What a Way to Wake Up

 

Covid, Kabul and Ida. It's become a habit that every morning before I alight from bed I have my Alexa give me news summaries from CBC, NPR and BBC.

Today those broadcasts were heavy with terrorism, pandemic and climate change. There was scarcely time for anything else. The Delta variant surging, more suicide attacks expected at Kabul airport and a hurricane to possibly rival Katrina just hours away from the Louisiana coast. It carried an apocalyptic foreboding that did nothing to encourage a person to put bare feet onto a cold floor.

Then I came across this 1959 quote from Carl Jung:

"We need more understanding of human nature because the only real danger that exists is man himself. He is the great danger and we are pitifully unaware of it. We know nothing of man ...far too little. His psyche should be studied  - because we are the origin of all coming evil."

I haven't unlocked the mystery of posting videos to "new" Blogger but check out this warning from Sasha Baron Cohen on how social media is sabotaging democracy:

"Democracy, which depends on shared truths, is in retreat, and autocracy, which depends on shared lies, is on the march." 

Then I found a quote from author and aeronautical engineer, the late Robert Heinlein, that made me think of the angry mob that recently derailed a campaign appearance by our prime minister:

"A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot."

For years I have bemoaned the erosion of social cohesion in our nations, marked by the rejection of shared truths on just about any issue that can be politicized. Just as the tobacco industry spent years undermining the truth about smoking, the fossil fuel giants did precisely the same to undermine the truth of climate change that has now morphed into climate breakdown.

We look at the rich diet of outrageous lies being swallowed whole by the Gullibillies, Trump's base. Cohen calls those "shared lies." A lie, shared widely enough and often enough, is annealed into unassailable truth. Society fractures, each side speaking a different and irreconcilable "truth." The civility of our civilization fades.  Confounding and distracting a society, sowing doubt and suspicion, has become the order of the day, channeling us into a Lord of the Flies world.

Carl Sagan, a couple of years before his death, wrote a terrific book, "The Demon Haunted World."

"I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic and national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.

"The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir."

"Habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls." Are we witnessing, in every corner of this world, a counter-Enlightenment, a new Dark Age that will usher in a reversal of progress?  It does, to me, seem that way. This is no natural phenomenon. As Sasha Baron Cohen warns this is being engineered by the forces that would see a new order replace our unappreciated and poorly nurtured democracy. Cui Bono indeed.

All of this before I even have my first cup of coffee. I might just go back to bed. I'm not sure I want to see how this day unfolds.