Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, and the Zeitgeist

🎶
I’ve come down from the upper class
to mend your rotten ways
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Where did we get Boris Johnson from, for heaven’s sake? The man is an obvious grifter. And why Donald Trump?

Be afraid, there is an answer.

Time are hard. And when times are hard, people of most nations look back to the Olde Days when things were better. This was where Afghanistan got the Taliban from: godly men from the days of the Caliphs. Donald Trump is an image (entirely an image, he is apparently actually a failure as anything but a television personality) of the American entrepreneur. Boris Johnson plays the noble.

It’s all bosh. The Taliban were not godly, Donald Trump is a failure as an entrepreneur, and Boris Johnson is a fake noble with a fake name and a fake accent. But “Mundus vult decepi, ergo decipiatur” (“The world wishes to be deceived, so let it be deceived”) and enough of the public believes. (Lying, character assassination, and a press dominated by the far right helped.)

The world, truly, stands on the edge of a new age. Humanity either will change and prosper, learning to master its numbers and its use of resources, or its numbers will collapse and it will sink into poverty in an ecologically impoverished world. And so humanity stands, as Rome once did, on the edge of vast change, and there are purges and the reinstatement of state gods. In utter panic, the world turns to the values of its past, failing to recognize that these either never were honored in their own times and often never were even valid. And so we get the grifters and the ethnic cleansing.

If humanity is to thrive, it must live in the present looking towards the future. It must look to the future and listen to visionaries like Greta Thunberg and Bill McKibben.