Pylimitics

Chris Hedges’ piece The Rule of Idiots rings pretty true and it’s pretty depressing. Are we really amidst the death of the American empire, the empire that never really admitted to itself that it was an empire? Or is trumpism our society can recover from?

“The last days of dying empires are dominated by idiots.”

“Donald Trump, and the sycophantic buffoons in his administration, are updated versions of the reigns of the Roman emperor Nero, who allocated vast state expenditures to attain magical powers; the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang, who funded repeated expeditions to a mythical island of immortals to bring back a potion that would give him eternal life; and a feckless Tsarist court that sat around reading tarot cards and attending séances as Russia was decimated by a war that consumed over two million lives and revolution brewed in the streets.“

The whole idea makes me both depressed and guilty. Could I have done something more to forestall this? I sure didn’t see it coming, and until recently I actually believed that some things, at least, could be improved. Now I’m just scared of a future that I won’t see, but my children and grandchildren will. After the Romans burned down their empire, Europe became a very dangerous place for a long time. North America hasn’t been dangerous (except for some people, of course), but if the current crop of idiots succeeds in burning down the laws, it certainly could.

Maybe that fantasy about “artificial intelligence taking over” wouldn’t be such a bad idea; humans clearly lack the ability to organize ourselves for good outcomes. Or if we did, the idiots and greed heads and demagogues have made us forget how.