I crave the single narrative that will make everything clear: Everything is race. Everything is class. Everything is moral rot caused by godlessness. They say that fundamentalism is rigid and authoritarian. I say to them: Yes! I want fundamentalism. Please wrap me in that rigidity. Otherwise, I have no coherent self.
Catastrophizing is my mind-set. Catastrophizing is pure: Society is totally corrupt. The “system” is totally rotten. I am terrified by ambiguity and ambivalence, the idea that the glass might be only half full. I seize on the extreme example of anything and take it to be the typical case. In this way I create my truth. An immigrant committed murders, so immigrants are murderers.
People are not defined by individual traits but by group ones. Individual persons are too complicated, but groups are abstract and easy to stereotype. Every human being gets reduced to some category, preferably the cunning ones I despise: the libs, white males.
