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[–]penelopepnortneyBecome ungovernable[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

From the article:

“entranced by their need to know WHAT to think, their inability to know HOW to think left them vulnerable to domination by demagogues and the dissolution of a free society and so, born citizens, they died subjects.”

-the epitaph you do not want

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the hallmark of the modern age is a firehose of information and emotion that both invites and demands that you have an opinion on everything. every issue is someone’s hobbyhorse or hot button and in the attention economy, the issue du jour rapidly crowds out all others. more and more, the desire to remain relevant in a world of ever shifting obsession creates a drive toward a presumption that we not only need to have an opinion, but worse, that we possess a basis for one.

at a stroke this both demands and serves as enabler for a captured class with strident views and low information.

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this finds uneasy confluence with the idea of technocracy and other such “rule by experts” who peddle imposed “solutions” and seemingly always seek to “do something” that more often than not is sold as “for you” when it is in fact “to you.”

emotion demands action and this bias toward stepping in with loud, simple solutions rather than nuanced comprehension and considered calculation instils not just a need to generate an overblown sense of emergencies but a desire to handle them badly and a distrust of the very processes that would allow for their effective analysis and mitigation. (bold added)

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the “emergency” itself is put forward in a fashion calculated to prevent any from questioning whether it is, in fact, a matter that warrants attention and response. "everything i want” is rendered calamity to ensure its prominence of place. everything is a crisis. everything a war.

coming to terms with this emergent property of the modern age will be one of the important societal processes of our time.

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we all want to act like we know that which we do not know so that we can assuage our emotional need to “do something” about a set of “crises” that were mostly not crises at all until our poorly calibrated responses made them so.

and this is no way to live.

(more at the link)