Some things remain true for ages — but become amplified over decades, as we fail to learn the lessons, of those decades.
Today is a time like that. In abundance. Do go read this — all of it:
…Idiot America is not the place where people say silly things. It is not the place where people believe silly things. It is not the place where people go to profit from the fact that people believe in silly things. That America has been with us always — the America of the medicine wagon and the tent revival, the America of the juke joint and the gambling den, the America of lunatic possibility that in its own mad way kept the original revolutionary spirit alive while an establishment began to calcify atop the place. Idiot America isn’t even those people who believe that Adam sat down one day and named all the dinosaurs….
The rise of Idiot America, though, is essentially a war on expertise…. The rise of Idiot America today reflects — for profit, mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power — the breakdown of the consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people we should trust the least are the people who know best what they’re talking about….
Idiot America is a collaborative effort, the result of millions of decisions made and not made. It’s the development of a collective Gut at the expense of a collective mind. It’s what results when politicians make ridiculous statements and not merely do we abandon the right to punish them for it at the polls, but we also become too timid to punish them with ridicule on a daily basis, because the polls say they’re popular anyway. It’s what results when leaders are not held to account for mistakes that end up killing people….
[His] Three Great Premises:
1. Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units.
2. Anything can be true is someone says it loudly enough.
3. Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is measured by how fervently they believe it….
Yikes. That is the time of Trump, to a tee. As I say, do go read it all — it is spot-on, from top to tail — here over 16 years later. Onward.
नमस्ते
Powerline Lies... 