Metaphor For GOP Thinking

Andrew Sullivan posted this on The Daily Dish the other day.

From Sullivan and Wikipedia:

An ant mill is a phenomenon where a group of army ants separated from the main foraging party lose the pheromone track and begin to follow one another, forming a continuously rotating circle. The ants will eventually die of exhaustion. This has been reproduced in laboratories and the behaviour has also been produced in ant colony simulations.^[1] This phenomenon is a side effect of the self-organizing structure of ant colonies. Each ant follows the ant in front of it, and this will work until something goes wrong and an ant mill forms.^[2] An ant mill was first described by William Beebe who observed a mill 1,200 feet (365 m) in circumference. It took each ant 2.5 hours to make one revolution.^[3] Similar phenomena have been noted in processionary caterpillars and fish.^[4]

Sullivan remarks that this is a great metaphor for the long-term effects of “epistemic closure”.

The term, appropriated from philosophy, means (in terms of the political blogosphere) the tendency for conservative media to become untethered from reality — accepting no new ideas or entertaining or discussing in any meaningful way ideas which they disagree with.

Sounds about right.

-Chris