If It Feels Like We’re Losing the Battle for the Future…That’s Because We Are

Feel Like You’re Surrounded by Maniacs Who Could Care Less if Civilization Dies? Exactly.

Image Credit: The Florida Channel/WJXT

Do you feel…well…a bit…sad…these days? I do. That’s not a cry for help. We need to talk. It’s not a normal sad. It’s more like a kind of welling up of grief, crossed with a lashing of looking into the abyss, and see a whirling gyre of insanity at its bottom. That feeling? It’s about this.

If it feels like we’re losing the fight for the future, that’s because…we are.

Take a look around. What do you see?

I see people becoming…meaner. Harder. Crueller. Dumber. Something seems to have snapped in people’s minds. They don’t seem…normal…to me anymore. And I don’t think it’s just me. Look at America. Neighbor shoots neighbor. Lashing out in rage? Now it’s exploding in ultraviolence. And all this seems to be becoming the norm. This isn’t remotely normal. This is the feeling of something breaking in society.

What is that something? Its spirit. Its sense of trust, community, belonging. People are deeply uneasy just being around one another now. Precisely because you never quite know when or if that person’s actually a maniac in flimsy disguise. If they’re going to overhear you and shout at you, or just erupt, for no real reason at all. We walk around warily these days. Because our societies are undergoing a process of fragmentation.

The classical sociologists — Durkheim, their father, and onwards — used to talk about how the industrial age reordered society. Gone were the generations-long bonds of agrarian communities, towns, villages, hamlets. In its place rose city life, more anonymous, more atomized, more individualistic. They were right — but even within that mode of existence, societies found, well, ways to be societies. Clubs, organizations, groups, neighborhoods all found certain levels of coherence. But it feels like all that’s — even that’s — going away now. Suddenly, it’s as if the beating hearts of our societies have been chopped away by an axe. And now we barely look at each other, let alone talk to each other.

And that’s understandable, because, well, people have become maniacs. Not all people, but certainly some. About a decade ago, a process of radicalization began. Certain people began to find scapegoats, because, essentially, they were at the leading edge of downward mobility. So they blamed their woes on (LOL) George Soros or the WEF or what have you. All kinds of conspiracy theories began to take root. A decade or so ago, though, they were relatively harmless. People were being destabilized mentally, but they weren’t total maniacs.

Today? They are. Now, this group of people believes in all kinds of seriously sinister and bizarre and horrific things. Killing strangers for making you feel uncomfortable? Totally OK! Climate change? Hoax! I guess it’s the devil starting all those mega fires then. 

Basically, to cut a long story short, this group of people believes that hate should be the primary value in society — which is to say that bonds between people shouldn’t exist. Society should be ordered in strict hierarchies — not, say, the loose communities Durkheim and Polanyi remembered, perhaps a touch nostalgically, about the agrarian age. No — society should be a hierarchy. At its top, the strongman, which is to say, the most brutal and ruthless man, then in descending order, all the rest of the men, then come women, who are perpetually on the brink of being able to be people, but that depends on if they produce pure-bred children or not, and then come the subhumans, basically.

All the conspiracy theories of now boil down to this, essentially. And this is a lunatic set of beliefs. It isn’t just “like” fascism, for all intents and purposes it is fascism. And yet this mindset has been totally, completely legitimized and normalized, and I put it like that to emphasize just how much. Scroll through YouTube or Facebook and you’ll see endless posts about this, with millions upon millions of “likes.” How do you get the girl? You insult her, of course, and tell her she’s an animal!! Whose fault is it my life went nowhere? Can’t be my own foolish political choices — must be those dirty subhumans. 

The loss of status is most keenly perceived amongst certain kinds of men, who felt entitled to the primacy of decrepit hierarchies of status and power, and being deprived of them, they won’t take no for an answer. They’re openly just choosing…violence. Hence, they support what are now growing attacks on…minorities, women, kids, innocent people just doing their jobs, like teachers, doctors, journalists, scientists, professors, writers, novelists, artists…literally everyone else in society.