We can almost reverse-engineer our friends by their odd pronouncements about things like, whether to let their parents die to save the stock market, or send the kids to public school, get vaccinated, wear a mask in public, or vote; and if you must vote, who to vote against.
But what's the point? Is this all being set up by some evil mastermind, to pull off some horrible coup-d'e'tat?
No.
It's all designed to do something simple, of which our political situation, the worst in our history short of the Civil War, is but an afterthought. Or a toxic byproduct. The euphemism is "unintended consequences."
It's all built to make the most money, of course. But since the most money just now goes to whatever screenface-object attracts the biggest audience, that's where public policy, foreign policy, international trade policy, economic policy and diplomatic decisions are made. So the "providers" are sucking up all the money, and the government is running around like a chicken with its ass shot off.
That's it. There's no hidden meaning or evil political plan. It's just "free-market competition." in a totally unregulated new kind of market, at an absurdly inflated scale.
It's the scale of this thing that has us buffaloed. Despite moving the most money and political power in history, it's in a blindspot, utterly imperceptible. Nobody can resist what they can't detect even with electron microscopy.
And this isn't The Singularity. Our machines aren't Woke and abandoning us as they head for the stars. But we have lost control of an amazing new artifact that held great promise for real human freedom, from fear, from hunger, from disease, from perpetual war. From ignorance.
We didn't see what we were looking at. We didn't see the inherent power of this thing we created, the magnitude of it, the cumulative effects, the potential for deep separation and isolation. The danger of Divide and Conquer. We couldn't know how it could totally disable any possibility of self-determination, a democratic system of government by informed consent, a just allocation of resources, a fair deal. It tilts playing fields and reallocates wealth and throws up impermeable membranes that pass money but not people.
This tragic imbalance of power provides audiences to the most outrageous and opportunistic liars, crooks, thieves, swindlers, grafters, grifters and dangerous psychopaths, to do with as they please: to feed them whatever kind of baloney will keep the con going. Then those audiences are supposed to conduct themselves as good citizens. All they can do is blame themselves. This is clear from the levels of despair. And this has been going on for a generation now. You know this. Every one of us knows.
Quiet, reasonable, wise servants of the public interest need not apply. They aren't barred from competition: they just don't induce people's index fingers to operate a mouse, other than to swipe them away to make room for something more stimulating. Read, terrifying.
Those who enter this system with high motives find they cannot extricate themselves from the debts they incurred to pass though the gate. Even their polished track-records are now stinking in the hot light of this new pestilence-mirror. The path to glory is littered with the bones of their political aspirations.
Fear hijacks attention with total effectiveness. The fighters fight, the runners run. The freezers freeze, the flockers flock. But we're all helpless, awash in adrenalin, with tunnel vision, desperate for air.
So for practical purposes, we don't have a representative form of government, or an economy that can ever support all of its citizens, or a foreign policy of any kind whatsoever, or a justice system that can avoid sinking under the sheer weight of the incarcerated. Or a health system that can do anything with a pandemic but make it as deadly as possible, while making a small number of us obscenely rich. Again.
Now what?
I'm going somewhere with this, besides dystopian depression.
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