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Joining the ranks of heartsick peoples throughout history. Remember the film, The Seventh Seal?
All nations have aggressive, self-centered, power-hungry people who rise to leadership, first when they tell people they’ve been disabused of their rights and the strong man will restore them to their rightful status, and then by abusing those same people further. We are not alone in this. History gives us Incas, Mayans, Aztecs, Mongol Khans, Chinese emperors, slave-selling African queens and kings/tribal leaders, Roman emperors, Muslim, Russian, French, German, Italian, and English examples.
By a combination of historic events - the last nation standing after World War II, government funding technology, colonialism, racism, an expanding middle class until about 1962, Brown v. Board of Education, etc. - the USA has surpassed France, England, and Germany in acceptance of authoritarian rule.
How did we as a people travel from patriotic, civic minded people to insouciant nonparticipants? It’s apparently the combination of deteriorating public education, television culture, numbing and dumbing toward voting and toward government and toward civics that has let us get to Now. I think.
A dear friend has just moved back to France - the Grenoble area. The place has a socialist/communist/environmentally aware, arts community culture.
And it’s not as though the national government of France is pure as the driven snow. Au contraire.
Transnational capitalism is not the only culprit, though it’s major - in creating resource exploitation and inequality. Professor Peter Turchin summarizes his decades of study of historical social science (which he has dubbed “Cliodynamics,”) thusly:
When the equilibrium between ruling elites and the majority tips too far in favor of elites, political instability is all but inevitable.
I can accept Prof. Turchin’s summation. It is a helpful underlying insight, and in his books, he demonstrates that history shows a repeating pattern of that cause and effect.
But we have to fill in the details, where the devil is. In our time, we have compounded the power of the rulers with Supreme Court rulings that castrate the political power of the non-ruling people. We’ve compounded the rulers’ power with widespread propaganda machines such as Fox News, and now with the 20th century European autocratic ploy of capturing the independent news organizations. We’ve compounded the rulers’ power by marginalizing citizenship, by disabling social services, by firing experts and scientists, and destroying trade and defense alliances.
And now, Artificial Intelligence, or AI, has come onto the stage, reminiscent of Death in The Seventh Seal.
Let’s review the Quest in the film. A disillusioned Swedish knight returns from the Crusades to find his country ravaged by bubonic plague, the Black Death. He sees religious fervor, ignorance, cruelty, crime, and poverty everywhere. Meeting Death, the knight challenges him to a chess match for his life. Death remarks that he always wins. The knight has lost his belief in God on the Crusade. He has confirmed his loss of faith in seeing how the Deity deals with humans in the grip of the plague. But he decides to evade Death long enough to commit one redemptive act while he still lives.
Why does Knight Antonius Block make that decision? Sit with that question for a while.
Now let’s talk about AI a bit. Writing in Forbes, Sylvain Duranton thinks about AI and the search for history’s hidden laws.
“It is a strange irony of our digital age that our most advanced tools are being turned toward our oldest anxieties: why societies thrive and why they collapse,” he says.
Well, yes, we are informed and believe that the current AI products suck up too much of the planet’s land, water, air, and electrical energy, to the detriment of entire ecosystems and to the probable creation of a permanent underclass on a dying earth. Those of us who see that the new technology is not going to go away, and who grapple with how to regulate it, do fear for our lives and those of others. We are Antonius Block, eh?
University of Chicago Economist Sam Peltzman writes that there was a Happiness Crash in the year 2020.
“I document a sudden, sharp and historically unprecedented decline in self-reported happiness in the US population,” he wrote. “It occurred during 2020, the year of the Covid pandemic, and mainly persists through 2024. This happiness crash spread across nearly all typical demographics and geographies. The happiest groups pre-Covid (e.g., whites, high income, well-educated and politically/ideologically right-leaning) tend to show the largest happiness reductions. The glaring exception is marital status, which has consistently been an important marker for happiness. The already wide happiness premium for marriage has, if anything, become slightly wider. With both married and unmarried reporting large declines in happiness the country has become segregated: slightly over half-the married adults-remain happy on balance; the unmarried, nearly half, are now distinctly unhappy. I also show that across a number of aspects of personal and social capital post-Covid deterioration is the norm, including a collapse of belief in the fairness of others and of trust in the US Supreme Court.” (The bolding is mine.)
Well. During Covid, rich right-wing White people lost their happiness. Unless they were married, in which case they didn’t lose all that much happiness. But everybody no I mean everybody lost faith in the fairness of others and in the United States Supreme Court.
The Knight, Antonius Block, has lost his faith in God and Death always wins. But he has decided that he will evade Death long enough to commit one redemptive act while he lives. Why does he do that?
Because he is a Knight. He will not have his Spirit defeated by any sonofabitch, even Death. He will do as he says he will do.
Electricity, gas, and food prices will be a moving issue in the US 2026 elections. Prices are going up because AI, and the Administration’s war on Iran and war on clean energy.
Despite Trump and the fossil fuel industry, in 2026, the world will spend more on clean energy than on military spending.
Even in the US, wind and solar are being installed as the least expensive form of energy. Per Zeke Hausfather, “at the end of the day, markets trump ideology.”
Let’s us just go out and Commit some redemptive acts, you all.