Snarky Behavior

Have you ever learned a word for the first time, and then been bombarded with that new word in all kinds of different places: books, magazines, newspapers, conversations or even commercials?

It feels like a conspiracy, like the world was witholding that word from you and just slipped it into the common venacular right under your nose.

Of course the more logical explanation is that you’re an unobservant simpleton. But we’d all prefer to believe the conspiracy.

This phenonmenon has a name: “primed implicit memory.” Implicit memory is a type of memory in which previous experiences aid in the performance of a task without conscious awareness of these previous experiences.

So, of course you’ve seen and heard that word before (the primer, like a coat of paint)… but once it has semantic meaning (that is, once you’ve clearly defined it’s meaning for yourself), then the word is transmitted into your conscious memory, turning from a process of recognition to recollection.

What does this have to do with anything?

Earlier this week I wrote about the sexy appeal of Libertarianism. The impetus of that article was my mind’s association (or, I suppose, prejudice) of the wealthy Georgetown elite mentality with Objectivism, a political philosophy that arrives at a rational conclusion of the inherent morality of greed and self-interest, and in turn, my mind’s association of Libertarians and Ayn Rand fan-boys. Combined with Ron Paul’s surging popularity, it seemed like a legitimate question to explore as a thought piece.

Putting aside the fairness or unfairness of that association, the fact that I thought to write about the popular appeal of Libertarianism felt like an original thought. Not, of course, that I would be the very first to recognize a general pattern, but at least that I was stumbling upon something that was certainly worthy of greater exploration.

And then today I read a book-review of Brink Lindsey’s The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture. Lindsey has also expressed the crux of his book’s argument– that America’s cultural wars are in their last throngs, resulting in a vaguely libertarian consensus consisting of personal freedoms on the left and economic freedoms on the right — in this month’s CATO Unbound.

So… as it turns out, it wasn’t an original thought. But my mind had been sufficiently primed to believe that it was, which makes the release of such a book seem perfectly timed. Moreover, it makes me want to do that weird Natalie Portman dance from Garden State so that I can feel like an original human being again.

So I’m headed to Borders to skim-read this book. But before I go, I’ll link you to this food for thought :

in places like China and Russia cultural libertarianism seems a far hotter
commodity, at least for those with the money to buy it, than political liberty.
Perhaps that libertarian consensus Brink Lindsey keeps talking about is far more powerful than anyone yet has given it credit for. Perhaps it, not neoconservatism, is now the driving force for ‘human freedom’ in the world — a very unpolitical freedom measured in nightclubs and bar tabs, designer shoes and designer drugs, underground parties and teepeeing trousers. Perhaps this is how America, growing scare quotes as it does, takes over the planet, instead of that mythical globalization that flattens the Earth and lifts all boats. Perhaps the great frustration we reap from fighting those who despise this force and its impact on the world as a matter of politics stem in part from the fact that our policy tools are blunted and made ridiculous by that very force itself, these increasingly ‘American’ emanations…not the end of history but its driver of endless change.