In a continuing series of columns featuring psychological themes, today’s topic is habituation – the process by which an organism decreases its response to any stimulus after repeated or constant exposure.
Disclaimer: I’m not a real doctor. Unless you consider “Dr.” Jill Biden a real doctor, in which case I am the wisest, most esteemed doctor in the world, by comparison. If you’d like to review my extensive experience with psychology, you can read my column from last Friday, now up at Martinsimpsonwriting.com. (Summary: I’ve watched Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting and several episodes of Frasier, and I dated a few crazy young women in college – alcohol and some deceptive attractiveness was involved – before I met my smokeshow wife in grad school and became the paragon of mental health that you see before you.)
Where was I? Oh yeah.
Like most psychological phenomena, habituation is often functional, helping one to navigate through daily life. For example, if you couldn’t “tune out” a loud air conditioner in your room, you’d go crazy. If you’re in a stuffy apartment, or standing near flatulent Fang-Fang-banger Eric Swalwell, going “nose blind” to bad odors is a good thing.
I experienced habituation from a very young age. When I was a kid, we moved to a house that backed up to railroad tracks – the Simpsons were never far from being in a country song, as regular readers may remember from Uncle Bob’s wild ride driving a tractor with flaming tires out of a smoking barn a few months ago.
Anyway, dad parlayed his great real estate instincts into buying a house with a train track in the back yard, and as it happened, a train came through every night at about 2 in the morning.
Because of course it did.
For the first week there, I woke up every night. Within a month, the train never woke me up again.
It’s a flexible phenomenon. Big city dwellers are habituated to street noises and ambulances. If they’re living in a one-party, Democrat-run city, they are quickly able to block out constant gunshots and pained screams of, “I’m dying! Why do we keep voting for this sh*t?! F**k Pritzker!” followed by agonized death rattles.
Put that same urbanite in a rural setting – if he manages to get out past the feral violent mobs bred by leftist crime policies – and the quiet will keep him awake all night.
But sometimes, habituation becomes a dysfunctional strategy; people get used to negative circumstances, and come to accept them as normal. When I was a kid, almost all the adults I knew smoked, and so did everyone in the movies, so when my parents gave us candy cigarettes as treats, we thought nothing of it.
I’m not making that up, you youngsters who don’t know how good you have it, and won’t stay off my lawn. We’d get little white candy sticks with a red tip on them, and we’d pretend to smoke them, as we prepared for an adult life of looking very cool, and then having a lung removed.
We were habituated.
Today, poor benighted souls who live in Dem-run cities drive past miles of filthy tents, walk past hundreds of supine junkies, and hop over mounds of dirty syringes that they don’t really see. They walk through wisps of vomit smells and clouds of slightly dissipated urine stench that they don’t really smell. And to them, that’s just a normal Tuesday.
They’re habituated to leftist rule.
I thought about habituation when I saw Pete Hegseth’s speech to the assembled military brass last week. Strong militaries thrive on functional, positive habituation. Quality training and discipline teaches soldiers to heighten their situational awareness, while at the same time shutting out negative distractions like fatigue, pain, and emotional stress.
Under our previous Cadaver in Chief (and several administrations before his), many elements of our military had become habituated to maladaptive behavior patterns. Bureaucrats and social justice warriors in uniform undertook idiotic pursuits such as understanding white rage, promoting DEI, and encouraging LGBTQ recruits to join, and focused more on fetishes than fighting. They produced recruiting videos featuring soldiers in drag, and others with a “the corporal has two mommies” theme.
They emphasized privates, more than training privates, and corporals, and sergeants.
When Hegseth came in, all service branches had been missing their recruiting goals for quite some time. Unexpectedly! And he has the tough job of re-habituating some of our military personnel.
He pledged to rip out the politics, and to focus on high standards that everyone would have to meet. “No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses, no more climate change worship, no more division, distraction, or gender delusions, no more debris….We are done with that sh*t.”
In what a good psychologist might consider a rough translation of the kind of cognitive behavioral therapy needed to counter-act negative habituation, Hegseth said, “It’s nearly impossible to change a culture with the same people who helped create or even benefited from that culture…. An entire generation of generals and admirals were told that they must parrot the insane fallacy that, ‘our diversity is our strength.’ Of course, we know our unity is our strength.”
If you haven’t read the transcript of his speech, you owe it to yourself to do so, because it was such a bracing dose of the truth, and a roadmap to a renewed, functional military, after years of watered-down social experimentation.
Hegseth has only been in his position for 8 months, but all of the services have already reached their yearly recruiting goals. Unexpectedly!
Because it’s Monday, I thought I’d leave you with a couple of feel-good news stories to start your week.
It’s been fun watching the good guys start winning again in Portland and Chicago, as Trump has deployed some National Guard troops in to protect ICE agents and facilities against the violent hoards of “mostly peaceful” protestors. Once again, the Dems have jumped onto the “10” side of a 90/10 issue.
I can’t see this ending well for them, because video is coming in daily, and showing who the good guys and the bad guys are. And that’s going to be an easy call for most Americans.
When the antifa thugs surrounded and rammed an ICE vehicle in Chicago, agents shot Miramar Martinez, an evil hag with a history of doxxing federal agents and inciting violence against them. Tragically, she survived the shooting, but was later arrested at a nearby hospital she had driven to for treatment.
One of the other drivers in the attack, Anthony Ruiz, was also arrested. Looking at his and Miramar’s mug shots puts you in mind of a dumber and less charismatic Charlie Manson and one of his homelier groupies.
Meanwhile, in Portland another antifa idiot got a little hilarious justice, but hopefully has a lot more coming to him. Or possibly her.
Let’s just go with “it.”
It’s a weirdo named Seth Todd, who identifies itself online as Apollo Toad, “just a lil gay non-binary toad and proud Antifa terrorist.” (Wait ‘til it finds out from leading Democrats that Antifa doesn’t exist, and is just an idea!) Todd’s pic looks like either an effeminate dude or a unsettlingly butch gal; either way, you can understand why it attends protest events dressed in an inflated frog costume.
(Let’s just say that there are no princes, or princesses, or pronoun-less prince-adjacent creatures lining up to kiss this frog.) (The judges would also have accepted, “This is one froggy that’s not likely to go a-courtin’.” Or at least not successfully.)
So Todd is toddling around outside the ICE facility with a clot of other miscreants and ne’er-do-wells and wastes of their parents’ tuition money, when a cop notices that the back of the frog costume contains a round vent with a fan drawing air into it. So the cop gives the air vent a very hearty shot of pepper spray.
And in about three seconds, that frog started hopping like it’d never hopped before!
I can only hope that an hour later – it’s eyes still burning and the frog costume ruined – it finally made it back to where it had parked. Only to find that it’s car had been…wait for it… toad!
I’m here all week, people. Happy Monday!
Hamas and Trantifa delenda est!
Martin Simpson 