The Ouroboros

If the Library of Alexandria existed today, our society would grab a torch and burn it down.

Like the mythical ouroboros, modern society is consuming itself.

More accurately, forces interested in destroying American society and culture have walked it up to the precipice and are now trying to push it over, hoping to create something new. They don’t know what that “new” is and the methods they have used to get us to that precipice have created situations difficult to overcome.

Americans have seemingly lost the ability to speak to each other without offending, universities and student governments are buying into the feminist fable of “rape culture” that infantilizes young women and criminalizes young males for nothing other than being male. The same goes for the assault on masculinity in the broader culture where men are viewed as warmongering savages and women the paragon of virtue. Speech “codes” are being enforced and language is being politically and ideologically modified to fit a particular worldview.

A recent student survey got college kids to agree to sign a petition to abolish the Constitution. Nancy Pelosi wants to replace our capitalist economy. It hasn’t been that long ago when Senate Democrats wanted to amend the Constitution to restrict the First Amendment right of free speech. Free speech for me, but not for thee – especially if I don’t like what you are saying. At every turn, the Biden administration is telling Americans to sit down and shut up, we are the government, and we are here to help you because that “freedom” thing is so last century.

Three things are combining to accelerate our current death spiral.

The first is rank ignorance – we live in a time that is so fraught with trumpery the timeworn phrase “a chink in the armor” is interpreted as a racial slur. The word “chink” as in “a narrow opening or crack” has been part of the English language since the 1500’s. In a stunning bit of historical ignorance, a few years ago, people went nuts on Twitter about a Kanye West collaborating with a new artist – the fans were thinking that this new guy was “’bout to blow up” as I believe the kids say.

The new artist?

Paul McCartney.

Just a tidbit for the youngsters, McCartney was a member of an obscure little band called “The Beatles” that washed up on our shores in 1964 from Britain (that’s the island kingdom from which we declared our independence in 1776) – this little known, obscure band holds the record for selling the most albums (the ancient equivalent of CDs or downloads) with over 180 million copies sold.

The second factor is isolationism – while the age of the Internet has increased the world’s access to knowledge, it has also coarsened and narrowed debate and has eliminated the need of people to be in someone’s physical presence or even to hear their voice. True communication is made up of three things – the denotation of words, the connotation that the nuance of the human voice gives them and the physical expressions of the human body and face as those words are spoken.

Two of those three are lost in our electronic society – how many times have Facebook posts been misinterpreted simply because they are so antiseptic? How many of your Facebook friends do you know in the “real world”? I maybe know 10-20% of mine.

Now add the left’s hysterical insistence on masking and we bring the isolationism of the Internet to the real world.

The final contributing factor is the ideology of collectivism. It seems counterintuitive that a collectivist belief system would be driving people apart, but the implementation of all collectivist belief systems has been based on pitting individuals and groups against each other to create class conflict. Today, this nation is more divided along racial, economic and ideological lines that at any time since the Civil War.

Of course, American collectivists are actively trying to present themselves and their policies as the cure for the very divisions they are creating. We have a political party and a President that believe it is acceptable to pass laws to see what is in them, to capriciously define and enforce those laws depending on how they feel about them at that time, and to look at those policies as they fail and claim success.

We have already reached a point where a misunderstood interaction could be considered a criminal act. There are voices out there that are saying that a woman should always be believed when she claims that there was a rape – that the male is automatically guilty even before any evidence is collected – even though there are quite a few cases (the UVa and Duke “rape” cases in particular) where these charges were made up. At the University of Virginia, the administration is continues to sanction campus fraternities even though they acknowledge the gang rape that brought about the punishments never occurred.

Accusations of racism are legion and there is such a short supply of actual racism, the left must manufacture it, perpetuating an endless stream of Jussie Smollett level race hoaxes. In a delicious intersection of irony and ignorance, BLM, the movement that spent pretty much all of 2020 burning and looting has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Price - and they will probably get it.

What a true conundrum it is to witness such a colossal paradox – to live in a time where society has the greatest access to knowledge and wisdom since the existence of the ancient Library of Alexandria and yet still be so spectacularly stupid, to have the greatest opportunity for individual liberty and yet be careening toward serfdom, and to live in the most widely spread prosperity only to be told that prosperity is evil and wrong.

We are living the curse of the old toast “May you live in interesting times” – because these times are certainly “interesting”, if not confounding and absurd, a literal assault on the senses.

Society is quickly replacing common sense, decency, propriety, and self-governance with the arbitrary authority of the state. References to Orwell’s “1984” have unfortunately become all to cliché – but while clichés represent trite and overused concepts, it does not mean they are false.

In The Road to Serfdom, F.A. Hayek wrote:

“There is no justification for the widespread belief that, so long as power is conferred by democratic procedure, it cannot be arbitrary; it is not the source of power which prevents it from being arbitrary; to be free from dictatorial qualities, the power must also be limited. A true “dictatorship of the proletariat,” even if democratic in form, if it undertook centrally to direct the economic system, would probably destroy personal freedom as completely as any autocracy has ever done.”

Think on that, America…