Demagoguery Is Characteristic of Human Populations — Islam’s increasingly Violent Split and America’s Representatively Republican Hyper-Brainlessness

© 2016 Peter Free

 

06 January 2016

 

 

At 2016’s beginning

 

With (i) Islam about to ramble off into sectarian chaos and (ii) prominent elements in the United States eagerly fanning those and other flames, I sadly anticipate the ethically unappealing character of the coming decade:

 

 

Do we live in an era of an extraordinary rebellion against ratio, or Reason?

 

The drift toward the irrational is happening most starkly in the Muslim world. Taking the Quran for unquestioning guidance, radical Islamists are rejecting education and destroying historic and cultural monuments. They do not recognize in principle the sanctity of human life, which is the foundation of any civilized society.

 

[R]eason is also being rejected in the United States.

 

None of the sizable Republican field accepts the scientific evidence of climate change and the human impact on climate.

 

None is prepared to believe that there is a direct connection between the broadest possible interpretation of the Second Amendment and the number of gun deaths and mass shootings in America by deranged individuals.

 

There may be a darker future ahead, and it may come suddenly. In 1914, Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip [see here] pulled at an ultranationalist corner of Europe and the entire world order tumbled.

 

© 2016 Alexei Bayer, The End of the Age of Reason?, The Globalist (05 January 2016)

 

 

But then, I remind myself

 

Regarding three of my favorite quotations:

 

 

The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

Bertrand Russell, source unknown — but reportedly see the same substance expressed in New Hopes for a Changing World (1951)

 

All men are intrinsical rascals, and I am only sorry that, not being a dog, I can’t bite them.

Thomas Moore, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron: With Notices of His Life in Two Volumes (1830), “Letter CCCCLXIII to Mr. Murray, 20 October 1821” (at page 545)

 

I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.

Albert Camus (translator Justin O’Brien), The Fall (1956) (at page 149)

 

 

In illustration, the irresistible Donald Trump and the herd of equally daft Republican kumquats

 

Trump unerringly voices much of the human core — to wit:

 

 

Don’t overestimate the decency of the human race.

H. L. Mencken (see here)

 

Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origins.

Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871) (reportedly at Chapter 21)

 

 

The moral? — When humanity eagerly burrows deep in muck . . .

 

Surprise is not an intellectually defensible position, painful though that may be:

 

 

Optimism is the content of small men in high places.

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Matthew J. Bruccoli (editor), The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1978) (reportedly at Epigrams No. 330)