Things are about to get really bad, and then they'll get worse

I keep coming back to this quote by James Howard Kunstler in 2011:

Blood in the streets. #Charlottesville

"The clowns and villains who run America have accomplished something really epic: they have vanquished meaning. Nobody knows what anything means anymore. Anything goes now. All bets are off. It's not reassuring. It leads to bad things happening like blood in the streets. When nothing means anything anymore, some people will actually strive, make an effort, to reestablish meaning in practical economic and political life, because civilized life is impossible without it. So, in those historic moments when civilization is suspended, people will work like hell to restore meaning. Sometimes though, like Germany in the 1930s, you discover that the suspension of civilization is itself intoxicating, and you ride with that for a while.  

...There are heroes as-yet-sung-and-unsung in America, people who prefer reality over reality TV, people with a taste for meaning in life, which often requires the recognition that some things are true and some not so true, and you're better off with what's true."

And again from 2008(!!!)

This process is really out of control now. The bottom line is the comprehensive bankruptcy of the United States. The Republican Party under George Bush will be known as the party that wrecked America (release 2.0). Painful as it is, Americans had better get a new "Dream" and fast. It better be a dream based on the way the universe actually works, which is to say an operating procedure run on earnest effort and truthfulness rather than merely trying to get something for nothing and wishing on stars. We might begin symbolically by evacuating Las Vegas and calling in an air strike on the loathsome place -- to register our new reality-based attitude adjustment.

After that, we've got to get to work re-tooling all the everyday activities of life, including the way we grow our food, the way we raise and deploy capital, the way we do trade and manufacturing, the way we go from point A to point B, the way we educate children, the way we stay healthy, and the way we occupy the landscape. I know, it sounds like a lot, maybe too much. But grok this: we don't have any choice if we want a plausible future on this portion of the North American continent.

Of course, none of that is likely to happen. Instead, and under the worst imaginable economic conditions, we'll probably embark on a campaign to prop up the un-prop-up-able and sustain the unsustainable -- that is, defend every status quo habit and behavior that we're used to, whether it can be salvaged or not. Of course, this would be a fatal squandering of our dwindling resources, but it it tends, historically, to be the last act of the melodrama in any faltering empire.




An American corn-pone Hitler.

The result, pretty soon into that process, will be social breakdown and political upheaval. Every tattoo freak out there who has been prepping for his own starring role in some kind of comic book armageddon will finally get his chance to shine. Lots of people will get hurt and starve. Property will change hands in a disorderly way. And at the end of this process an American corn-pone Hitler may be waiting to set everything and everyone straight.

 And now a nod to Hannah Arendt:

Arendt had a deep insight into something that we are living through now. The very categories of truth vs. falsehood and facts vs. lies are in the process of being obliterated. Consequently, the possibilities for lying become boundless and frequently meet with little resistance. Lies are frequently used to deliberately deceive – to present a falsehood as if it were the truth. This still presupposes a distinction between lies and factual truth. But Arendt emphasises that something new occurs when the deceiver comes to believe his own lies. She points out how difficult it is to lie consistently without coming to believe in the “truth” of one’s own lies. Many liberals are perplexed that when there is “fact-checking” – when it is clearly and definitively shown that a lie is a lie – many people seem unconcerned and indifferent. But Arendt understood how propaganda really works. “What convinces masses are not facts, not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably a part.” People who feel that they have been neglected and forgotten yearn for a narrative – even an invented fictional story – that will make sense of the anxiety they are experiencing – one that promises some sort of redemption. In such a situation an authoritarian leader has enormous advantages by exploiting anxieties and creating a fiction that people want to believe. Argument and appeal to facts have little effectiveness is the face of such “persuasive” techniques – amplified by social media that penetrate our privacy and are so powerful in shaping opinions and beliefs. A fictional story that promises to solve one’s problems is much more appealing than facts and “reasonable” arguments. Arendt warns us that these dangers helped to smooth the way for the success of totalitarian regimes. These are the dangers that we face today in an alarming fashion.

I want to make a quick - albeit irresponsible - connecting point about modernism / postmodernism. For the purposes of this essay, "modernism" being a shorthand for the idea that "if you work hard enough, you will eventually reach some kind of truth."

This picture of a cat on a stump is entitled
to the same attention as your
medical fundraiser.

Postmodernism, by contrast, holds that ALL MEDIA is inherently equal and ultimately deserves an audience. No single media can be held above another.

The tension this society is feeling is these two diametrically opposed philosophies battling for dominance in our collective cerebral cortex as we try to solute the insoluble.

These cannot co-exist, and no, simply saying so in a Facebook comment won't change this.

Because all media is inherently equal, we cannot make sense of what's true. Even our "news" sites work to distract us from their own work by placing adverts and countless breaks between the paragraphs, annihilating the ability to create context or transfer knowledge.  

Most of us, given the option, will rate our own reading comprehension level at "collegiate" without once questioning what reading level someone who holds an actual degree might select. We tend to overestimate our own intelligence and relevant skillset(s).

Typically, metacognition and comprehension performance are highly related; that is, less skilled comprehenders often fail to adjust their reading in relation to reading goals and they tend to overestimate their own comprehension abilities.

But when tested, most people actually land in the middle-school region of reading and language comprehension. When polled afterwards, most people think the survey/poll/experiment is rigged against them.

Voting matters.
(source: Graphs.net)

Which leads me to practical challenges in voting...

"The problem" with voting lies in how the system places equal value on votes when voters are mostly unequal. A 23-year old bilingual single mother who's holding down two part time jobs has different political needs than an 86 year old retirement-home resident who can no longer distinguish between times of day or understand how door handles work. And the irony of contemporary culture is both these people will spend 4-6 hours a day in the same building/space but operate under different realities.

That we are ok being ignorant about these arrangements is one of the many reasons why we've become comfortable (and complicit) in our feeling of powerlessness.

Working backwards, I believe our feeling(s) of powerlessness are driven by a coterie of intersecting forces: a political voting system that is paralyzed by our larger cultural inability to arrive at a reasonable consensus about the reality in which we inhabit, driven in part by widespread - and fundamental - misunderstandings about how the world functions.

And without these agreements, a functioning, civil society becomes really challenging if not impossible after a certain point, and at a time when global warming is driving human migration to historic levels, we are up against a set of challenges that we might be uniquely incapable of meeting because we don't agree which things are true. And its the shared truths upon which we build meaning.

Photo of New Orleans by TheDailyBeast

And this is why I think (today) "things" (read: the ability for a functioning government to deliver political goods, ala clean water, electricity, emergency services, law enforcement, etc) are going to get worse for a while - not better. Our current structures of governance seem well-tuned to the needs of historic demographics, but terrible at planning for new ones. (See: Hurricane Katrina)

Two closing thoughts: 1) I wish I had a clever quip or philosophical quote to summarize all of this with a simple, memetic hot-take, but I don't, and 2) I want to be wrong about all of this.
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Note to readers: I have most likely misunderstood Modernism/Postmodernism and it's probably not the correct reference, so I'm open to editing ideas💖💖

Suggested Reading:

Naomi Klein - The Shock Doctrine

Hanna Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism
  
Effects of reading goals on reading comprehension, reading rate, and allocation of working memory in children and adolescents with spina bifida meningomyelocele