The Triumph of the Age of the Idiot

The Lesson We Refuse To Learn — And Why It’s Destroying Our Civilization at Light Speed

Image Credit: Mike Kiev, follow him here.

There’s a lesson the world isn’t learning these days, in the 21st century. It’s funny, because it’s an old lesson. And it’s funny, because it keeps being proven in ways big, small, and bigger. But here we are — what is it called when you repeat the same mistakes over and over again?

Call it the Triumph of the Age of the Idiot. What do I mean by this?

Twitter’s dying, in case you haven’t heard. The World’s Richest Man bought it — and the press showered him with adulation. A genius! Surely, a visionary! And yet here we are, a few scant months later. And this “business visionary” has just…had to…put in place…viewing limits…for a platform…he’s trying to sell…ads on. LOL. 

Imagine having to walk into a boardroom. And even if you can bat away the question, “So, what are you going to do about my Mega Brand being right next to a crackpot who thinks vaccines don’t work and Hitler was a pretty good dude, like, for example, ‘Moms for Liberty?’ — even if you can somehow answer that, what are you going to say when the next question is: “What’s the point of me spending Big Bucks on ads…when you’re limiting people to viewing a few minutes worth of tweets per day?”

LOL. I can tell you those conversations aren’t likely to go well.

What’s the lesson here? It shouldn’t need pointing out, and yet it does. And before I say, let me emphasize, while it’s going to sound political, it’s not. It’s an empirical observation, which anyone can see over and over again in the world today, and I’m about to give you a multitude of examples. That lesson?

Everything the far right touches dies.

I told you it was going to sound political. But, again, it’s not. If everything the far right touched somehow ended up wonderfully, I’d tell you that, as distasteful as it might be. We are dealing here in the realm of objective facts. It’s a set of objective facts that you can see this relationship at work in the world today — and that’s not politics. Politics is what happens before that: what we believe, wish, desire, to be true. The outcomes of politics aren’t politics, and in that way, this isn’t. It’s reality. It’s the examination of factual truth.

Let’s take that a step further.

Far right politics have stormed the world. Yet can you point out a single example to me — just one — where they’ve worked out well? Resulted in better…anything? After all, what we want from politics — no matter what ours are, really — are better outcomes. It’s just that the moral circle, and their definition, by a degree, differs. And yet when you take a hard empirical look at the outcomes of this tsunami sweeping the world — well, they’re not good anywhere. I mean that exhaustively and categorically. Any…where.

Let me give you a couple of examples more before we come back to Twitter’s sudden cardiac arrest. A story from…Finland…recently swept the globe, dropping jaws. Finland — the last place you’d expect, a mature social democracy — went far right, and put in place a fanatical party called, LOL, the “True Finns,” who’ve now changed their name to “Finns Party” because I guess “True Finns” was a bit too obvious. What happened next, almost as soon as they took power?

The Economy Minister was forced to resign. Why? Take a deep breath. After a Hitler salute, he was found to have said that the answer to climate change is…for African babies…to be…aborted. Whew. How ugly is that? To most thoughtful and sane people, that’s repellent, stomach churning, even, perhaps. But that’s not even really the point. The point is that…this is the level of competence…delivered by an Economy Minister. His answer to climate change is Heil Hitler and let’s just get rid of African babies. Think about that for a second. It’s not just repugnant, it’s also bizarre, absurd, and idiotic.

Here you have a simple example of a Very Old Problem. Fanatics take charge — they lie and cheat their way into power, making promises they can’t deliver, scapegoating innocents, and so forth. But when they get into power? Being fools, lunatics, crackpots, and aggressively willful ignoramuses…they have no idea what they’re doing. Ruin proceeds, and gathers a momentum all its own.