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This is EXACTLY the same spew my college professor PhD type associates use. They believe it too!

Jeepers, my father-in-law could have written this verbatim! LOLOL, I love him dearly, but he is a "Leftist crank" with whom one cannot have a rational conservation. :^) [My husband agrees.]

I gather the reason for this is — he is living in an alternative, or "second reality"; the screed posted by DomainMaster is the detailed description of it. It is the "reality" being drilled into college kids everywhere nowadays — even though all it is, when you boil it down, is a totally artificial cognitive construction having questionable contact with the real world of human existence and experience.

It is also the favored worldview of the MSM, the self-selected "intelligentsia," the Obama administration, and "fashionable" people everywhere.

Please note the screed is nothing but a series of allegations, with not one proven "fact." These are the presuppositions on which the second reality is built. They may not be questioned!

Anyhoot, the term "second reality" comes to me from the philosopher Eric Voegelin. It refers to a psychic/social phenomenon brilliantly explored by three great German-language novelists: Robert Musil (The Man without Qualities), Heimito von Doderer (The Demons), and Elias Canetti (Auto-da-Fe). The three novels are simply superb — and often totally harrowing.

I have found it virtually impossible to "debate" with a denizen of Second Reality. As Voegelin put it (in his article, "Debate and Existence"):

...no agreement, or even an honest disagreement could be reached, because the exchange of argument was disturbed by profound difference of attitude with regard to all fundamental questions of human existence — with regard to the nature of man, to his place in the world, to his place in society, to his relation to God. Rational argument could not prevail because the partner to the discussion did not accept as binding for himself the matrix of reality in which all specific questions concerning our existence as human beings are ultimately rooted; he has overlaid the reality of existence with another mode of existence that Robert Musil has called the Second Reality. The argument could not achieve results, it had to falter and peter out, as it became increasingly clear that not argument was pitched against argument, but that behind the appearance of a rational debate there lurked the difference of two modes of existence, of existence in truth and existence in untruth. The universe of rational discourse collapses ... when the common ground of existence in reality has disappeared.

Thus Second Realities "cause the breakdown of rational discourse." Voegelin noted that they are "a comparatively recent phenomenon":

They have grown in the modern centuries, roughly since 1500, until they have reached, in our own time, the proportions of a social and political force which in more gloomy moments may look strong enough to extinguish our civilization — unless, of course, you are an ideologist yourself and identify civilization with the victory of Second Reality.

As you wrote, narses: "God help us all!"

Thank you so much for writing!