What will anthropologists say about us in 100 years? What is our zeitgeist? I suggest this: Uncritically deployed empathy is motivating many of us to close our eyes to dream up utopias du jure. Your wish list can include anything you want, including 87 sexes, equal outcomes for all groups in every endeavor, a world where no police exist and even no opposition when the U.S. instigates its next discretionary war. Anything you can dream up can instantly be yours if you can gather up a mob on social media and occupy our sense-making institutions.

Step two is to reverse-engineer society to destroy anything that gets in your way, Chesterson’s Fence be damned. This is the Age of Ad Hoc where you are invited to declare your dream to be “self-evident” so that no evidence is necessary. Get rid of traditional math and science because the techniques that allow us to make miracle medicines and airplanes that fly will repeatedly clash with your dream. Get rid of history, criminal justice research based on multi-variate analyses and the Rule of Law. Get rid of all of these things by any authoritarian means necessary, including threatening and defunding inconvenient researchers, deleting their lifetimes of work and silencing anyone trying to question your approach. Develop hundreds of new versions of the ad hominem attack. Snap your fingers to make all Enlightenment principles self-implode without discussion by calling them “racist.” No need to do any work to actually fix any of the problems that motivated your quest. Then sit back and repeatedly blame the ensuing chaos on someone else.