I'm with stupid!

Choosing not to know or understand

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I’m going to pick on Nostradamus, famed 1500s predictor of global events still cited widely today, not because I’m against trying to figure out the future — anything but. Rather, it’s how people use Nostradamus that disturbs me: this need to surrender one’s logic and understanding to some distant past where it was either all decided or at least all figured out.

I know, I know, this is the problem with virtually all religions: e.g., what So-and-So opined two millennia ago, or — more saliently — how the Founding Fathers felt about some issue they never encountered in their lives but which now compels us to imagine what they would have felt.

I mean, why not just ask your dog?

Why can’t we just understand these new things on our own and address them with … I dunno … basic logic?

The thing today is, if you just want to jettison your brain and bask in the crazy-profound wisdom of whomever (including me on a particularly megalomaniacal day), then, sure, you’re free to do so and totally empowered by the web, where Gresham’s law prevails (originally, an economic theory about “bad money'“ driving out “good money”; today, meaning more that “bad information/analysis” drives out the good variants).

It’s the why part that depresses and worries me — the sheer surrender of agency.

I mean, I get the paralyzing impact uncertainty can have on your day-to-day existence, particularly if that level of volatility and uncertainty and complexity and ambiguity (the dreaded VUCA combo) leave you bereft of the “happy ending” mindset that tells you that everything is basically going to work out and life will get better. Take that away from anyone and ANY day is hard to navigate because of that looming sense of pointlessness (Why bother trying?).

I feel it all the time in my career because I’m basically the intellectual variant of a serial entrepreneur: always chasing shiny objects. People who succeed and have predictable lives tend to avoid that temptation. They stay focused and they climb that ladder, whatever that entails. I … tend to tilt at windmills (and turbines too).

Why? I am compelled by my nature to live primarily in the future. It’s just how my brain works.

Believe me, I wish I could just attach myself to some predetermined logic and stop trying to figure things out. I envy those people — seriously.

Point being, I deeply understand the need to feel less uncertain and thus less uncomfortable about the future. It is the driving intellectual force of my life and THE reason why I do what I do: constantly try to figure things out as they loom on the horizon, unfold over time, spread throughout present-day reality, etc.

[And yes, people tend to hate or love you for such efforts, as there is never any in-between.]

To me, the primary point of analysis regarding the recent US election involves that underlying fear or discomfort: the majority of Americans have that we’re on the wrong track vibe and, within our political elites, there’s not much constructive explaining — much less doing — about those negative emotions.

By constructive, I mean the sort of explaining that gets us to real solutions versus damn-it-all-to-hell tear-downs — a sort of hard-forking of America’s soft and hardware that must inevitably render it incompatible with what it is today (far too broken and antiquated, so many of us feel).

This is basically the same logic that the neocons applied to the Middle East after 9/11: It is all so screwed up that we’re better off laying a Big Bang on this mess and just see what happens in the subsequent churn.

That is a brutal, over-the-top logic — nothing half-assed about it. And it’s so American to go so radically down that path.

Trump wants his 2.0 model to constitute a Big Bang on the Deep State: destroying as much good as necessary to comprehensively destroy the bad.

What comes next?

Trust us, it’ll be great!

Trump taps all that angst rather brilliantly, redirecting the fear outward toward them (globalists, migrants, “shithole countries,” war mongers, etc.) They are presented as all powerful — unless deconstructed, demolished, defeated, etc., and that requires STRONGMEN to step up, grab power by whatever means necessary, and do whatever is necessary to destroy these powerful-but-hidden forces (aka, the Deep State).

This may all sound like a detour from how this post started with prediction-visionary types but it isn’t. The same emotions and desires and fears are involved: I can’t figure this out but this all-knowing/all-powerful force can.

Why?

Because I know deep down that somebody is controlling everything.

I have run into this fear-based notion throughout my career.

It was there when the Wall came down in 1989.

It was there in the rise of globalization.

Y2K came with a boatload.

Then, of course, 9/11 … that fabled inside job.

Then the secretly engineered endless wars, which were all about oil that it turns out we never needed.

Duh!

Then the 2008 financial crash and Great Recession, where the rich somehow kept getting richer and the upcoming generations took the nasty haircut.

Then the pandemic, which seemed to repeat those same winner/loser dynamics.

Now, the secret plot to stop northern Whites from having enough babies and thus replace them with docile Brown people from down south.

Next up, the inevitable descent into WWIII.

I know: it’s like some updated real-world version of The Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.”

Please allow me to introduce myself …

You try and argue about climate change/energy transition being important amidst that long litany of disasters and you’re fairly easily drowned out.

Stunningly enough, despite the ability of hidden evil elites to manipulate our world on a constant basis, the idea that humans could be responsible for recasting our planet’s climate is simply inconceivable — too far out there.

Are you nuts?

So, scientists and experts are out and demolishers are in: Trump doesn’t want to govern so much as to make future governance almost impossible.

It is an odd ahistorical choice for a 21st century Gilded Age: in a world where people feel like things are spinning out of control, we’re choosing to reduce the government’s power and reach.

Why?

Because it must be their fault — all of it!

I mean, we’re the most powerful nation in the world and thus have the most powerful government in the world, so, if that Deep State isn’t controlling all, then maybe … no one is actually in control!

With that notion being simply too scary, we turn to Nostradamuses, and End Times preachers, and conspiracy theorists, and so on.

Meanwhile, the Tech Bro oligarchs now on board the Trump train see a moment — a brilliant moment to disable government oversight for just long enough for them to craft the ideal political system of their … making? Manipulating? What?

And yes, I realize that I’m engaging in a bit of pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! fear-mongering here, but hey! Can you think of better targets in a Gilded Age other than the oligarchs now taking over our government — tech billionaires being given a supposed free hand to … basically … constitute their own Constitutional Convention and re-code the American political system?

Doesn’t that sound like the sky-high ambition behind the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)? An opportunity to recode it all?

I’m not against the whole traitor-to-their-class approach of reform. Hell, as I frequently note, that’s your two Roosevelts bookending a phenomenally successful updating of the US system across a several-decade Progressive Era.

But that’s not the direction we seem to be heading, as so smartly explained by David Ignatius in a recent op-ed (a truly brilliant piece):

WAPO: The Regressivists come to Washington; Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressivists and Donald Trump’s DOGE billionaires diagnosed the same problem in government. They part ways after that.

[Theodore] Roosevelt’s Progressive movement rescued “Gilded Age” America from a predicament a bit like what the country faces today. Freewheeling capitalism in the 1890s had created gross inequality, rising anger among workers and a swamp of political corruption …

A recent Rand study argued that Roosevelt’s reform movement was a case study in how “anticipatory national renewal” can avert decline. “That is precisely the challenge that faces the United States” now, the study argued, when the country’s “competitive position is threatened both from within … and outside.” People across America agree something is wrong, and this year, voting for Donald Trump was a way for millions of Americans to register their discontent.

Point being we’re at the stage of growing self-awareness that transformational improvements are both possible and necessary — that odd mix of seemingly intractable problems and inconceivable solutions colliding.

The thing is, per “The Six Million Dollar Man”: We have the technology! Thus, our undue deference to, and belief in, the Tech Bros in their pure wizarding mode (Watch Elon recast the entire USG just like he SAVED Twitter!).

But I’m serious on the technology part: for every huge problem you can name, to include my book’s focus on climate change, demographic aging, and the rise of a supremely demanding global majority middle class, there are looming technological solutions and advances — AI being chief among them.

So, sure, I get the Tech Bros’ ambition to step up now and try to get it done. I just don’t trust them enough on their own. Like the Bush neocons with the Global War on Terror (and yes, I realize that some people finger me in that crowd), I fear we’re going too destructively far, too destabilizingly fast.

What will that get us in its messy failures? I fear even more disbelief in science and reality and even more willingness to trade in our freedoms for the illusion of certainty.