https://youtu.be/dcAzzTIN0lc?si=Fi2TmWoU3icE0_PE
YouTube video which stimulated discussion between B. and me. (Well, at least it got me riding one of my favorite hobby horses again.)
Me: Although he expands it to Greek and Roman civilization while I was limiting it to Chinese and Indian civilization, here's a very interesting YouTube presentation which makes the point I've been making for 40 years.
(Why civilizations fall from internal corruption.)
I especially concur with his point about the humanities. I remember in elementary school learning about getting on the bandwagon and other manipulative techniques. Even in the insanely paranoid anti-communist 50s, some of us were actually taught how to think critically...in elementary school.
...I'm watching this as I record to you. His point about the Mayans has been seriously questioned. Human caused ecological collapse is no longer considered to be, necessarily, a correct cause for their collapse.
B: What are the conditions that enable anti-expert, anti-competent sentiment at scale?
Me: This is one really complicated situation about which I've given to which I have devoted a great deal of thought over the past few decades. Again, I trace the origin of it all to Ronald Reagan. Naturally, he too had his roots, but I still think that we can point to that one man as the source of so many of today's miseries.
Reagan brought religion into politics in a way it had never been before. Up till then, all politicians gave it lip service and it was just a background to the campaign. Reagan was the first to make religion one of the critical elements of his administration, separating the good and holy from the other party.
He also did away with the Fairness Act, which kept news media from slanting toward one party or another but instead creation kept it simply reporting news. Up till then, there was at least the dream of reporters who investigated and whose purpose was to probe the actions of politicians rather than to get them elected. (Of course, this was after the age of yellow journalism.)
He also opened the airways to the highest bidder. Previously, once a year networks had to prove that they were serving the public interest and were providing public service in their programming. Much of what they presented was nonsense but at least they had to put on a good show. After Reagan opened the airways, the highest bidder got what he wanted and the crazy nut cases who spread their wild conspiracy theories at two or three in the morning on a.m. radio suddenly were "journalists" on major networks.
One of the ways in which networks formally proved that they were serving the public interest was their excellent and accurate news reporting. It took a loss. That seeming failure simply proved, or at least was offered as proof, that the network really cared about the public good and it was willing to lose money in order to provide accurate reporting. Today that sounds like a very lame and very bad joke.
Current news is very profitable entertainment and clickbait. It is now so political that I am surprised they don't simply declare their party affiliation.
In other words, we need good leadership. The hope that what Reagan was doing would be overturned when a Democrat got back in office was quickly crushed by Bill Clinton's betrayal of everything the Democratic party stood for, to be replaced by triangulation and neoliberalism.
Most people are not leader material. Traditionally, most of them were glad not to be. Today everybody is their own leader. They do their own research by rushing around biased media finding something that makes them feel good rather than think well. Then they rush around making themselves into their own private influencers and leaders by spreading the nonsense.
The conservatives at this time have two things right, but not in detail. The first is that our nation is in desperately bad trouble. What they don't understand is that the trouble afflicting our nation is them.
The second is that we need a good strong leader. What they don't understand is that we need an honest, sincere, and intelligent leader who still understands what the term "public service" really means.
It would certainly also help if he was at least minimally honest.
We are here because the billionaires and the religious extremists formed an unholy alliance very similar to that of Ibn Saud and Ibn Wahhab. That is, a religious dictatorship which supports the brutality and exploitation of the ruling class in return for creating the one and only official religion.
They want America to become at least a Christian version of Saudi Arabia, if not a Christian Iran.
So far they're succeeding.
In self-defense, let me conclude by pointing out that you did ask. I know you've heard much of this, if not all of it from me before, but, as I said 40 years ago, I'm ringing a fire bell in the night and, as Peter Paul and Mary sang, I've got a bell and I've just gotta keep ringing it.
