The Triumph of the Age of the Idiot

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?

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.

In case that’s not clear, let’s talk about what any vaguely serious Economy Minister should be saying — politics completely aside. Yes, climate change is here now, and we need to invest to fight it, because the consequences are only going to be even more costly in the end. Sure, maybe you don’t like immigrants, as a nation, but guess what, we’re aging, and we need people to be doctors, nurses, truck drivers. Our problems need real solutions. Not crackpot level thinking, which is only really designed to trigger people’s fears and rage. That’s also, at the level of actually managing a society, incompetence.

See how different that is from “LOL, Heil Hitler, and hey, let’s kill some Africans!!” Yes, that’s horrendous, morally, but more to the point, for Finland…now it doesn’t have an Economy Minister, which means it doesn’t have a plan for its economy, which means that things just spiral into nihilism and chaos.

Surely we should be learning this lesson by now. But are we?

Let me expand that, because this isn’t just about one country, but the world. Where else can we see this folly happening, on an even more dismal, laughable, and shocking scale? Poor old Britain. It’s government seduced the nation with the historic, grave mistake of Brexit. Brexit’s now led Britain to the brink of collapse. Its NHS doesn’t work, inflation’s off the charts even in an inflationary age, the economy’s cratering, right down to water systems — LOL — collapsing.

Again, we learn the same lesson. Exactly the same one. Everything the far right touches dies. How did Britain get here? The answer’s astonishingly simple. Its fanatics and lunatics blamed…everyone else…for their own mistakes. Rising to power, they proceeded to underinvest — austerity. Living standards fell. They turned right around and blamed that on — LOL — Europeans. Baffled Europeans were then forced out, in a mania of rage and xenophobia. Brexit happened. And even then, the fanatics doubled down. Instead of admitting the mistake? Today, they’re blaming Britain’s woes on everyone from refugees to young people to immigrants to doctors and nurses.

This is the suicide of a society by way of incompetence. Masked in spite and bile and, yes, hate. It’s easy to see those, though, because they’re loud, shouted proudly, delivered with glee. What they mask? Is that this party, this set of people, this group…is incompetent. They don’t even know how to deliver functioning basic social systems, like water and healthcare. Sure, it’s true that they don’t care — but that’s their perspective. The perspective of objectivity is that they are staggeringly incompetent at the most basic jobs and tasks they are there to perform — governance, the functioning of systems, delivering if not soaring, then at least not cratering living standards.

Again, sure, to them, that might all be wonderful and great and perfect. But to any vaguely objective point of view, this is breathtaking incompetence.

The Trumph of the Age of the Idiot’s about all that. On several levels. The way that breathtakingly incompetent figures have risen to power across the globe — Economy Ministers whose solution to climate change is, hey kill Africans, Heil Hitler, hate and bile which only masks that they have no real idea whatsoever what to do with a modern economy. Governments that blame their own mistakes on their nearest allies and best friends, proceed to seduce populations into a mania and frenzy of hate, while — LOL — everything from healthcare to water systems collapse. The way that hate has come to mask incompetence. And the way that the average person is still not learning the lesson, which is being delivered over and over again, by history, at this point, laughing in disbelief. When are you going to…get it?

Incompetence leads to ruin — fast. Why? Negligence. Irresponsibility. Worse, the legitimization of those as something noble and proud — the way Brits leaned into their own ruin, or the way that half of America cheers at not having any functional systems or institutions. Ultimately, the formation of an entire “side” of politics and discourse that celebrates ruin as some kind of cleansing, a Day of Judgment, that’ll sort the ubermensch from the under people, the superior from the inferior.

This is what we call “institutional decay.” Incompetence emerges, then rises to power, then solidifies itself, then proclaims itself as competence, vision, even genius. And at last — in a perverse twist, because now, reality’s been turned inside out — the average Joe, not knowing which way is up anymore, buys it.

Then the abyss beckons.

I said that this was an old, old lesson — everything the far right touches dies. And it is. It is the single gravest lesson of the 20th century, in fact. Can you think of a single nation where the far right succeeded in accomplishing anything? For its people? That lasted? Where self-destruction and ruin didn’t just happen?

At this point, a certain kind of America will arrive to scold me about “communism” — calm down, Nancy Reagan, I’m not here to tell you communism was some kind of great victory. It assuredly wasn’t. But it’s hardly what’s resurgent in the world today. The far right spectrum — from nationalism to fascism to authoritarianism — is, and we seem to be operating under the delusion that this time won’t end up just like last time. But it already is.

Let’s transport ourselves back into the 20th century. The far right was ascendant, at one point, across the globe. An Axis formed. Even in “Allied” countries, the far right was so powerful that it stopped them from entering what had become a brutal, bloody World War, until it was almost too late. America’s far right didn’t want to get involved, and it was only after Pearl Harbor happened that it did — think about that.

And even then, after World War II, the 20th century kept teaching us the same lesson. Why didn’t America advance? Why did it become this weird amalgam of a poor-rich country — where wages stagnated from the 1970s, more than half a century, the once vaunted middle class imploded, and today, 80% of people think things will keep going downhill…for good? Because, centrally, America stayed far, far on the right. So far that it was a segregated nation until the late 1960s. Loving vs Virginia was the case that legalized “interracial marriage” — and it happened in 1967. After that, Americans turned to the Reagan Revolution to make “private choice” the linchpin of their sentiments — “I won’t pay for those people’s kids schools! Their healthcare!”

The result of all this was that while Canada and Europe developed the systems and institutions of public goods for which they’re renowned today, America didn’t. It couldn’t, because it could never agree that anything should be a universal right — and that is where it’s stuck today, one of its Justices warning, in a dissent, that discrimination in the form of “Jews and dogs not welcome here” is now OK again in America.

The 20th century kept on teaching us this lesson. Over and over again. In example after example. If you don’t like my formulation of it, you could try another one: political fanaticism whose project is the construction negative rights — I get to nullify your rights — ends in ruin, time and again. For obvious reasons. If all a society is me trying to take your rights away — where can it really go? What constructive thing can ever happen? What forward motion can there be?

And yet today, we’ve forgotten it. Why is that? Perhaps its because we’re at about the distance in time of one human lifetime, and that’s what it takes to forget, as a society, as a world. Maybe it’s because capitalism is failing, and the average person is so bereft, so in despair — from China’s “lying flat generation” to America’s giant underclass where a middle and working class used to be even to Europe’s mature social democracies — that they have just lost their thinking minds, and are thus easy prey for Big Lies, scapegoating, hate, bile. Maybe when people are desperate, embittered, broken down, resentful, angry enough — “let’s kill African babies to solve climate change” suddenly seems like a good idea.

I think in the end all those explanations hold weight. The loss of social memory. The slow flatlining of living standards. The rise of pessimism and despair. All those…it’s inelegant to say “they turn people into idiots,” but they do stop people from thinking clearly, well, carefully, maybe much at all.

And yet explanations don’t solve the problem. What does, what might — if anything can, and that’s debatable — is at least recognizing that Houston, We Have a Problem. The Triumph of the Age of the Idiot. We’re forgetting modern history’s greatest lesson. You can put it in my simplest form — everything the far right touches dies. Or you can put it more formally — fanatical politics whose only project is the construction of negative rights, me being able to take yours away, end in ruin, inescapably because that isn’t what “rights” are.

Sure, all this is good for the people at the top of these systems, maybe. If you want to overlook how the World’s Richest Man’s reputation is, LOL, in tatters at the moment. Hardly the stuff of “business genius” to have to limit views on a platform you’re trying to sell ads on…because you can’t pay the bills…because…wow, who knew that Brand, Inc didn’t want its golden goose right next to a tweet saying “Seig Heil me, bro!” Shocker.

Even if you think that doesn’t really matter — the point cuts deeper. From the point of view of objectivity, what we have here is a problem of incompetence — at governance, management, thinking, planning, keeping systems functioning — at a staggering scale. It’s masked with hate and bile, which are allowed to flourish as visionary genius, too much, and the average person comes to conflate these things. They cheer on their self-destruction.

This is where we are, my friends. This is the Triumph of the Age of the Idiot. Perhaps, then, it’s time for the rest of us to try and wrest sanity back from this lunacy, one small moment, action, conversation, illumination, at at a time.

Umair
July 2023