For purposes of gauging the anthropological and sociological development of humanity, academic specialists have usefully divided its long history into designated “Ages,” relevant to the respective progress of its physical and cultural development. Thus we read of the Prehistoric Ages, the “Stone Age,”” the ” Iron and Bronze Ages,” the Pre and Post, “Industrial Ages, the “Middle and “Dark” Ages, the “Age of Enlightenment,” and, finally, the”Modern Age,” The mere cursoryreview of such conveniently denominated periods will readily reveal the ubiquitous advancement of Hunkind toward his present state.
For the thematic purposes of this writing, we have editorially chosen to designate the presenting portion of the “Modern Age” as the “Age of Trump,” or, dynamically, the “Dystopian Age,” by reason of the latter’s consistent Orwellian distortion of factual reality and its all-pervadingl dissonance.
To be clear, we have selectively employed the phrase “dystopian society” as one in which people live in insecurity or fear, depression, and misery under the control of a government that maintains its own perfection, but, in actuality, is painfully dehumanizing. Such a bizarrely nightmarish scenario is in its zenith of irrationality and level of moral caricature as we speak. For the first (and, hopefully, the last) time, empirical reality has been rendered acceptably subjective and acceptably viewed via an analogous fun house-distorting mirror.
The toxic etiology of such an insalubrious state of affairs is difficult to rationally tolerate, albeit, surprisingly, simple to account for, based upon the ubiquitous folk proverb, “The fish stinks (or, “rots”) from the head” [“piscus primus a capitolefoefet,” from Erasmus’ Adages]. Such consequential decline mandates a compliant society; o unhappily found in the Nation’s substantial underbelly of poorly informed and inadequately educated, grievance-inclined populists, financed by profit-loving, anti-regulation industrialists.
The fateful elevation of Donald J. Trump to the Nation’s Oval Office was not merely a defeat for principled, mainstream American citizens, but, as it soon evinced, an unexpected and effectively profound reversal in the ongoing development and maturation of human society. Human progress suffered while the populist underbelly of our Nation celebrated Trump’s dystopic and megalomaniac denigration of empirical reality, in favor of his atavistic and non-rational concept of “alternate facts,” and a primitive, subjective, and self-serving “alternate reality.”
Irrational, self-serving conspiracy ideation replaced empirical facts, and utilitarian reality orientation was overridden to comport with the transmogrification of gto irrational ideation, founded on selfish economic interest; butressed by an all-out autocratic attack upon the public media and higher education; the latter, reprehensible policies, historically common to would-be autocrats, as publicly declared by Donald Trump, have historically consulted the identical recipe. The egregious, societally backward results have been, unfortunately, outlined in previous writings and universally elsewhere.
The historic operation of our tri-partite polity, the significance of our usefully competitive two-party system, and the responses to occurring events were now governed by egocentric impulse and amorally perceived, ignorant criteria, rather than on factual rectitude and accepted historical precedent. National standards and public policy were predictably distorted by irresponsible populist sources of consumption, rather than by reliable news sources.
In sum, the evaluation of political issues declined to the status of chosen perspectives, rather than factual reality. The reality of the election was not based upon the popular competition of rational principles, but empirically reduced to a competition between public grifters and guileful demagogues. Irrational conspiracy theory, bigotry and competing populist propaganda memes were the controverted contents of the election during the Trump fiasco. The competition was, sadly, not between relevant political and economic principles but between competing, disparate ideologies of basic reality.
It is our hope and expectation that the noisome fog of Trump-inspired dystopia will be dispelled upon his salutary retirement from office and that the beneficial course of rational and salubrious progress towards more rational a nd just governance will historically and beneficially resume.
-p.
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