Why so many bad calls on every single problem facing humanity? This is what used to be called a relevant question, before the word “relevant” became too hard to understand or spell.
Environment, health, housing, poverty, ludicrous prices for education, mindless wars, social madness, it’s all fine according to someone. The idea seems to be that it’s fine to live impoverished in a global sewer with nutcases paid at your expense. God or an equally authoritative press release from some delusional geriatric fraudster/psychopath are the usual reasons.
Do tell. This is going to be a fairly murderous little opinion piece. So form the spiritual eunuchs and compulsory existential weaklings into a circle, set fire to a few hypocrites, and get comfortable. Have a glass of something that’s not likely to be fatal until after you share on social media. (I try so hard to uphold these dear old media traditions.)
As a daily routine, I source information from AFP, AP, Reuters, science sites, contacts, any number of areas of interest. I also of course watch the unavoidable trashy PR-driven headlines from around the world. I’ve been doing this for years.
A nice, simple, two-dimensional, approach, you’d think. If only. The problem with this idyllic perspective is that I have to look at the logic, if there is any. There usually isn’t much. The working dynamic is that idiocy drives idiocy. Any totally unnecessary situation usually becomes a crisis. Pure fiction is “rewarded” with credibility. The situation turns into a disaster, claiming “passions” among paid spruikers.
Yawn cubed and cubed again. It’s one of the oldest media tricks. A brief summary of the obvious – If you lack talent, intelligence, and judgement, all you need to do to be successful is be enthusiastic. Become a fanatic, or more likely, a fully documented idiot. Don’t despair – You will make a lot of money, however mindlessly.
This, unlikely as it might seem, is where things get interesting. The total sum of utterly grotesque information does add up to a literal catalogue of human failure, on a global scale, minute by minute. Aren’t you all wonderful? Of course you are. It’s one of those things that you “have to believe” in order to live up to your social obligations and be as ineffectual as possible.
These are today’s global headlines on Google. By a bizarre coincidence, you will note that most of the headlines relate to serious problems. Assuming you don’t have the usual five seconds/pan/forget mindset, you will note that none of these problems are ever solved.
It’s like a particularly badly written soap opera, with millions of deaths, etc. The “human condition” has now been a subject of self-righteous debate for thousands of years, and not much has been done about it.
History is full of bad calls, but we are now in uncharted territory. A quick “market sample” of some of the headlines tells a story:
- Democrats talking themselves into defeat in 2022 and 2024. Won’t that be nice?
- Brexit and other delusional disasters. In this case, we are talking about getting absolutely everything possible wrong about running a national economy, national strategy, and even basic sanity.
- Yet more news about blatant lawbreaking by the extremely rich.
- The continuing total failure to manage any environmental issues whatsoever.
- Crime, crime, and more crime. This is a global plague, and has been for decades. Also some interesting news about how making heroes out of organised criminals like The Sopranos is good media.
- The endlessly cute pandemic.
- The education fees racket and its glorious incompetence. I have yet to see anyone at all question the fact that most of this education could be delivered for the price of electricity. Apparently making sure that the global skills base is destroyed is far more interesting than doing anything about it.
- The ongoing disasters inflicted on the Millennial generation.
- Just to top it off with a little frivolity, the exciting chances of a real war with China.
OK, in context: all of these issues relate to well-known ongoing catastrophic failures across the board. Coverage doesn’t even include an implied demand to fix problems any more. No solutions, real or imaginary, are expected, which is probably just as well.
Trashy, you say? Not really. Expectations of society for any sort of government leadership are so low/bottomless that this total mediocrity is normal. It is as if due respect for total failure is the higher priority.
The smugness and the stupidity
If someone put you in a car on a crowded freeway travelling at full speed, wearing a blindfold and handcuffed, you’d be a lot safer, and certainly far less stressed, than you are likely to be reading the “news” of these disasters. It’s not news. Everyone knows what a train wreck this is. This is the colour commentary, at best.
Meanwhile, the bad calls continue, complete with the mandatory hysterical gargoyles. Conservative naivety, clinging desperately to obsolete abstracts and progressive verbosity continue their digressions into failure. These digressions are in fact day jobs for a lot of people. However useless, absurd, and counter-productive, somebody thinks they are achieving something. Obviously, they are not; that’s not even a consideration.
What’s interesting is the smugness of many people. The money junkies are pretty typical. As long as they are winning their non-existent game of Monopoly, they are perfectly happy. Nothing exists outside their little cocoon, and they are quite pleased about it. There are no other people.
On the more sanctimonious level, spiritual ignoramuses pontificate. If belief equals money, success is measured in other people’s ignorance. Stupidity, therefore, is good. That does explain “dumbing down” everything, and this is the result.
Now tell me – What’s the likely outcome of all this brilliance? More failure. At least, this will keep everyone employed in their usual useless occupations for a bit longer. That’s not news, either.
The inability to adapt is a famous recipe for evolutionary disaster. Idiots hanging on to a non-existent world is a pretty good description of failure to adapt. This is what it looks like.
