The Amway of the Mind

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. –Marcus Aurelius

Kind of amusing to see an argument over who’s to blame for a snowstorm that didn’t happen. The idea that you were promised bad weather, and it didn’t arrive, so you have been put upon, is comic when considered dispassionately. Then again, I’ve seen the internet. No one on the internet is dispassionate. Some start out pretty fair, but eventually out pops the cloven hoof.

It’s especially piquant to see arguments about a snowstorm that didn’t happen when you know for a dead cert it did happen. The wind blew 50 MPH, which made it hard to measure what fell. It was somewhere between sixteen inches and two feet at my house in western Maine. When sixteen inches of densely packed snow is delivered at Jimmy-Carter-era highway speeds, you notice.

For the first time since I’ve lived here in Maine, I had to begin shoveling snow while I was still standing inside my foyer. I opened the front door, and there was six inches of snow against it, even though the door lives beneath an eight foot overhang. It took a little while to simply shovel my way to a place where the crystal blue sky was above me. That was unusual.

Blizzards are funny. Like city dwellers, blizzards just put snow anywhere they like, without a care for the neighbors. There was no snow on my roof to speak of, because the wind blew so hard that it couldn’t linger in the open. On one side of the car, you could walk up to it and open the door. On the leeward side, the snow was level with the roof. The blizzard had a sense of humor, and it filled in all the slit trenches I’d dug in the snow that came before. Snow likes equanimity.

Where my driveway met the road, the snow was up to my chest. It was compact stuff, too, and it required you to stand in one place for a long time and throw the snow some distance to make headway. It was honest work, and I didn’t mind it. One chews a mental cud during such exertions. I wondered what frame of mind would make people angry about a storm that didn’t come. I wondered more about anger about a storm that did come, but you denied its existence.

My countrymen live in an interesting world. This world is not real. They did not say that the storm did not come to them in their concrete dovecotes. They said that the storm did not exist because it did not happen to them, and meant it. More to the fact, they said the storm did not happen because it did not happen in the imaginary world they inhabit, composed solely of the media they consume.

I am not real to those people, because I am not on television. They have joined an Amway of the mind. They sell their worthless factual surfactants only to each other. Eventually, when that doesn’t work, they end up selling their intellectual soap to themselves, but still think they’re going to get rich on selfie commissions.

Every once in a while, they’ll invite someone who looks impressionable to join their little covens, but for the most part, it’s a closed shop. You do not exist because you do not buy their soap, and sell it back to them in return.