The Illustrious Age of Torpidity

There has always been a faction of people who are convinced Man must be governed for their own good. Inspect the annals of political history and it is ever present. This obsession in certain people extended its shadow over the public during the Revolutionary War. People of this persuasion are opportunists, and often True Believers. Benjamin Franklin declared the drive for American independence was rooted in the Colonists inability to control their own money, without the interference of the British government. But we are taught it was over the cause of freedom, taxation without representation being the primary cause. But that in itself becomes a ruse over time. It wasn’t the issues of taxation that caused the rebellion. It was financial losses on the part of businessmen that drove the Federalist movement for political consolidation and stronger Federal government. We have beheld the orgiastic peak in recent years of what businessmen will do to extricate themselves from their folly. It is government they turn to for advantage and ease of restriction, and government the source for financial redress. They’ve been doing this to the populace in this country the same as what has been done in others back through the ages. The Revolutionary War didn’t grant the public freedom of self-determination. It merely granted power-mongers here the privilege to do what their counterparts in England were doing to them. If there is anything to be learned from politics, it is that the nature of human beings is to grope toward fascism and despotism.

The truth of the matter is Man is the only specie on this planet capable or regulating itself by cognitive action, and has regulated itself over countless millennia, with or without imposed supervision. Speaking of supervision, there is no such action performed by governing bodies—they’ve never possessed SUPER vision. This is oxymoronic, and if anything, it’s been super-myopathy where hierarchies are present. From a psychological perspective, those who seek to define themselves through the regulation of the public welfare are universally least capacitated to do so. Our very own American grass-roots philosopher, Eric Hoffer, eloquently elucidated this character defect, as has numerous doctoral dissertation beggars attempting to categorize the human psyche in predictable patterns. Such obsessed people acquire substitutes for what is lacking within themselves—at the expense of others.

The spiral of retrograde amnesia however, is not due to the presence of this and numerous other human behavioral defects. My contention is that such behaviors are more pervasive and subtle the more complex our civilization becomes. The more pyramidal and stratified we become in our attitudes, associations, and business ventures, the worse the amnesia, and more imminent the collapse. The natural bonds that hold families, communities, and ad-hoc associations together tend to dissolution if not inhibited. More is not necessarily better. Faster is not necessarily earlier. Riches and power derived from them do not necessarily grant freedom, serenity, and certainly not happiness. Such solutions to life’s impediments to those goals in fact tend to the opposite result. Despite this cognitive recognition, the pursuit of “getting ahead” permeates business, news, sports, virtually every aspect of Western life.

The more technologically oriented we are, the more buffered our relationships become. When I was a child, neighbors still chatted from adjacent yards and joined in ad-hoc neighborhood activities. A grievance was addressed through face-to-face communication. Formal politeness and honorifics in speech were used to convey respect and friendliness. These behaviors are disappearing. The irony is that where they do exist, it is in organizations like the military. Such organizations depend on these honorifics to survive. They cannot perform their intended purpose without the camaraderie and trust such treatment engenders in their members.

Evidence of buffered relationships is most obvious with Facebook, Twitter, and other Internet based communications. Direct contact between communicants is virtually non-existent. In fact, virtual in all its social permutations is where our “advanced” society is headed. Good science fiction writing (the style that started the genre) has always been prognostic. The movie Surrogates released in 2009 is a representative theme in science fiction material, brought up to date with current technology and social patterns. Social interaction is mechanized, facilitated by complex hardware and software apps. In the last month I have witnessed more than a dozen emails among the Amateur Radio community about how there is an app for this or that function. The need for interactivity between persons is pacified with the substitute of machine tools for the sake of expediency, speed, convenience, or fear of non-acceptance. What is invented to grant more leisure time for direct social interaction of families or communities is transmuted into methods of asocial interaction. The closer we become in time and space the less we want to deal with the realities of social intercourse. We prefer to experience our relationships through virtual reality mechanisms—movies, video clips, sound bites, stage performances, and entertainment. Persons enmeshed in these mechanisms to the exclusion of regular and productive social interchanges become insipid and ethereal.

The explosion of reality and criminal justice TV shows over the last few decades follows a path similar to Harry Benson in Michael Crichton’s Terminal Man. The Media in this country, obsessed with ever higher ratings and market share, scour anything that can be made sensational. Vulgarity and crass apparently is their watchword with spectacles like the Trayvon Martin court proceedings. Of course this is not new; O.J. Simpson’s trials dominated the “news” in their time.

The consequences of this is a decrease in patience not only with the technology, but with people for small affronts or failure of expectation. Americans as much as, and perhaps more than any other culture today, will have their pound of flesh for infractions against their repose. We see it in the news repeatedly. The Boston Bombers, the Tucson Triggerman, Pompous Posters on You Tube and Facebook. There is hardly an exception to those interviewed on the evening news, being victim of some violent crime, who speak out for justice when what they really mean is retribution.

The top news stories are trivial and disgusting. They’ve become minibite emulations of Days of Our Lives, Dallas, Peyton Place, and reality shows like Survivor in their press releases, as if the news media must compete with the entertainment industry. Who cares about the personal problems of Lindsey Lohan, Paris Hilton, or Reese Witherspoon, or Randy Quaid? How do their personal difficulties become the subject of headline news? Are people that petty, vulgar, or half-witted? Apparently so judging by broadcast content.

Who turns the TV on to get the latest top stories because of the graphics used in television production? Are people so easily manipulated by the agenda of media moguls, or is it both? Evening entertainment takes the form of Bevis and Butthead or South Park type humor. To out perform The Simpsons with its parody of family dysfunction, we get cartoons depicting and exalting the lack of intelligence, foresight, and wisdom. On the opposite channels we have game shows of every kind reflecting Frederic Bastiat’s 1873 observation: “The Lottery is the poetic vision of the poor.” And the technology to watch this drivel keeps pace with bigger and bigger LCD view screens, and iPads with their WiFi connected intravenous narcotic drip.

In concert with these banal media productions idolizing fatuousness, we’re getting graduates who not only cannot spell, but don’t want to spell correctly. In the parking lot of Sam’s club I observed a sign concerning their expansion project: “We thank you for your patients.” And another: pure filtered water. Nobody caught these before they were retrieved from the sign-making press. With all the technological aids and tutorial services today, public school graduates are not concerned with the excellence of the basic communicative skills: reading, writing, arithmetic competence, nor analytical thought. They don’t see any value in it, and we’re seeing a commensurate decline in technical competence and interest by undergraduates.

Contrast this with the African tribes who confront the social offender not with their misdeed, but with the name and song they were given at birth, or recitations of the all the good the person had accomplished. The offender is confronted with positive reflection, reminded of who they were before they committed their offense. Which people are the more civilized?

How is it this younger generation largely abhors the technical professions that brought them the gadgets and instant communication and gratification they depend on? Eric Hoffer observed of my generation it was due to the rise of affluence in the middle-class. They have so much affluence they have little to strive for but venal self-indulgence. Today the middle-class is not much larger than the working poor. The median age in America is close to middle age. When I was a burgeoning youth, I looked forward with great anticipation for the future of exploration and discovery. Today’s youth are looking forward to the maintenance of a geriatric population supported by broken political programs and economic policies. Their nation is being run by a gaggle of cronies that can’t agree on anything but plundering the last vestige of civil liberty. Children today are not in pursuit of an education that increases their perspicacity, but to find employment in a rapidly declining marketplace for the professional, and increasing demand for the common laborer or soldier. In my youth an education represented the door not only to prosperity, but new frontiers in discovery. Today’s youth view education as a lifetime of debt and destitution for all but the elite.

More people can read, but literacy remains a small percentage of the population.
More people are taught arithmetic rules and algebraic relations, but analytical skills remain fairly low.
More people are taught the concepts of artistic composition, but music and art remain blasé.
Network and broadcasting information channels have exploded, but the content is uniform and repetitive.

American media peddles the Paint Factory mystique. Europe had more leisure time in the 90s than Americans. Here there is a frantic 50+ hr/wk pace to obtain economic stability all the while escalating work place burnout, and on a larger, longer scale corporate burnout. Everywhere people bemoan the loss of business enterprise, the loss of large corporations that comprised the backbone of American manufacturing and personal affluence. The big name corporations of a century, and half-century ago are disappearing in consolidations and bankruptcies. The unemployed and uninformed cite corporate officer greed as the motive force behind the exportation of their jobs. But few if any, realize that the loss of productivity in America is not about where the jobs have gone, but why. Corporations are living entities composed of a symbiosis between the worker and the patron. Corporations have a life cycle and ultimate economic impotence just as people do. Bemoaning such losses, Tom Barrett, mayor of Milwaukee referred to the development and exploitation of the Great Lakes as a commodity rather than a natural resource to be managed and conserved for the preservation of all life. Jobs have left the northern continent not because of corporate officer greed, but because world affluence has obviated the need for a working middle-class American.

Where have we come to when we view our world in terms of economic stability and affluence, measured against the spendthrift business practices of the last two centuries?

This morning I discussed with my wife the negativity that exudes from the news channels, which are relentless in asserting their supremacy at accurate weather forecasting, breaking news stories (I abhor broken news), and the fine sifting viewers must perform to find something truly noteworthy, informative, and uplifting. Because our communication organs are largely insipid, I quit watching TV news, listening to radio news, and the banality of their programming across the modulation spectrum. Shows like Dancing with the Stars, and American Idol is like watching Sesame Street on steroids. Not that there isn’t value in supporting people in the quest for artistic excellence. It’s the system of extreme sensationalism that permeates the whole of communication networks. In the last decade there has been an unending line of movie productions escalating the computer graphic depictions of movie remakes. But where is the art? The only useful portion worth remembering in Iron Man III was Tony Stark’s introductory commentary on the hazards of hubris. Man of Steel is loaded with high tech and magic, but the characters are mostly wooden, particularly the hero who spends the majority of the 150 minutes bashing it out with his father’s enemies (who by the way loses his life to a moment of petty distraction capstoning a life of cunning preparation). Kal El can’t seem to outwit these idiots at their own game and triumphs only by assistance of his mortal counterparts. Superman was originally possessed of higher intelligence as well as morals. The appeal of the original story was traded for CGI.

The previous century was loaded with theorists who were completely off their rockers, theorizing cause and effect that had nothing to do with observed reality. Men like Freud, Chapman, Einstein, Gammow, Geovanelli, Sagan, Hawking, Hubble. The list is quite large. The best analytical research was accomplished by their predecessors whose discoveries were largely ignored. There were, and still are some physicists and astronomers who pay attention to their observations and its connection to reality. But these are largely held incommunicado by an entrenched and corrupt peer-review process. Those that manage to self organize and produce their own publicizing organs fall prey to the same traits as their opposition; rigid, intractable, pertinacious, opinionated, closing ranks on any who may wish for open discussion or debate of their research and creating the Peter Principle atmosphere in their hierarchy.

In the late 60s, philosopher Eric Hoffer observed a trend that has become the general state of the current world economy: “it is doubtful whether a non-middle-class society can be modern. Domination by aristocrats, intellectuals, workers or soldiers results in a return to the past—to feudalism, the Middle Ages, or even the ancient river-valley civilizations. It is not as yet certain whether it is possible to have a freewheeling science, literature and art, or even a genuine machine age without a middle class.” With all the advancement in technology and its affluence, we do not see a return to the Golden Age, but a further decline into stagnation and depravity. It isn’t the advanced society of Star Trek NG we see on the horizon, but the world of Blade Runner and Cherry 2000 with its cyborg counterparts.

Seth Smee

REFERENCES
First Things Last Things p45 Hoffer
The Ordeal of Change Hoffer
Economic Sophisms p264 Frederic Bastiat