Welcome to the Age of Disaster

“There have been four sorts of ages in the world’s history. There have been ages when everybody thought they knew everything, ages when nobody thought they knew anything, ages when clever people thought they knew much and stupid people thought they knew little, and ages when stupid people thought they knew much and clever people thought they knew little. The first sort of age is one of stability, the second of slow decay, the third of progress, and the fourth of disaster.”

Bertrand Russell

What “stupid people” think they know is that most of the “clever people” are full of shit.

Mark Twain famously pointed out that “The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.” We can say the same about speaking the truth: The man who refuses to say what is true is no better than the man who has no idea what is true.

“Their lies are even worse than our lies!” ain’t much of a slogan.

In the United States, voters are told to choose between two parties that have both made peace with to their inability and unwillingness to speak the truth. But as the politicians would be quick to point out, it’s not just politics; the entire culture is riddled with untruth, like a wooden house that’s been chewed through by decades of unaddressed termite infestation. Every ad, every phishing sales pitch, every self-indulgent Instagram post, every dating app profile, every pretty woman smiling from your screen stinks of falsity.

And we lie right back, don’t we? Last time you updated your software, did you read the “legal agreement” you swore to have read when you clicked the SUBMIT button? Of course you didn’t. They knew you wouldn’t. Nobody does. That’s how we’re trained to swallow lies — force us to tell our own. Ignore them, traffic in them, and come to accept blatant bullshit as commonplace normality.

SUBMIT. SUBMIT. SUBMIT.