Nobody Knows What the Fuck They’re Talking About Anymore!

And we probably never did.

Trump won. Again. Many historians feel we are in the throws of Fascism, not just in America, but throughout the west. His re-election was fueled by Latino male, white male, and white female voters. Bafflingly they also managed to get an outsized amount of support from younger [male] voters. A large share of this support both from young and older men came through social media. Most men now no longer watch the news like their senior citizen Boomer parents, who actually split for Harris and Trump rather evenly. No, they get in from Joe Rogan, Adin Ross (who is illiterate), and Donald Trump (who is also illiterate) — however what these 2 out of 3 illiterate men have is common is they are famous. Famous for being funny, or attractive, or for having been on television, or being wacky, or outrageous, or a reality TV star, or a mix of all these things.

Fame is currency in the modern world.

But it’s more complicated than that. Streamer Destiny, who feels like he has outsized importance suddenly, said “people used to know how things worked”. He’s wrong. He’s a tad bit younger than me, and I remember the before times. He’s wrong. People used to not know how things worked. As a screenwriter, I’ll explain this from that perspective. Movies used to have this concept of “there’s magic behind this mundane thing”. It was a great device. To sort of go into this world you only walked by every day. To go to Japan and find it’s a wonderful world of dancers, samurai, Autobots, and cyborg ninjas. But then social media connected the world, and suddenly everything was just explained. I’ll use the election as an explain. That election was over for Harris by 10pm eastern time. But it was called in the wee hours of the morning, why? Because we have way more data now, so they can drag it out. There is some responsibility in waiting for near returns, but in most swing states the math was not mathing way earlier in the night.

In the “before times” the news would just call it. On the fluke chance they got it wrong, you’d see a correction the next morning in the paper. The reader would shrug their shoulders.

I even believe our obsession with producing all the data imaginable caused herding in Kamala Harris’ direction. It even makes me question Biden’s actual re-election chances. It probably was too late for a real primary, even though they had one and voters just did not participate. The black coalition, and many older white voters (who Harris did marginally worse with) supported Biden until the bitter end. However all the data made them see something that either wasn’t there, or was there.

In the before times we performed less polls, less often. There were often some after debates, or big events, or large rallies, to gauge public support among likely voters. Keep in mind these are “likely voters” not first time voters or on the fence voters. That problem of capturing new voters has been an increasing problem for them. Easily in new media spaces, which Harris did not embrace.

It’s sad, and yet, the election is the tip of the Iceberg. I am a science fan, but something that has always bothered is the idea of an “end of science”. This debate is currently going on in science not because progress has necessarily stalled, but a diminishing returns has expected set in within major disciplines, and many breakthroughs they need to study the things we have questions about have yet to occur. There are many goals such as curing cancer, extending the human lifespan, interstellar travel, teleportation, cold fusion, what happened before the Big Bang, was the Big Bang even really the beginning, abiogenesis, flying cars, that we are no closer to than we were when we achieved them. Our biggest contribution has been communication, satellites, mapping, and hopefully climate change — and while this is nothing to bark at, science has so far simply brought convenience and a certain loss of pain to a regular human life, for those who can afford it. It really has offered no insights into the grander existential truths of life.

My long held belief is the answer is, it’s all bullshit. Hard science is a navigational tool in the material world we call reality. But guess what? It doesn’t matter. The Fermi Paradox all but guarantees we are stuck here.

But this is what has made Fascism inevitable in the western world under the kind of government and economy they have created.

Humans require a narrative to function. I would argue someone who completely lacks such a mind is schizophrenic. Religion, in the 21st century is failing at doing that without life support. Very few are committed to religion in the way they were 200 years ago. Even an Amish wandering through Times Square has eyes to see. They understand, even intuitively, what science has given and shown capable of doing. But when science enters a period where the achievements pale in comparison to the run of the greatest generation, and religion requires more potent opiates to pair with you find that narrative take root elsewhere.

This is what I means by nobody knows what the fuck they are talking about. We’re just shifting narratives around in the same sandbox, over, and over, and over again.