The Age of the Imbecile...

O' beautiful, for spacious skies
But now those skies are threatening
They're beating plowshares into swords
For this tired old man that we elected king
Armchair warriors often fail
And we've been poisoned by these fairy tales
The lawyers clean up all details
Since daddy had to lie -- Don Henley, End of the Innocence, 1989 

"I’d bet you’ve thought, shaking your head and muttering, something like: “Jesus. We live in an age of impossibly catastrophic stupid.”You’re not wrong. About a decade or so ago, hot on the heels of the financial crisis, something happened — an old story began to be rewritten, as the world found itself poorer once again. There was an explosion, somewhere deep in the human heart, and a tsunami rippled across the globe — one boiling and bubbling with every imaginable variety of stupid: human folly, gleeful ignorance, self-destructive greed, reckless spite, dim-witted cruelty parading itself as enlightenment.And so now a tsunami of imbecility is rolling like a slow-motion thermonuclear bomb across the globe. Lightning bolts of foolishness shiver down it. Smoke clouds of idiocy billow from it. Here are the five kinds of stupid wrecking the globe — because your first job, these days, as a human being, is to make sure you’re not being turned into an imbecile by this wave of stupid, too". -- Umair Haque, Eudamonia, 3/4/2019

One of the tons of weightless, mass-less but still existent things that cross my field of vision daily is Medium. I like it, because it gives me access to a wide variety of interesting stuff. Kind of a Daily Kos/ Huffington Post for people who have a bit broader perspective. And one of the things I enjoy and learn from is the work of Umair Haque, who seems to be occupying an intellectual space not all that different from Kierkegaard's or Schumpeter or I don't know...Hunter S. Thompson. 

I'd never heard of the guy, and started reading him because he was echoing things I thought, which is scary. Then I googled him...turns out the guy is a highly respected management guru with a meta-view. Which, when you think of it, is a rarity. Now, perhaps sort of a bit of humanist eschatology, which is an interesting concept in itself.

 

Folks  who are neck deep in the struggle to make the world a more humane and human place might gain from his perspective or might find it annoying. Good on you. But, I think that even people trying to save the world might occasionally need a slightly contrarian buzz. As for the rest of us, I think countering the age of the imbecile is a pretty laudable exercise. 

 

I don't know where I want to go with this, but I think it's something people who think about the things they think about can find a better place to put the lever. Invite comments, thoughts, and suggestions...

 

So I said good-bye to government,
And I gave my reason:
That a really good religion
Is a form of treason. -- "On Banning Bokonon" Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

 

Apropos, perhaps?