Pedants I
If you want this in a pithy: the next era is of the pedants, and this time, they haven’t learned anything themselves (for real).
If you understand the above, you don’t have to keep reading. But I will keep typing.
—
Have you heard that the “age of reason” is dead? When the news cycle tells me something, I have to wonder why, and today they were reporting, “the AGE OF REASON is DEAD.” I know this is just my news but if it reaches me, it reaches many.
I want to work backwards this time and start with how this news will be read by the average me at first glance. “Dumb people are dumb” sums it up. It isn’t news to any of us that whatever you would call reason in the average person is definitely on the decline — in that I mean: many people are against the idea of coming to a resolution through reasoning. People don’t like resolution anymore; conflict is safe now and way more fun.
But that doesn’t mean those people are dumb. When they say the “age of reason is dead”, they mean that “the age of resolution is dead.” These people are not looking to create resolve with you but these people are still humans built to be reasoning machines and they will continue to reason.
Therefore, we’ve reached the more average and appropriate conclusion: the age of “good-faith reasoning” is dead. We figure that everyone else has already chosen their side and the battle is for show; the idiot yells to feel heard, the average parrots for stability, and the smart patronize to escape culpability.
We are all reasoning to the best of our abilities to make ourselves comfortable with our current realities but I am never trying to win you over to my side.
-
Why would I want you/ You’re no better at reasoning than I am/ which means you are of no use to me/ unless you have something which I want/ in which case I will out-reason you for it// I don’t need you at all// At my best I’d be willing to let you renounce your beliefs and join me/ with the caveat that you are permanently marked as someone with unstable beliefs//
-
We are serving masters and this is what puppetry looks like.
Our current confusion between reasoning itself and resolution has been created because we lack a common enemy. Maybe you are able to move past the initial point, where you think resolution means “winning the other over” to a smarter-stance where merely “having the conversation” is enough, and that co-existence with conversation is the good-human way. Or maybe you’re evil and you think they are absolutely wrong, and anything you do is the good-human way. No matter which of these options you want to choose, they reinforce the idea that there are teams. If you think I’ve only just decoded “tribal mentalities” then, good for your team that I’m an idiot.
To be honest, we shouldn’t even mention the tribes or teams. Anything that reinforces the collective. Humans thrived off community because community enables individuals but at some point if community starts to disable most individuals, or rather, most individuals become dependent on the community and disable themselves, instead of being that which props it up, the community is bound to fail.
Failure of the community is fortunately or unfortunately of different meaning than it once was. Fortunately, in the sense that its original meaning would mean death of nearly all, and our modern luxuries render that unlikely. Unfortunately, in that meaning you have to live through the entire decline of civilization.
Failure now simply means to be usurped. You have no control.
It is almost impossible for the average person to understand the players of the game now. We can understand that their was indeed distinct differences between Philip II, Alexander the Great, and the “state of Macedonian”, but their power had a great deal of overlap: the state is the leaders, the armies, the people; the power of Alex/Phil is to lead the army and rule state; the state/army may lose control of people without Alex/Phil; and of course, the people all die to others without the state/army/Alex/Phil.
This is how society existed. And yes, there are miners and blacksmiths, and more importantly, those that own the mines; and chemists and poets, and everything else; all of those help to keep the balance, similar to today. But it doesn’t take a manifesto to realize that few people hold most of power, similar to today.
Try to play that same example out today. Who do you put in the leader role of Alex/Phil? The state is still the state, so maybe the leaders are the presidents or military generals? Or the judges who govern the state, and thus the overall life restraints of their people? Is it the corporations who spent the most on lobbying the state? Is it the media, since they can change the perceptions and convictions of the people?
If you tried to nail something down, it would be close to: the leader role of Alex/Phil is the top government official(s) in charge of monetary policy and defense policy, often both relegated to the president and advisors, whose opinions in democratic societies, should reflect the representative majority opinions on monetary and defensive policy, as well as, and in balance to, social policies, and the interests of local corporations, as well as foreign corporations that are beneficial to local corporations. They might be one person, they might be a group of people.
[If your objection to this was that those leaders are autocrats and we live in a democracy… I ask only this: was Alexander the Great a one-off? And would he been okay with voting equal to you?]
The war is still on today. The least violent of all wars in which you won’t be killed is still a war, and Alex/Phil are still out fighting in that war. And you are at home rooting for one of those generals. When they come home, there won’t be any blood, and they’ll only change the rules a little bit, and they’ll be known to win wars so you should probably trust them with your next war.
But after a hundred wars and a hundred little changes, you won’t care about who Alex/Phil are, or even who we are all fighting against, you will only care about getting to the next rule change first. Win or lose the war, the resources will be adjusted accordingly, and the people react accordingly: they divvy up the total of what was left for them amongst themselves. They might use a market and feel smart about it, but they are fighting over the crumbs still.
You fight “at home” because you never leave your house. They took the war away from your feet but that means that you are at their will. If they lose abroad, the losses might never reach home, but if and when they do you, do you think they will be upfront about them unless it is absolutely in their benefit? Unlikely. And when they win, they will try even harder to hide it, and give you only what is sufficient to calm you in the event you do find out.
Now, when I say they’ve taken death away, I lied; they haven’t. You won’t use sharp pieces of metal to slash each other to death anymore but you will still work in the mines until you are dead. Or at Walmart until you’re dead. Work anywhere until you are dead. Doesn’t matter, you are dead.
They have taken death out of the game, so that they don’t die. They will all get old and die too, of course, but their time isn’t pre-occupied with work and following rule changes, so at least they get a chance to go to war if they so choose, and now their war doesn’t involve swords.
--