Modern Pessimism
Walter Kirn Version of Pessimism:
"People now in that stage of demoralization where they calculate what levels of infrastructure failure they can tolerate given their incomes and life expectancies."
Walter Kirn Version of Pessimism:
"People now in that stage of demoralization where they calculate what levels of infrastructure failure they can tolerate given their incomes and life expectancies."
Brett Weinstein: "Something is at war with us, “us” being regular citizens who want things to work and to be left alone. We’re slow to react because we think in terms of nations. Our enemies are mafias that wear our governments like a cloak to defeat our eyes, and fly our flags to disarm our minds."
One can apply this quote to dozens of major controversies that have erupted over the past five years.
Omar El Akkad:
"One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this."
Why have so many of our institutions have become so dysfunctional? Further, many of them have become Orwellian, which you can see when you compare their official mission statements with what they actually do. Dylan Ratigan offers this thoughtful analysis:
The Billionaires Are Not VictimsOne of the great distortions in American political discourse is the idea that populist anger emerges from nowhere — as if millions of people simultaneously became irrational, tribal, or extreme for no reason at all.
I don’t believe that.
I think what we are witnessing across the United States — on both the political right and the political left — is the consequence of a society that increasingly understands, correctly, that its governing institutions are not primarily organized around the public interest.
They are organized around capital concentration.
And until that changes, populism will continue to grow.
Not because people are stupid.
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