The Future of the Age of the Idiot

Killing Heat. Fascism. Boiling Point. How Did We Get Here, and Where Are We Headed?

Image Credit: Francis Mascarenhas

Take a look at the world today. I mean right now. This week. What do you see? A toxic cocktail of…everything…combined into one foul-smelling cup called “the wreckage of the future.” It’s overheating. Boiling. Simmering. It’s glowing red with rage, pulsing crimson with hatred. That’s at the top. At the bottom? Something even uglier? Have you ever seen bubble tea? This drink is like that, except it’s filled with rotten pustules of…idiocy.

This is the Age of the Idiot. Now, for the Greeks, “idiot” carried a precise and special meaning. The person who was only interested in private life, private gain, private advantage. Who had no conception of a public good, common wealth, shared interest. To the Greeks, the pioneers of democracy, the creators of the demos, such a person was the most contemptible of all.

History will think of us the greatest idiots there ever were. Now, that’ll be unfair on those of us who clutch our hair over the self-inflicted tragedy of now, one after the other — but history tends not to make such fine-grained judgments. It just delivers verdicts. About us, it’ll — at this point, almost surely — say: there walked on this planet once the Greatest Idiots ever known.

What do I mean by all that?

Today, we learned that the killing heat has arrived. The heat in the US is so extreme that it’s killing people in now surreally gruesome ways. They are literally being burned alive. “People Are Dying, Receiving Second-Degree Burns From Extreme Heat: NBC News says the burn injuries are happening as people fall or pass out on sun-scorched surfaces.” So. Imagine that for a second. There’s someone trying to…make it…through a 40 plus degree day. They stagger. Pass out. And just contacting the nearest surface — which might be asphalt, or worse, metal — burns them. So badly that people have begun to die this way.

Every summer from now is going to get worse. For a very long time. Not just until carbon emissions “flatline,” which is net zero, but long after that, probably, because right now, we’re on the cusp of hitting tipping points, which have long-term effects, like setting an avalanche in motion. So every summer from now, people are going to begin to perish…in these incredibly gruesome ways. Next come wet bulb events — which we’re right on the verge of this summer — where the human body simply can’t function, can’t cool itself anymore. Even sweating doesn’t work. Then? It won’t even take touching a surface. Go outside, stay there for a couple of hours, and you…die.

Wet bulb events are probably going to begin to happen — again, this summer, we were right on the edge, wet bulb temperatures above human livability having been just about hit from America to Asia — in the next five years or so. I don’t think anyone much expected them to arrive until about 2050. They’re not talked about at all — they’re barely part of the public awareness whatsoever. Why is that?