What no one told us, however, is that this reformist method of engendering peaceful change was highly dependent on the existence of a broadly-subscribed ethos of honesty, goodwill and, perhaps most of all, healthy shame in the class of people possessing an outsized ability to promote new ways of approaching social problems.
I want to take the thesis of the last essay a step further and explore what might be causing our collapse. Is it a coincidence that we are suffering in so many different areas of life right now? Is it a little misstep on an otherwise progressive path? If we are on the verge of collapse, is it part of the arc of all great civilizations? Or, like Oedipus, do we suffer from some tragic flaw — a collective destructive character trait that we all share — that is responsible for bringing us to this place at this moment in history?
Judging by the fight between knowledge and stupidity today, the latter ostensibly still has the upper hand, but as more people are awakening to the titanic struggle between the two, knowledge is in the ascendant. It is up to us to tip the scales in its favour – as long as we realise that it is a never-ending battle.
We recoil because we know that the appeal to self is corrosive to unit cohesion. We also know that promoting individual identity and self-actualization—focusing on what is different among us—fosters division. And yet we are repeatedly told that it’s precisely such “diversity”—not of thought, but of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, and sexual orientation—that makes our nation prosperous and our military strong.
Much of the current debate surrounding health care – putting aside momentarily the catastrophic failure of the public health system during the pandemic – is whether or not it is a “right” or a “privilege.”
Our models represent, largely, a collaborative social universe, where people play by rules, say what they mean, and act with honesty and integrity — and where, in general, we do not deal with calculating minds trained in the arts of war and espionage. Their models, on the other hand, encompass a reality that exists completely off this game board, which is not beholden to it, and whose players often take each other’s movements into account and plot reactions several steps in advance.
For many years now, Ireland has been subject to a particularly intense cultural offensive. Why this should be so is an open question. It may be that Ireland is – or was, at least – more than usually culturally robust, an opportunity for the technocrats to really cut their teeth.
In sum, while the poisonous aspect of the media pharmakon has not nearly exhausted its toxic potency, the curative side has incrementally been gaining strength and therapeutic effectiveness, as reflected in the anxiety of the ‘Davos elites,’ detectable in their worry, that they no longer ‘own the news.’ They thought they had it all under control, but were caught unawares by the unexpected power of the alternative media – those ever-expanding digital spaces of the machine inhabited by the resistance.
The old distinction between civilization and barbarism has taken on a new form in the 21st century. It is from within our own “civilized” culture that emerges an inversion of the concepts of civility and savagery. It is our professionals, our academics, our political leaders, and our journalists who most ignore the standards of rational discourse, who institutionalize hatred and incite division. Today, it is the elites who are the true barbarians among us.
We forgot that we are going to die. We forgot that suffering is our lot in this lacrimarum valle. We forgot that how we approach the fact of our suffering and death is what gives our life meaning and what enables the hero to be heroic. Instead, we allowed ourselves to be trained to fear all emotional and physical pain, to catastrophize with implausible worst-case scenarios, and to demand solutions from the very elites and institutions who worked to ensure our forgetfulness.
The difference between the two is the impression of the intent of the group by those on the outside. Conspiracies are manifestly suspect and created out of nefarious motives to achieve a specific, most likely at least unethical, goal. Consensuses are seen as positive constructs, having been arrived at after open discussion, healthy debate, and a consideration of all relevant factors.
Progress involves improving on the past. Once, we used leeches to suck out an excess of cancer-causing humors, or just blamed them on the wrath of the gods. In modern hospitals, we now image such tumors deep within the body, target them with synthetic chemicals or narrow beams of radiation, or excise them with clinical precision.
