A Political Ramble: Part I

1. The shootings at Kent State in 1970 produced a chain reaction in my mind that eventually destroyed my faith in anything I had ever believed before then. I started to wonder about how the US was really governed, and why politics seemed always to run in fixed ruts; I began to doubt whether scientific progress would really be a benefit; I lost all my religious persuasions; I began to regard every positive thought I ever had as a form of delusion

Within a year or so, I had convinced myself that I could pretty well see the outlines of my future, and it wasn't a pretty sight: I became sure that as I grew older, a technological fascism would sweep the country, and that I was likely in the distant future to be beaten to death in a concentration camp

I worked out my logic here in great detail. People generally act in what they regard as their self-interest, and improvements in technology will temporarily increase the human population until resource extraction and industrial pollution become unsustainable, at which point declining economies will produce a search for scapegoats and wars, at which point the mass media will manipulate the public into supporting vicious repression of anyone who suggests we really need radical changes

I still can't find any flaw in my logic from those days: the analysis still seems to me generally credible and based on large-scale realities. But though I rather enjoyed trying to play the prophet, nobody particularly wanted to hear my glum predictions

2. The ancients left us some stories about prophets. Francis Bacon wrote a nice interpretation of the myth of poor Cassandra, whose prophecies were never believed and always came true:

Against this, we might set the Hebrew myth of Jonah, forced reluctantly to prophesy. Like Cassandra, he is somehow a colossal jerk. In the story, his prophecy was believed by those who heard it, and the prophecy therefore did not come true -- which would seem evidence of a very successful prophet. And yet, Jonah is not pleased that his warnings saved a great city from destruction: no, at the end of the tale, Jonah sulks angrily that after he has gone to all the trouble of warning the city of its demise, the situation changes and the city is not destroyed after all

Looking back at my attempts to be a prophet, I see a mindset that produced nothing but cynicism bordering on nihilism

3. There is some experience behind the old saying, Prefer sages over prophets