And always, of course, there are a great many people who are just
confused in mind and have a lot of inconsistent beliefs all jumbled up
together.
- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
In 2002, the Pulitzer Prize in the category of commentary was awarded to New York Times columnist
Thomas Friedman. In 2004, Friedman was made a member of the Pulitzer's
board of directors. Our nation is killing itself from within.
Every nation is always killing itself from within, though. Every golden
age occurred some fifty years
previous to whatever year it is today, and every such golden age could
have gone on forever had it not been brought to an end by some
misguided contingent of one's
own countrymen. It should also be noted that one's political enemies
are always in control of the state; in the modern age, they've branched
out into the media for good measure.
Crime, as the reader may recall, spiraled out of control in the 1970s,
increasing exponentially until such time as the federal government
ceased to function altogether. Wealthy citizens moved into
self-contained arcologies defended by private mercenary armies, while
the poor organized themselves into communal military tribes, some seizing territory within the ruined cities, some
taking to the highways in order that they might launch raids upon
On another occasion, the proliferation of nuclear power plants
throughout the United States resulted in the accidental destruction of
several major cities. Likewise, the proliferation of evolutionary
theory and the decline of Biblical literalism resulted in the
inevitable rise of a global government, itself led by a New Age tyrant
who demands to be worshiped alongside some unspecified mother goddess.
The sexual revolution led to an epidemic of lesbianism and infanticide.
Welfare reform led just as inevitably to mass starvation in the inner
cities. The New Deal continued to snowball until 90 percent of the U.S.
workforce was employed by the Works Progress Administration, digging
trenches and putting on Eugene O'Neil plays. Megacorporations replaced
most national governments in the late '90s. Everyone is now a crack
addict.
Eight hundred thousand years from now, the human race will be divided
into two species - one shall live on the surface, and the other beneath
the ground.
To the extent that we look back and examine the predictions of our
predecessors, we find ourselves confronted with a great deal of
nonsense. This is a fine thing, as nonsense merits our attention. In
studying nonsense, we find certain common characteristics that we may
use to identify further nonsense of the contemporary sort, the nonsense
that plagues us just now. We may determine, for instance, that many of
the foolish predictions that have been made in the past are quite
clearly the result of ideology. One opposes nuclear power, and thus
nuclear power will lead to disaster. One opposes the theory of
evolution, and thus the theory of evolution will lead to immorality.
One opposes the sexual revolution, and thus let us ignore him.
If we are to divide the causes of poor predictions into two categories,
we would probably make ideology one of them. The other category, just
as probably, would be that of extrapolation, the act of making
determinations about the future based on the trends that have reached
us here in the present by way of the past and which, one assumes, will
continue their growth into the future.
The main problem with
extrapolation is that it is entirely necessary. When we drive a car - I
guess it has two steering wheels - we drive a certain speed in a
certain direction. A tree is straight ahead. We extrapolate that, if we
are to continue on our present course, we will hit that tree and then
the cops will come and they'll probably find what we've got stashed in
the glove compartment. But having extrapolated this tree-hitting
scenario from our present course, we will probably just turn the car a
bit so that we are no longer headed for this problematic tree. Perhaps
we will get back on the highway, where there are considerably less
trees to hit, but at any rate we have in this case successfully used
the art of extrapolation to avoid hitting the tree and thereby we are
more likely to successfully make it to our destination, which is a gay
bar.
If some pedestrian is observing the car at such point
as it is headed towards the tree, he might very well make an
extrapolation of his own - that, because the vehicle has been heading
in a particular direction, this trend will continue until the car hits
the tree. This is, of course, not the best bet to make, as cars are
almost invariably driving in the direction of some object that it ought
not hit, yet their drivers almost invariably turn before such time as
their cars would otherwise hit such an object. In this case, the
observer forgot to consider another extrapolation - that cars rarely
hit things due to drivers making extrapolations of their own, and that
this car is thus not likely to hit anything either.
Cars do sometimes hit things, though, and this need happen only once for everyone inside to be killed.
The purpose of this book is to convince the reader that our republic
is in the midst of a crisis of its own making; that this crisis is so
fundamental as to have been partly responsible for many of the failures
that have brought our republic into decline; that for all of its
gravity, the crisis is largely unknown to the citizenry; and that,
barring an unprecedented and concerted campaign of information,
boycotts, and other methods by which to bring pressure to bear on those
most responsible, the crisis will likely spell the end of our republic
as a credible superpower.