Enemy Of The State - A Eulogy

The Lords Of Unreason Have Taken The Fort

This essay will be a sort of preemptive eulogy.

Something that once tried to become beautiful is in its death throes and a new hideous, mutated incarnation has just reached adolescence and is asserting, to quote Nietzsche, its will to power.

It is an insecure beast, hateful, selfish, bigoted, greedy, jealous, deceitful, and it seeks to take the place of that more beautiful something. It wants revenge and to be restored to what it believes to be its rightful place at the top of the hierarchy.

This is the Revenge of the Layperson era and the de facto coronation of the new Lords of Unreason. They seek to replace reality with something in their own image.

It is an era where ill-informed opinion has been elevated to our highest epistemic level, above knowledge and even Truth. And an era where ignorance is celebrated as the highest virtue.

Behold, the complete abandonment of reason, ethics, thoughtfulness, and seriousness.

It is our Australopithecus forebearer throwing feces and grunting in its show of dominance again. It is the wanton underbelly of human nature taking its turn, asserting itself in the perverse and cyclical struggle of our worse demons against our greater angels.

Sagan certainly saw it coming,

Sagan wrote this before the age of social media or he might have cited a growing social narcissism, greed, and self-consumption where taking constant selfies and e-begging for attention, likes, and donations as another sign of our social decay, loss of dignity, and humility.

The comedy, turned documentary, Idiocracy also presciently saw into the looking glass into our near dystopian future.

It is still mostly a cartoonish version of itself but as it finds its way, as it blows out our candles, as it gains its foothold, it will become anything but amusing or entertaining.

I used to try to reason with the beast. I tried to build bridges with the australopitheci, to empathize with their grievances, to try to bring them back into the fold.

After all, many of their grievances are justified. But they have been radicalized similarly to those who flew planes into those buildings on 9/11 and who threw flowers at parades to a cocky, little man with a strange mustache. They have been reprogrammed by their masters to blame everyone but those who are responsible for their disenfranchisement, for the cultural ostracizing, for their poor education, and for their economic hardship.

I tried to explain to them about the effects of 40 years of neoliberal policy, about the massive and unprecedented transfer of wealth to the most privileged, about decades of privatization, the dismantling of unions, safety nets and anti-trust, about the removal of corporate and government oversight, about the decoupling of productivity gains from wage growth, and about the threat of excessive global corporatism and the effects of unlimited private and dark money in politics….but they could not hear. It was all Libtard to them.

Alas, the long separation and isolation of the australopitheci has modified their language now to such an extent that communication is no longer possible.

I finally had to break off relations with the beast. It was too far gone. It is feral and rabid now.

On September 11, 2001, I was on a business trip in Lisbon and giving a lecture when the news dropped. That day was far too blurry in my recollection, in the fog of the moment, to know what it meant.

But I should have.

Something was broken that day. It was the cacophony of a death knell. The illusion and spell was lifted, the psyche shattered.

The Western delusion of invincibility, security, and permanence was gone.

I met the beast in a plaza that day in Portugal. It appeared as an elderly couple dressed in the stereotypical matching American flag jumpsuits. I needed to momentarily commiserate with those who spoke my language and shared my country of birth.

I said that I hoped cooler heads would prevail and this event would lead to global talks about the causes and possible solutions. They lashed out at me and replied:

”I hope we raze the entire Middle East to the ground. Nuke ‘em all.”

My last reply was simply: “I hope you do not speak for the country.” But they did. An eye for an eye and blood lust would shortly be the order of the day…..again.

My background as a political scientist and once a consultant at the United Nations in Geneva in the early 90s should have prepared me to better understand its causes and its significance but I am a mere flawed and irrational human, endowed with naivete, dreams, and hopes.

I was also trained as an international economist, an international law academic, a human rights consultant, and learned the history of war and peace.

And the problem of international terrorism had long been on our radar screen, along with stalled nuclear disarmament talks, and the threat of climate change. These were considered our biggest and most threatening challenges.

I was once a champion of progress and of our most optimistic human aspirations.

I once wrote policy documents and prescriptions for international conferences on knowledge transfer, development, poverty, human rights, nuclear disarmament, diplomacy, and global health.

I cited our global successes, the decline of poverty and big power conflict, the ascension of democracy and self-determination, the focus on multilateral cooperation and improvements in respect for human rights.

I promoted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and declared it as the harbinger of a greater future.

I heralded the birth of a new world order based on the rule of law, international conflict arbitration, and economic cooperation and coordination.

We cried when the Wall fell and sang The Winds of Change together while it happened for the whole world to see. Sigh.

That short-lived optimism was fairly quickly dashed but it was a wonderful moment in time.

Since then, democracy is on the decline and authoritarianism is again in the ascent. International relations have chilled substantially. Nuclear disarmament talks no longer occur. The US has abandoned its role as the champion of the world order that has fended off a third world war for 75 years. War has returned to Europe for the first time since WWII. There is another expanding war in the Middle East. And there are over 120 million displaced persons around the globe, far higher than after WWII.

The UN has been completely abandoned and discredited by its founding father and remaining sole super power; a super power, mind you, with more bases on the planet than all nations combined by large measure and with a military budget that is incomparable to any other as well. .

A concern for human rights and international law has been abandoned.

Countries like Hungary, Turkey, India, and Russia have adopted electoral autocracy models and civil liberties are under attack everywhere. Freedom House (2024) reports that global freedom has declined for 18 consecutive years and democratic norms are under attack all over the globe.

If I were to make a prediction, which I don’t tend to do, it might be to qualify the coming new international order as a techno-feudal system, managed primarily by oligarchs, using AI and cryptocurrency, and client-state puppets whose job will be to suppress freedom and destroy any semblance of economic and legal legitimacy.

I imagine the world may be split into spheres of influence which the oligarch class divy up and agree upon.

Because, in the end, Fukuyama was wrong. History was not over, it was just dormant, and Huntington’s clash of civilizations was the next hypothesis to be tested.

The new oligarchs and their foot soldiers, the lords of unreason, will certainly add that clash to their tactical arsenal along with the normal demagoguery and scapegoating to seize and maintain power and as a useful means of dividing and conquering.

Bread and circuses, (maybe some military parades and the occasional proxy war for effect) will also come in handy as well to keep the people distracted while they rob the vaults, and extort and hide the remaining natural resources.

In case it has not become obvious enough yet, you see, I’ve slipped inexorably toward misanthropy and anger. What a shame.

17 years ago I returned to the United States after two decades in Europe. My country of birth had gone mad and I felt the need to try to do my part.

I began volunteering my time to write and educate on science and philosophy, hoping to help people improve their critical thinking skills and combat this new global virus; a virus far more deadly than Covid.

I began writing countless essays about the world’s slide into madness and unreason and the erosion of the world order. I warned of the vacuum that would be filled by even worse actors. I have tried to note the parallels with prior periods of decay and disorder.

But all of that was to no avail. We lost. The Lords of Unreason have taken the fort.

I once advocated for a strong, liberal state as the only possible legitimate advocate of the people; the only entity capable of protecting and defending human dignity, freedom, and civil liberty.

The only viable competition is the corporation but it is a strict, hierarchical authoritarian entity, by definition, and is completely antithetical to human rights. It has one singular function and that is to enrich its owners.

Alas, the state has again been captured by a vengeful and spiteful layperson, the new lords of unreason and their masters, the oligarchs. The state is now merely a marketing and propaganda department for the owners of this planet and its remaining resources.

But maybe the most suprising bit is the craven cowardice of so much of the media, academia, and even our public intellectuals.

The near complete capitulation and pusillanimity is scandalous and an embarrassment to our species.

Apparently, those who live in gilded cages are far more concerned about securing their own fragile castles and maintaining the ratings and income of their podcast, law firm, academic seat, or media company to show any spine and courage.

It seems increasingly more likely that we will be left only with anarchy and revolution and, unfortunately, those come at a substantial cost. People are already dying and being tortured and more is to come.

Maybe the greatest irony of all time is that after thousands of years of civilization building and countless experiments in governance, the strongest country and military to ever exist has handed the keys to our species’ survival to an individual without a single redeeming quality.

I’m not a religious man but if I were I might claim this beast, who I refer to as Cartman, is the perfect embodiment of the seven deadly sins.

And as a man of science, I might say that, according to the DSM-V, it meets all the criteria of an exemplar of the Dark Triad…..and if you add sadism, the Dark Tetrad.

Needless to say, I will not be celebrating this 4th of July. R.I.P to my country of birth. It was a good run but you didn’t make it to 250! 1776-2024.

And just like that then, I am become the enemy of the state.

And I now want revenge for the murder of something which was far more beautiful.