Mad World Preamble

Regular readers of this blog understand that for a decade plus, my thinking has been darkened and clouded by impending disaster regarding multiple, interlocking dilemmas: epistemological crisis, social disintegration, periodic financial crashes impoverishing tens of millions of people at a time, ecological collapse and mass extinction stemming from climate change, and at least two bits of irrational mischief (an obvious euphemism) before we all take a dirt nap and the human species goes extinct alongside most others. The first bit of mischief is the doomsday sort, meaning that, in keeping with dystopian, fictional narratives being reliable predictions of actuality, recognition that our time is severely limited will enable some psychopath with his or her finger on the button to rationalize “We’re all nearly spent, so fuck it. Let’s first convert some large portion of the Middle East into a sheet of glass.” Once mutually assured destruction (MAD) is loosed, the second bit will be to convert the entire globe into a lifeless sphere. No doubt this is a worst case scenario, but the necessary dominoes are lined up and ready to topple, and 2020 has already handed us several severe perturbations to make the endgame more likely with each passing disastrous month. It hasn’t quite happened yet and outcomes may take years or decades to fully manifest. Still, eternal optimists offer hope in defiance of reason that we can still rescue ourselves from self-defeat; I’m not so sanguine.

My conclusion (drawn more than once) that the world has again fallen into madness is the central point here. Whereas previous instances were major disruptions leading to political regime change, world wars, genocides, etc., each eventually concluded and what life remained went on. This iteration could well be different. My warning is not perpetual fearmongering that politicians practice. Electoral politics keep raising specters of insecurity to be solved by each incoming administration but then never manage to be resolved. Indeed, that’s the condition of our industrial, technocratic civilization: processes and problems have grown too massive, intractable, and instititionalized to be managed even in sane and stable times. Rather, my warning is about understanding death stalking us best as possible. I also offer no solutions.

Over the years, I’ve written several multipart series of posts that address my conclusion directly and many more one-offs that nibble at the margins. The main ones are The Frailty of Reason, Dissolving Reality, and Pre-Extinction Follies, all (IMO) worth a read. As I contemplate our situation in mid-2020, I had in mind to write another multipart series but have found myself unable to gather disparate thoughts under one cohesive theme or title. So I’ve decided to break with my own habits and instead offer this preview of drafts already begun — at least insofar as I can map them now.

• Unitary Consciousness. My rumination on the misapplication of the scientific method’s divide-and-conquer strategy for understanding reality and the mind.
• Making Sense and Sensemaking. An exploration of fascinating yet frustrating attempts to draw conclusions about the world we inhabit.
• Align Your Ideology! A survey of historical instances of madness overtaking us at the level of whole nations or societies.

Much as I would prefer to tie these together under one title, nothing coalesced in my thinking to allow for tight integration. Nor do I have an order or schedule in mind. I’ll chip away at it, more for my own purposes than to achieve influence or notoriety. All the same, posts will be published here for whatever value you may garner.

Cranky Old Men

Most of us are familiar with a grandpa, uncle, or father who eventually turns into a cranky old man during late middle age or in his dotage. (Why is it a mostly male phenomenon?) In the last three decades, Clint Eastwood typecast himself as a cranky old man, building on lone-wolf characters (mostly cops, criminals, and cowboys) established earlier in his career. In real life, these guys spout talking points absorbed from mainstream media and narrative managers, or if they are truly lazy and/or can’t articulate anything coherently on their own, merely forward agitprop via e-mail like chain mail of yore. They also demonstrate remarkably forgivable racism, sexism, and bigotry, such as Eastwood’s rather enjoyable and ultimately redeemed character in the film Gran Torino. If interaction with such a fellow is limited to Thanksgiving gatherings once per year, crankiness can be tolerated fairly easily. If interactions are ongoing, then a typical reaction is simply to delete e-mail messages unread, or in the case of unavoidable face-to-face interaction, to chalk it up: Well, that’s just Grandpa Joe or Uncle Bill or Dad. Let him rant; he’s basically harmless now that he’s so old he creaks.

Except that not all of them are so harmless. Only a handful of the so-called Greatest Generation (I tire of the term but it’s solidly established) remain in positions of influence. However, lots of Boomers still wield considerable power despite their advancing age, looming retirement (and death), and basic out-of-touchness with a culture that has left them behind. Nor are their rants and bluster necessarily wrong. See, for instance, this rant by Tom Engelhardt, which begins with these two paragraphs:

Let me rant for a moment. I don’t do it often, maybe ever. I’m not Donald Trump. Though I’m only two years older than him, I don’t even know how to tweet and that tells you everything you really need to know about Tom Engelhardt in a world clearly passing me by. Still, after years in which America’s streets were essentially empty, they’ve suddenly filled, day after day, with youthful protesters, bringing back a version of a moment I remember from my youth and that’s a hopeful (if also, given Covid-19, a scary) thing, even if I’m an old man in isolation in this never-ending pandemic moment of ours.

In such isolation, no wonder I have the urge to rant. Our present American world, after all, was both deeply unimaginable — before 2016, no one could have conjured up President Donald Trump as anything but a joke — and yet in some sense, all too imaginable …

If my own father (who doesn’t read this blog) could articulate ideas as well as Engelhardt, maybe I would stop deleting unread the idiocy he forwards via e-mail. Admittedly, I could well be following in my father’s footsteps, as the tag rants on this blog indicates, but at least I write my own screed. I’m far less accomplished at it than, say, Engelhardt, Andy Rooney (in his day), Ralph Nader, or Dave Barry, but then, I’m only a curmudgeon-in-training, not having fully aged (or elevated?) yet to cranky old manhood.

As the fall presidential election draws near (assuming that it goes forward), the choice in the limited U.S. two-party system is between one of two cranky old men, neither of which is remotely capable of guiding the country through this rough patch at the doomer-anticipated end of human history. Oh, and BTW, echoing Engelhardt’s remark above, 45 has been a joke all of my life — a dark parody of success — and remains so despite occupying the Oval Office. Their primary opponent up to only a couple months ago was Bernie Sanders, himself a cranky old man but far more endearing at it. This is what passes for the best leadership on offer?

Many Americans are ready to move on to someone younger and more vibrant, able to articulate a vision for something, well, different from the past. Let’s skip right on past candidates (names withheld) who parrot the same worn-out ideas as our fathers and grandfathers. Indeed, a meme emerged recently to the effect that the Greatest Generation saved us from various early 20th-century scourges (e.g., Nazis and Reds) only for the Boomers to proceed in their turn to mess up the planet so badly nothing will survive new scourges already appearing. It may not be fair to hang such labels uniformly around the necks of either generation (or subsequent ones); each possesses unique characteristics and opportunities (some achieved, others squandered) borne out of their particular moment in history. But this much is clear: whatever happens with the election and whichever generational cohort assumes power, the future is gonna be remarkably different.

Misdirected Violence

My information diet is, like most others, self-curated and biased. As a result, the news that finally makes its way through my filters (meaning that to which I give any attention) is incomplete. This I admit without reservation. However, it’s not only my filters at work. Nearly everyone with something to say, reveal, or withhold regarding civil unrest sparked in the U.S. and diffusing globally has an agenda. Here are some of the things we’re not hearing about but should expect to:

• comparison of peaceful protest to violent protest, by percentage, say, at least until the police show up and things go sideways
• incidence of aldermen, councilmen, mayors, congressmen, and other elected officials who side with protesters
• incidence of police officers who side with protesters, take a knee, and decline to crack heads
• examples of police units on the streets who do not look like they’re equipped like soldiers in a war zone — deployed against civilians with bottles and bricks (mostly)
• incidents where it’s police rioting rather than protesters
• situations where looters are left alone to loot while nearby protesters are harassed and arrested or worse

If the objective of those trying to control the narrative, meaning the MSM, the corpocracy, and municipal, state, and Federal PR offices, is to strike fear in the hearts of Americans as a means of rationalizing and justifying overweening use of state power (authoritarianism), then it makes sense to omit or de-emphasize evidence that protesters are acting on legitimate grievances. Indeed, if other legitimate avenues of petitioning government — you know, 1st Amendment stuff — have been thwarted, then it should be expected that massed citizen dissent might devolve into violence. Group psychology essentially guarantees it.

Such violence may well be misdirected, but that violence is being reflected back at protesters in what can only be described as further cycles of escalation. Misdirection upon misdirection. That is not at all the proper role of civil authority, yet the police have been cast in that role and have been largely compliant. Dystopian fiction in the middle of the 20th century predicted this state of human affairs pretty comprehensively, yet we find ourselves having avoided none of it.