I’m partial to iguanas, myself.
People of Earth did a wonderful job with the “rich and powerful are reptiles” trope.
From what I understand (from fiction, not any real study of history, so my understanding is not all that good), Harding was stupid and the dupe of unscrupulous people, but not actually evil.
Unfortunately, the way technology has advanced, the boob-in-chief can do global harm through, not only trade wars and shifting alliances, but through weaponry. Nuclear weaponry. Boobs have more power than they used to.
I keep thinking of the Jungian concept on enantiodromia, that is, the tendency of things to evolve into their opposites. The US has become the opposite of its best self now. I hope that the evolution continues, and something better results.
As in, thesis vs antithesis, outcome synthesis. We had a pretty good thesis, we are suffering the antithesis, please, a higher and better synthesis, without too much damage done along the way.
In terms of the world being a mess, I’ve always thought the year 1848 set a benchmark.
This is the real issue.
Thank you, Annie, for describing the most profound problem of our time in one concise sentence.
…And they’re ready to please.
(Extra points if you can get this reference.)
There have always been nutty people with far out ideas. What has changed is the social and community structure that deals with these people. I am reminded of Menocchio, a 16th century miller from near Venice in what is now Italy. He might kindly be described today as a religious eccentric. He was moderately well-read and came up with a cosmology that echoed the prevailing theory on where worms come from (spontaneous generation within rotting flesh or cheese) He pictured the initial world as chaos and then God and the angels spontaneously generated out of the chaos. (Although a concept he called ‘the majesty of God’ somehow existed outside of the chaos, but we’re not here to nitpick his cosmology, but rather that it existed.) So what happens is that he goes about telling his neighbors about it and for the most part they tell him that he’s nuts and all is well. Eventually, he tells the wrong person, they round him up and Inquisition him. They tell him to stop being an idiot, they give him the equivalent of a dunce cap he has to wear so that everyone knows that he’s nuts and they send him home. That riles him up and he manages to keep his mouth shut for a while, but then he starts saying that the church is evil and corrupt and needs to be destroyed, so 15 years or so after his first trial, they round him up again and execute him. Poor Menocchio.
Anyway, the point of the story is that crazy theories and conspiracies and all of that jazz are pretty common. The typical way to respond was to ignore them or roll your eyes. They mostly lacked a platform for spreading their ideas and so were seen as nuisances. Menocchio as our example showed was pretty much just tolerated as long as his platform was small and his ideas not particularly challenging to the status quo. When his platform enlarged and he challenged the status quo, he was eliminated from society. Again, poor Menocchio.
What has changed is that firstly, no one has a monopoly on objective truth anymore. In Menocchio’s case, he says some crazy stuff, the church has a monopoly on truth and says, “Nope, you’re wrong. Your theories lack validity” and they basically brand him as ‘person who should be ignored.’ (It should be noted that not every disagreement with the church hierarchy was branded as ‘incorrect’ for ideas outside of the mainstream, but not necessarily ‘crazy’ - debates would arise about their validity that could stretch decades.) This arbiter of objective truth really helped to squelch the crazies. We don’t really have that anymore. Now, truth is simply in the eyes of the beholder. ‘Fake news’ was not a problem because you didn’t pick and choose your truth source based on your predisposition. The truth source was the Church and there was largely tacit agreement especially among the non-elites that what they said goes. So for instance, if we were having the Climate Change debate in the 14th century, the real debate would be taking place in Rome and once they came up with their ruling, then that was ‘truth’ for all intents and purposes. The Pope issues an encyclical that climate change is real and man-made and the discussion is ended.
Secondly, the platform has become much larger. If I believed that lizard men are ruling the world in the 14th century, then my audience for my craziness is basically the couple dozen families in my village. The chance of me finding even a single sympathetic soul to my lizard man hysteria among those families was basically zero. I become ‘Old Crazy Senoy, God bless him’ and my theories die with me. The megacities of Europe typically had populations in the low hundreds of thousands. You couldn’t really reach those people except by screaming on a street corner and that wasn’t a way to win many converts either. If by some chance your movement did take off and it had more reach, the Church and State was always there to squelch such things. Now though, you can put up a youtube video and reach a population of hundreds of thousands in no time. I just did a youtube search for ‘lizard rulers’ and the first hit had half a million views. Now naturally, most of the people viewing that video probably think it’s funny or hogwash, but even if .1% have serious mental problems and believe it, then that’s 500 people and with the rise of the internet, those people can form communities that feedback on themselves and can grow over time into movements of the insane. What the internet and the ‘rise of the individual’ have done is essentially taken the social brakes off of the machine that moves societies as singular entities. That leads to a lot of craziness.
I can think of at least two reptilian politicians. The first is McConnell who looks and acts like a turtle. The second is even called a Newt and seems to be responsible for a lot of the ultra-partisanship we see today. But I mainly came to this zombie to mention Joe McCarthy and the whole anti-communism conspiracy, which did much more damage and the few communists could have ever done. And since Buckley was mentioned upthread, let me point out that he went to his grave convinced that McCarthy was a great patriot. I have long wondered whether McCarthy, in destroying the Asian wing of State, is the one who led directly to the Viet Nam disaster.
I think that the ready availability of widespread, unvetted information, combined with the inability of many exposed to it to accurately assess its veracity or even likelihood is the biggest thing making things crazy at the current time.
IMO, this is why we have Trump, anti-vaxxers, and a lot of other patently stupid stuff that we didn’t have in years past- like **Filbert **and **PastTense **have pointed out, you basically had to actively seek out the kook/crank stuff in say… 1990, when it was the province of weird newsletters and meetings.
Nowadays, you can get your kookery on your phone any time of day, any place, and since you can also surround yourself with an internet echo chamber of your own choosing, you get a lot more confirmation that the kookery is normal and real, instead of the crickets you used to get, or the outright derision from others.
Think about it- in say… 1990, if you were to say that vaccines were bad, etc… you’d get crickets from all traditional media, and a good chunk of people would tell you outright that you’re a f**king idiot, and what about smallpox, polio, etc…? Nowadays, you can say that, and if you’re not careful about where/when, you can end up in a situation where all your online peers confirm and support you in it. So even if the traditional media and some real-life people either don’t confirm it, or deny it, you have this huge group ready to confirm it for you. Plus, back in the day, you kind of had to keep your kook-ness under wraps, lest you got a reputation as a weirdo, but apparently that’s not a thing anymore.
Yes.
Yes, things are crazier today. They have always been crazy, of course, but now there is more widespread and unreliable information, higher expectations, lower standards and so many drastic changes whose effects simply won’t be understood for generations.
It’s interesting that there is a perception that woo is new and science is old.
Humans have spent almost all of our history believing in gods and ghosts and clairvoyance and superstition.
Science and skeptical reasoning is very much the new kid on the block.
I guess we can ask whether that “new kid” was particularly popular in the 50s and 60s…I was not alive then, but I would say no. Plenty of people were positive about science then, and plenty of people still are. Woo is pretty common now…and it certainly was back then too.
Oh, but on re-reading the OP I think he’s alluding more to conspiracy theories.
These definitely seem more common post-internet.
People are much more inclined to form their own opinion on events, which in itself is a good thing; as long as you form that opinion based on objective facts and weighing up data from a variety of trustworthy sources.
Unfortunately to many people it just means believing in what seems most cool or interesting to them.
And, once you have come to the conclusion that the earth is flat you can spend all day watching videos of people who agree with you, giving the reasons why they agree with you.
And also now you’re a member of a select group with insider knowledge. Instead of the reality that you would need to study and work hard for many years to make any contribution to human scientific understanding.
I grew up during the 1970’s, and will never, ever believe that people are any stupider or weirder now than they were then. People today are models of sanity by comparison.
During my teenage years, it was widely believed that putting things under a pyramid made them more powerful, that a ring could tell your mood, that your birth sign determined your fate and your personality, that emotions rose and fell with biorhythms, that talking to plants made them healthier, that Proctor and Gamble intentionally used a Satanic logo, that Kennedy and Hitler were still alive, that ancient astronauts had supervised the building of the Pyramids, and that unidentified lights in the sky were flying saucers crewed by aliens from other planets. These were not fringe conspiracy theories; they were mainstream beliefs you would hear from well educated friends and neighbors and if you dissented you were an anal-retentive killjoy.
The amount of misinformation that circulated was staggering, since there was no way to look anything up without making a trip to the library. Pompous blowhards could, and did, get everything wrong from the age of an actor to the mechanics of the impeachment process to the rules of the particular sporting event you were watching, and there was no way to call them on it except to yell back and forth “is not” and “is so”, and blowhards could usually yell louder.
God, I don’t miss those days.
I was a mere stripling then, but I remember 1968 as a banner year for crazy.
Thanks for this. I forget sometimes that my entire life is but a fraction of human history, and that those parts I admire most about humanity are maybe just 400 years old. Before the scientific method it was pretty much ALL kookery. And really, we managed to not exterminate ourselves in 10,000 years of city living as kooks, but science & industry appear to be about to do us in at any turn, and in a myriad of nasty ways. So who are the kooks, I wonder?
You’re welcome, but it’s actually my sister who came up with the word "irrelevant, which describes it in a nutshell.
I think it’s not so much that woo is new and science is old, it’s that woo DESPITE science is new- never before have we had a situation where science and rational thought explain something coherently and without much doubt, and then because of lack of education, credulity and a distrust in the authorities and their motivations, we have people actively turning against the scientific facts in order to believe in the woo.
Part of it, I think, it’s that science can sound like woo, and that is easily exploited by charlatans and can predispose people to accept woo as legitimate. Look at how Deepak Chopra uses quantum physic mumbo-jumbo to swindle people.
I’ve thought before that we are at a point where most people really have not the faintest clue of how the world around them works; which was the original state of things, then came science and technology and created a mechanical world where things were easily grasped by the average person…
You shove coal into the fire box, steam is made, the steam pushed in the thingamabob, the thingamabob spins the wheel and the choo-choo rides the rails; not complicated, most people would get it in very short order.
Now try to explain to a lay person the process by which they snap a picture with their phones, a pair of dog ears are magically placed around the real ones and the thing pops up on a friend’s screen on the other side of the planet, and I do mean to really explain the nitty-gritty behind it. Most people’s eyes will glaze over after a minute or two of what would be an hours long explanation. That’s the thing there, IMO, in today’s world, for most people it’s easier to shift the mind into “it’s all magic to me” mode.
This is what in part I think contributes to the resurgence of woo, people, at some level, accepting that the workings of the world are magic, then if something else that looks like magic comes along who are they to say it doesn’t really work like all the other wondrous things around them everyday?
It could be traced back to things like the Radium cures of the late 19th and early 20th century, but I think today the scientific and technological foundations of civilization are much more complex than then.
It’s like that quote from Arthur C. Clark, any sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic; when technology and what it can do far surpasses our comprehension then it does look like magic. I think many people in the world today are at that level regarding much of the science and technology that drives their everyday life, and that makes them susceptible to woo.
Yeah, I remember the 60’s & 70’s-- and people were stupid then, too.
But here’s the big difference between then and now: society as a whole wasn’t affected by stupid individuals.
Back then, the only way for something to “go viral” was to copy it on a Xerox machine and physically hand it to three or four people.
I heard lots of crazy theories that way (conspiracy theories about UFO’s, Bigfoot, JFK’s assassination, the Illuminati,etc, and a lot of bad science like you mentioned about pyramids and talking to plants).
But there was no fake news. Walter Cronkite read us the facts with solemn authority, always reliable.
Society seemed more stable.
Sure there were serious problems–campus riots, ghettos burning,violence at the Democratic convention in Chicago, Watergate. But those problems were solvable, because the people in charge of solving them, and the offices they held, were generally respected. Even the enormous amount of hatred directed at Nixon was done with logic and a solid basis in facts.
Today, the internet has empowered all the stupid people.
(and , dammit, I wish they’d get off my lawn. 
)
It sure seems this way.
Politics are getting crazier, and not just in the U.S.A. IIUC, Italy is now governed by a coalition of far-right and left-wing parties. Voters aren’t sure what extreme they want, as long as it’s extreme? Or maybe, despite having a dozen political parties to choose from, none of them are centrist.