I found myself on the wrong side of a unanimous informal criminal jury verdict almost a year ago.   A dozen friends of fifty years sat in judgment, either silent or indignant at my crime.   My punishment was banishment until death.  

“What is my actual crime?” I was impudent enough to ask one of them, since I had not been at the secret trial.  It was an apparently infuriating question coming from someone as obviously guilty and vicious as I am.

The couple of people who told me to shut up, for my own good, or to grow up, or to begin figuring out a way to heal the terrible harm I’d done to people who love me, were aggravating enough.  But the silent ones were worse.  Their silence was a reminder of how the world actually goes to hell, how lynch mobs always operate, how tyrants rise to power and rule.  Not a peep from these righteous souls, just silence.  Good people on both sides, on all sides, on every side — only you, sir, are the problem, you with your fucking filthy toilet bowl mouth.   We cannot forgive a fucking piece of shit with a fucking mouth like that.

In the end I finally understood my crime.  When you witness the rage, discomfort and dishonesty of people who need to be seen as perfect, it is humiliating to them.   Unless you admit that all the bad feelings were caused by you, that you alone are the angry, aggressive, threatening asshole who caused all the trouble, you have committed the crime of high treason.  You are in position to make them feel unbearably bad about themselves, to make them look bad to others.  There is no crime more serious to someone who must be perfect, on pain of eternal humiliation.  Either submit to their counterfactual accusation and take all blame or face the death penalty.  It really couldn’t be simpler.

So simple, in fact, that the logic of it is impossible to refute.  You live in terror of being seen as imperfect.  An articulate, credible witness is alive and well, loved and respected by people you love and respect.  You must make people believe the potential witness is a child blood drinking liar.  You have been the subject of an unfair, vicious, sneak attack, an operation that is ongoing and without end.   You convince people how hard you tried to make amends, how many times you apologized, how brutally all of your efforts were rebuffed.  You exploit any existing beliefs people have about the former friend who betrayed you so viciously.   You refuse to speak further about the painful, painful rejection by someone you’ve done nothing but love.  Loyal love is the only possible response to this kind of display of vulnerability and the expulsion of such a reprobate from the group of lifelong friends is necessary and proper.

The reason this works is that once people take sides, they get so invested in the belief system that they cease to care what is true.  Facts will not sway them, cause and effect become irrelevant.  They believe with a perfect righteousness that is infectious and undefeatable.   

This mechanism explains why 74,000,000 people who voted for a twice impeached serial liar, later convicted of sexual assault, his fraudulent university and fake charity shut down, his infidelity to all three of his wives well known, his pettiness and cruelty known to all, as well as his disloyalty to every loyal asslicker it has ever become convenient to disown, will probably get most of those 74,000,000 votes in 2024.   Those who love him DO NOT CARE about the so-called truth.  Thus is it always with a charismatic tyrant who will kill as many people as need to die in order to prove that he would never harm a fly.