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“Wisdom alone is the good for man, amathia the only evil” — Socrates
Amathia is believing to possess knowledge about matters of which one is ignorant, a sort of delusion of knowledge, which causes the sufferer to act stupidly in the world despite no lack of intelligence.
This website exists to cure amathia.
Why — you may well ask — should you care about amathia, your own or other people's? Because a veritable pandemic of it, with its origin in the marble halls of academia, is causing social devastation on an unprecedented scale. And we are careening toward a catastrophic finale, which may only be averted if the source of the infection is excised.
The popular reference has become de rigueur, so here is your glimpse into the desert of the real. Left: the 4th largest American city in the year 1965.
This website exists to cure amathia.
Why — you may well ask — should you care about amathia, your own or other people's? Because a veritable pandemic of it, with its origin in the marble halls of academia, is causing social devastation on an unprecedented scale. And we are careening toward a catastrophic finale, which may only be averted if the source of the infection is excised.
The popular reference has become de rigueur, so here is your glimpse into the desert of the real. Left: the 4th largest American city in the year 1965.
"The memorials of an earlier age cannot be recognized. Devouring time has wasted its mighty battlements away. Traces only remain now that the walls are lost: under a wide stretch of rubble lie the buried homes. Let us not chafe that human frames dissolve: from precedents we discern that cities too can die"
This elegy of the Roman world in its death throes, circa 415 AD, isn't too far off the mark as a travelogue on Detroit, Baltimore or the rest of urban America in the 21st century.
More historical parallelisms. Left: crowds, seeking to erase a demonic past, toppling the memorials of Classical civilization, in the twilight of Roman Egypt. Right: crowds, seeking to erase a demonic past, toppling the memorials of American civilization, California AD 2020.
More historical parallelisms. Left: crowds, seeking to erase a demonic past, toppling the memorials of Classical civilization, in the twilight of Roman Egypt. Right: crowds, seeking to erase a demonic past, toppling the memorials of American civilization, California AD 2020.
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The decay has spread past the point of deniability. Up to a decade or two ago, it was still possible to cleave to the illusion that we were riding the arc of history toward the golden age, especially if you lived in a gated community in one of the leafier suburbs. Nowadays Candide haunts only the Hamptons.
Speaking of the Hamptons:
Speaking of the Hamptons:
The tax code of the United States has effectively become regressive over the past 40 years: the richest pay proportionally less than the bulk of the population.
The postwar economic boom sputtered out by the late 1970s, and nowadays most Americans can expect to make less than their parents.
The period of maximum socioeconomic equality, the late 1960s, coincided with the historical nadir of immigration into the US, and inequality has exploded since then in lockstep with the immigrant population.
America has never recovered from the Great Financial Crisis. Only the richest fifth of the population has seen their income rise since 2007. Six hundred thousand homeless people roam the country, and you only need to walk down the streets of a city like Baltimore to see human wreckage and social decay at third-world levels.
Families have broken down too. In the year 2019, almost 50% of children were born to unmarried women. Most of these are single mothers.
Existential despair hangs over the deindustrialized heartland. Religion is not the nepenthe of choice of our people, however (pace Marx). Beginning in the early 2000s, literal opium started to be abused on a mass scale...
...and the suicide rate began to rise. This trend has continued, and for this reason, for the first time in the history of the United States, life expectancy, after reaching a peak in 2014, is in decline.
This is not the picture of a healthy civilization. We see a dysfunctional and anomic society, changing rapidly and seemingly out of anybody's control, in which all intermediary social structures--family, religion, neighborhood associations, communities-- are in terminal disintegration. A tiny international elite thrives over a mass of atomized serfs.
If you are a progressive, you know who is to blame: the deplorables, and the demagogues they elect to serve the rich and oppress marginalized groups. We may ask, why do they persist in their ways? Are they evil or stupid? Ignorant hicks/Bigots/Brainwashed Fox-News zombies?
The aim of these pages is to make you realize, progressive friend, that you are not so different from the other tribe as you just know you are.
How did you become a progressive, after all? How did you come to believe all the things you believe? Not by watching Fox News, presumably, but by availing yourself of more trustworthy sources, vetted by your critical and independent mind. Isn't that so?
Well, we shall see whether your trust was well placed.
If you are a progressive, you know who is to blame: the deplorables, and the demagogues they elect to serve the rich and oppress marginalized groups. We may ask, why do they persist in their ways? Are they evil or stupid? Ignorant hicks/Bigots/Brainwashed Fox-News zombies?
The aim of these pages is to make you realize, progressive friend, that you are not so different from the other tribe as you just know you are.
How did you become a progressive, after all? How did you come to believe all the things you believe? Not by watching Fox News, presumably, but by availing yourself of more trustworthy sources, vetted by your critical and independent mind. Isn't that so?
Well, we shall see whether your trust was well placed.
Questions? Comments? Reach the author at blossius [at] pm [dot] me