What if political and social reality were not what we know it to be?

WEIRD Western Culture is, in and of itself, a mega moral matrix.  It subsumes, encompasses, and forms the scaffolding for, the liberal and conservative moral matrices, grand narratives, and visions. It is the water in which all ideologies, moralities, world views, etc., of Western culture are suspended. 

It is a GRAND grand narrative that forms the basic assumption set, conventional wisdom, and foundational truths about human nature at the individual level and at the group level upon which all other thinking rests,including our collective sense of the basic properties of the dynamic, emergent, complex system, that is the social world: how it operates, what’s “good” about it, and what’s “bad” about it, and who are its villains and heroes..

It is, itself, a consensual hallucination; a closed epistemic system that answers all of its own questions.  

It defines pretty much everything that “everybody knows.”

WEIRD Western Culture defines reality as we know it.

What if the consensual hallucination of Western culture is wrong?  What if some (many? most? all?) of the fundamental ground truths that we THINK we know about ourselves and our place in the world, were different from what they are?

How would the world be different? How would we perceive ourselves? What would liberalism and conservatism look like? What would we be arguing about? What would our priorities be? Would the hot button issues we currently fight about the same? Different? If different, how? What would they be?

The answer to those questions, of course, would depend on exactly which fundamental truth(s) that we all take for granted were different.  So, just for the sake of argument, I’ll make up one up. 

What if the following hypothetical statement that everybody knows is obviously false was a fundamental assumption, an essential element, of the consensual hallucination that underlies all other assumptions?

Republican is the party of Civil Rights and Social Justice; Democrat is the Party of racism, slavery, enslavement (i.e., serfdom), and oppression.

The world would be different, would it not?  It would be completely upside down from the way it currently is. The good guys would be the bad guys and the bad guys would be the good guys.  Everything we think about ourselves and each other would be colored, tinged, influenced, by that one, single, basic assumption. That one lonely idea, all by itself, would, literally, change our world.

How weird would THAT be?

I mean seriously.  Stop reading for a moment, pause, take a deep breath, and ponder that idea.

The mind reels, does it not?

So here’s the M. Night Shyamalan, Sixth Sense, surprise twist at the end of the story:  

The hypothetical, what-if, just-for-the-sake-of-argument, scenario is  ACTUALLY TRUE.

It is factually, empirically, historically, irrefutable, undeniably, TRUE, that Republican is the Party of Civil Rights and Social Justice and Democrat is the Party of racism, slavery, enslavement (i.e., serfdom), and oppression.

I know what some of you might be thinking.  And in case you are, I’ll respond:  it is equally, undeniably, FALSE, that at any point the  racists within the parties, or the ideologies of the parties, or the parties themselves, switched sides.The so called “Southern Strategy” is NOT true.  It never happened. .