Think of Absurdities and Atrocities as the two crusts of a cookie sandwich. The crusts are the most visible part of the sandwich and the strongest of the layers. They hold the cookie together; the crusts perform the roles of protector and presenter. The cookie sandwich would not exist without the crusts; yet, the cookie sandwich by design requires the filling. The filling is the reason that the outer crusts exist.
We are borrowing our ideas from a phrase attributed to Voltaire: If you can be made to believe in absurdities, you can be made to commit atrocities. Translations of the French origin do vary. However, the meaning remains intact...that irrational beliefs are the precursors to irrational actions. We want to emphasize the first part of the famous quote. Instead of placing blame for a people's beliefs on the outside, from a source higher than themselves, from a force stronger than the people, we should highlight that people must be willing to believe. The willingness is necessary to the force applied. No propaganda tool is successful unless its target is prepared and ready and pliable.
Think about a child's willingness to believe in sparkly fairies and helpful elves and benevolent figures like Santa Claus. This willingness comes from the natural curiosity of the young, minds that are open to explore ideas because all ideas seem possible. Unless they've lived with persistent abuse and neglect, children have not yet faced repeated and relentless disappointments, have not become convinced by opposition or contrary evidence that their ideas are silly. Children are impressionable because they have not established an inflexible set of beliefs or an absolutist's wall against outsiders' ideas. But children are unlikely to commit without question the atrocities that other adults force on them. However, that is another topic, one about indoctrination and exploitation.
Adults cannot be coerced by brute force to believe ideas; they believe the ideas they are ready to accept. Adults have lived the disappointments, losses, struggles, deprivations, joys, highs and lows of emotions, failures and successes of their pursuits. From their experiences, they've learned that much is outside their immediate control -- events like tornados and floods, stockmarket crashes and wars. Adults know experientially that some other people are not trustworthy, that goodness and evil are often difficult to recognize. Whereas children are impressionable because they feel happy when new ideas and places give them chances to explore, adults are impressionable on stricter terms. They must feel comfortable. The whys and whens and hows matter a great deal to whether adults are open to new ideas.
For example. Many adults can be taught to believe that some groups are subhuman...assuming they were not indoctrinated as children to believe that Absurdity. In that case, the belief is an internalized and embedded bias. We are aware of this Absurdity from the historical facts of Nazi Germany and Stalin's Russia. But we are hearing the Absurdity everywhere in the USA...now, just as we know the Absurdity was accepted two hundred years ago during legal slavery and the genocide of indigenous tribes. If you are on social media, you've read them...replies to political and religious posts are evidence of the Absurdity. They are invading us. They are vermin. They are unnatural and stupid. They are deviant by nature. They cannot be educated. They prefer crime and violence to peace and harmony. They don't love their children and want to harm our children. They stink as if they cannot wash the smell away. They are lazy and force us to take care of them. They steal from the rest of us. They control our streets during the night. They don't look like us.
Why would any adult be willing to accept -- aloud or silently -- that a group of human beings is subhuman? That a particular group is by nature and upbringing unworthy of our Constitutional Rights, of the best our society offers to others. From where does this willingness, this impressionability, come? We find some answers to that in our current political, economic, religious, and social environment.
Americans are falling behind, and this has been a fact for at least two decades. And we know this to be a fact. Even Americans who do not travel and experience other societies realize that their own parents or grandparents were happier and healthier. They had more choices and freedoms. They were better prepared for life. They built financial stability even when they had to start from scratch. Putting aside the outliers, the stories of generational wealth and generational trauma like poverty and violence, the fact is generally and widely understood. Americans in 2025 are worse off than they were in 1970. Public education, the costs of living like housing and healthcare and college, wages and job benefits, infrastructure and innovation, personal and national debts, family and community relationships -- Costs and Losses, resistance to change, and resentments are much higher. A few at the top of the social structure are benefitting; some Americans are ekeing out an existence; some are thriving by adapting quickly to the changes; others are experiencing unimaginable suffering.
One factor that upsets the general truth is crime rates. Violent crime across most communities is far lower now than in 1970 because our nation has chosen to build a private system of prisons that isolates us from our social responsibilities. We've traded social programs that help families and workers to thrive and help themselves for mass incarceration. No matter that mass incarceration is more expensive than the social programs and that mass incarceration creates wealth for only a few. Just put Them away. We created a short-term solution and ignored the long-term consequences of mass incarcerations. The lessons have not been learned; mass incarerations are now the MAGA solution to immigrant populations. The hallmark of their racism and bigotry. Because, as of July 2025, we are witnessing the regime using ICE to kidnap and incarcerate mostly brown people, no matter their citizenship or criminal status. So...one of the long-term consequences of four decades of mass incarcerations for criminal behaviors is that the USA has normalized putting human beings away where they cannot be a burden on our neighborhoods.
Americans have become lazy in their thinking. Whether closing their minds because they are religious absolutists or doing so because they resent all challenges to their familiar ways, many Americans have no critical thinking skills. They traded reading and discussing literature, talking daily with their coworkers and neighbors, participating in townhalls and classroom debates, reading a variety of newspapers, and dinner-table talk for entertainment on a mass scale via television and the internet. They've chosen to be fed rather than to seek knowledge. Sit in a busy restaurant and observe the number of people who are scrolling through their phone apps instead of talking with others. Obviously, books and newspapers and informative media are available online. But are Americans accessing these non-print reading materials or merely clicking on headlines and reading quick colorful posts? Americans are doing the latter. They don't click on the links to sources like research documents and journalistic articles. They use confirmation bias to scroll for the short post that attracts their attention, bypassing stories that challenge their beliefs. Americans are no longer the explorers and the curious, the creative problem-solvers, or the insatiable questioners. This is all by choice.
Americans are divided from each other by gaps larger than the quality of their ideologies. The 1960s and 1970s was the last era in which all political parties in Congress would work together on policies and vote on legislation by margins like 70 to 30. Before the Christian Nationalist movement rose to power in the Reagan era, churches in communities across the nation would work together. Collaboration for problem-solving was the acceptable norm for adults in Congress and in religious associations. That era was when an entire class of Americans could own property while saving for emergencies and retirement as well as sending the children to college. Now, neighborhoods are separated from each other by walls and gates, by the quality of their schools, by the absence or presence of chemical plants and warehouses, by high-traffic roadways and large corporate shopping centers, by access to public transportation and isolated suburbs.
For example, a resident of Clovis, New Mexico, a small town that exists on its military and ranching industries, is not like all the other residents. The last four decades shows how a small town became divided into clearly defined neighborhoods -- via its full commitment to the wealthier residents, the surge of poorer versus wealthier churches, the neglect in appearances and maintenance of one side of town versus the other side, the tolerance of landlord negligence, the loss of good jobs outside the school system, the unfair housing costs and discriminatory (silent) rental policies, the obvious loss of a thriving middle class outside the active-duty and retired military and school system, long-standing bigotry and racism, a school system that perpetuates the bigotry and poverty because its staff is mostly locally harvested, and a thriving dominant right wing MAGA religious group. This is all by choice, not by coercion. The Absurdities are thriving in Clovis, New Mexico, because the people are either perpetuating them or tolerating them. Resistance is close to non-existent.
Americans are also primed to accept Absurdities because of a persistent drumbeat of misinformation. Again, no one person or group is having misinformation forced into their thinking. We as adults choose what we read, what we listen to, what we see, and how we respond. All emotional responses aside, Americans have learned to avoid the stories and ideas that challenge them. How is that possible? The information media over the last few decades has thrived and multiplied. But fewer and fewer owners of those media outlets means fewer and fewer actual challenges to disinformation and lies. Americans are in reality living in a monopolized society. A few corporations own the majority of all grocery businesses. A few corporations own the majority of urban rental properties. A few corporations own the majority of entertainment and banking services. A few corporations own the majority of profit-seeking news and information outlets. This is one reason that billionaires exist. We not only have fewer choices than our parents had, we've come to expect fewer choices. We accept without question what our political tribe tells us, the prices and quality of our groceries, the banking fees and housing costs. The only times in which we question what we see is when our political or religious tribe encourages it during election seasons -- but those politicians and preachers are usually asking us to question the facts, not our beliefs. Their position is, Beliefs, no matter how Absurd, are more important than Facts. This is all by choice, not by force. This willingness to believe the Absurdities is the filling in the cookie sandwich.
This willingness to believe in Absurdities is the reason that people can be convinced to commit Atrocities. As to the Atrocities, we will leave that for another post.