At some point in my childhood, I came to believe that all of the world's problems were rooted in ignorance. Into my twenties, I imagined that people would fix the world if only they knew how to do it. Then I discovered that the solutions to many of society's problems had been well understood for decades or longer. And some of these problems had, in fact, been engineered deliberately.
Ignorance is easily dispelled by enlightenment. But what is the cure for a society gone mad? I don't think there is a cure. And I'm suspicious of anyone who says otherwise.
Meeting ignorance with true information makes sense, but enlightenment isn't always the outcome thereby produced. A surprising number of people seem completely impervious to facts. Some passionately believe untrue things. Others twist reality for politics or profit. They're not ignorant, they're just wrong. I think the majority of our population is wrong, in many different ways, about even the most important things.
We don't have a political left and a political right in the US. We have blue team and red team, both of which support policies guaranteed to worsen inequality and a host of other economic and social issues. One of the more troubling new trends in the endless contest between these two teams is the blue team's attempts to further radicalize the red team by financially supporting fascist candidates in Republican primaries.
When I first learned of this trend, I thought it must be a joke. But no. The Democrats are literally funding fascists. Here's a quote from a Washington Post article about it:
"Democrats have spent nearly $19 million across eight states in primaries this year amplifying far-right Republican candidates. ... Total Democratic spending rises to roughly $53 million when a ninth state, Illinois, is added. There, the Democratic Governors Association (DGA) and the campaign of Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) spent a combined $34.5 million successfully elevating a GOP candidate who has said it was “appalling” that party leaders in Illinois wanted Trump to concede the 2020 election."
A Guardian opinion piece comments on the folly of this strategy:
"Spending money to try to dupe hapless Republican voters into backing the goofiest fascist is not just stupid; it goes against justice. Tricking people is not part of organizing. These sophisticated Democratic strategists are pouring poison into the well that we all, sooner or later, will have to drink from."
It seems important to note that there is no radical left in the traditional sense. Blue team radicals favor a totalitarian nanny state and endless corporate subsidies, not Universal Basic Income and genuine corporate responsibility. No one on the red team is funding radical leftist candidates. By funding reactionary reds, the blues are altering the total political landscape in a way that legitimizes the worst sorts of politics while driving everything that used to be called 'progressive' further into the wilderness.
The question of how so many people could be so wrong about so many important things is vexing. Honest answers to this question lower my opinion of my fellow human beings. The media is obviously culpable. So are the corporate and political machines that determine public opinion. But the deeper truth here is that most Americans believe things that fundamentally conflict with my understanding of the world. So even if everybody voted and we had fair elections instead of the screwy nonsense we've grown accustomed to, no candidate that I'd support could ever possibly rise to power.
Now the blue team is funding red team fascists, which makes sense because we live in a dystopia. Reasonable responses to this level of nonsense are difficult to formulate. There may be no reasonable political response to it. Where I see hope is in the social and economic spheres. The social networks we build have the potential to get us through the series of disasters on the horizon as a result of our bad politics. The blockchain economy is already weakening the banking cartels' stranglehold on our lives.
The future of power isn't political. It's technological. And it doesn't belong to the popular majority of deeply wrong individuals. Instead, the future belongs to those best able to harness technological advancement. Politics are little more than a sideshow against this backdrop.
(Pictured above: my siblings and I by Lake Superior.)
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