A Time Rife With The Con

There’s a palpable frustration out there in American politics.

It’s clearly rooted in some ugly and unpleasant realities: the reality that many of our major institutions blew up their credibility on COVID-19, BLM, and Russiagate; the reality that we don’t really have any idea how AI is going to reshape the job market; the reality that a ton of people in the political class have no scruples and are totally willing to engage in open corruption.

That frustration is turning into something else before our eyes in this country.

And that thing is nihilism.

That nihilism is rooted in a gigantic lie. A truly gigantic lie that tries to make us believe that all of our problems in the United States are intractable, that individual problems that you may have or I may have in the United States are the result of an evil system, often led by cohesive groups of conspiratorial elites, that you cannot succeed unless you pierce this supposed matrix, and all of those who call for individual responsibility and dutiful decency are actually part of this evil matrix. 

This thinking is not solution-making. It is thought-preventing. It is success-preventing. It’s a recipe for personal and national disaster, and the result is an increasingly incoherent and unhinged politics and an entire generation of young men and women who go looking for meaning in all the wrong places and on the very fringes, sometimes turning to violence.

On Monday, Peter Whoriskey wrote in The Washington Post:

Amid a wave of high-profile killings and political violence in the United States, investigators have been confounded regularly by the absence of a recognizable agenda. The assailants in several cases — shootings, a bombing, a planned drone attack — resisted familiar labels and categories. They were not Democrat or Republican, or Islamist militant, or antifa or white supremacist.

They were something new. In their manifestos, these attackers declared their contempt for humanity and a desire to see the collapse of civilization. Law enforcement officers and federal prosecutors have begun to describe these attacks as a contemporary strain of nihilism, an online revival of the philosophical stance that arose in the 19th century to deny the existence of moral truths and meaning in the universe.

This is not new. Societies that experienced major dislocations are often the breeding ground for nihilism and violence. That’s been true going all the way back to Dostoyevsky’s “Notes from the Underground,” which he wrote in 1864. But if you reread “Notes from the Underground,” Dostoevsky goes further.

He writes:

I, for instance, would not be in the least surprised if all of a sudden, à propos of nothing, in the midst of general prosperity a gentleman with an ignoble, or rather with a reactionary and ironical, countenance were to arise and, putting his arms akimbo, say to us all: “I say, gentleman, hadn’t we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to send these logarithms to the devil, and to enable us to live once more at our own sweet foolish will!” That again would not matter, but what is annoying is that he would be sure to find followers—such is the nature of man. And all that for the most foolish reason, which, one would think, was hardly worth mentioning: that is, that man everywhere and at all times, whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated.

One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice, however wild it may be, one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy—is that very “most advantageous advantage” which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms. And how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally advantageous choice? What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice. 

In other words, convince people that they don’t have any choices in life and what you are likely to get is a nihilistic retreat into barbarism, specifically because people want to lash out at their supposed lack of choice.

You’ve heard me rail against what I’ve called the conspiracy theory of society. That’s the idea that everything in life is controlled by systems you can’t quite identify, and that your problems are solvable only through violence or through some sort of pseudo revolution.

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Philosopher Karl Popper explained this again back in the mid-20th century. He said, “The ‘conspiracy theory of society’ is a typical result of a secularization of a religious superstition. The belief in the Homeric gods whose conspiracies explain the history of the Trojan War is gone. The gods are abandoned. But their place is filled by powerful men or groups – sinister pressure groups whose wickedness is responsible for all the evils we suffer from – such as the Learned Elders of Zion, or the monopolists, or the capitalists, or the imperialists.”

None of this is new.

But what we are experiencing right now in the United States is dangerous and stupid. Of course, there are conspiracies out there, but conspiracies generally have specific people involved and evidence of their involvement. What has been effectuated is the conspiracy theory of society that everything in your life is out of your control, and there is a group of manipulative elites who are getting together behind closed doors to figure out how to screw you.

That is something different. And that conspiracy theory of society is finding unbelievably fertile ground right now. And there are a lot of people who are promoting it for their own pure grift and greed.

They are doing it because of the con.

It turns out that this modern wave of nihilism is not entirely organic. It is fomented by influencers and politicians who commit ideological arson so that they can pretend to be firefighters, people who manipulate their audiences into believing that their problems are unfixable unless they hand over more power and control to precisely those same influencers and politicians. 

After all, influencers can get really, really rich off the nihilism of crowds. Politicians can foment the change they seek by channeling nihilistic energy, at least temporarily, until they’re eaten by the movement that they actually foster.

The pool right now is really, really warm for tons of influencers and politicians who wish to promote the idea that society is rigged, and that if you follow their particularly crappy advice and give them attention and therefore cash, you will somehow break the matrix and your life will become better.

It’s a lie. 

We live in a time that is rife with the con.