profitable narcissistic and Machiavellian behaviors and a zero-sum based just world perspective and you get these ‘individuals’ lapping up the hollow authoritarianism we are dealing with today.
As you said, they cannot understand why anyone would do anything for someone else unless they benefited directly. It is a transactional mindset due to the traits mentioned above, and it explains why they also can’t tolerate the idea that anyone else should get help to achieve the goals/material items they’ve achieved/obtained themselves. They truly believe that someone else’s gain comes at a cost to them. Student loan forgiveness, reproductive rights, and every government funded social program are examples.
It is a mindset trapped in binary thinking with no tolerance, recognition, and acceptance of nuance or context. ‘Facts don’t care about your feelings’ lays it bare.