When I was young I had a button that I proudly wore on a hat. It said, “Reason Will Overcome Instinct.” I was studying to become a scientist and I intended to exemplify that motto. I now think that it was a naive sentiment.
At the same time, I also thought a lot about politics and society. As a child of the 1960s and 1970s, I saw failure in the American system in ways that a reasoning person would find confusing and surprising. I quickly identified that cause as the inherently irrational and irresponsible nature of America’s form of zero-sum politics through exclusively embracing capitalism.
I have seen the evolution of this enshittification of culture over the subsequent years. It is pervasive. Advertising, reality television, militarized police, Hollywood hedonism, social media. Everything is evaluated for it’s effect on the bottom line. It is more than a dystopian vision of people as mindless consumers. It is the stupidification of Americans and the export of stupidity to other nations. It is willfully rejecting reason as a way of making sense of life and the world. It results in accepting, from birth, a complete cultural model of understanding, containing all facts and explanations. People do not grow up if they do not develop their own way of looking at the world. People remain incomplete adult children. They learned everything they need to know before they leave elementary school.