It is said that the space between a right-wing conspiracy and its confirmation is about three to six months or thereabouts. It does not take long between something being voiced as being extreme and being vehemently denied to the inevitable walkbacks about it not being a big deal anyway and it being admitted and even bragged about by the people responsible for it. Over and over again we have seen this happen, to the point where it has greatly diminished the respect that many people have for those organs of the press that have sought to suppress this truth because of how offensive it is to a great majority of people not only in the world but even in the United States. One cannot do with boiling a frog too quickly, before it is ready to accept the current thing as acceptable.

One of the ways in which our current age has shown itself to be a time of crisis is the way that elites and their grip on the world is breaking down. Whether one sees that in the rise of entertaining figures in seeking political power in countries like the United States or Ukraine, for example, or in the seeming inability of economic and political and cultural elites to demonstrate empathy with the suffering of the people as a result of the misguided behavior of those in charge, who appear to want ordinary people to suffer and to be content to live in luxury without any apparent concern for basic issues of food, shelter, and education for the unwashed masses, it appears that there is a glitch in the simulation, a failure on the part of those who hold and seek power to act in ways that preserve their power.

Such glitches in the system tend to occur in time of great crisis. When people seek power because of what it can provide them rather than on how they can serve others, this creates obvious difficulties, but yet we see these difficulties everywhere. Over and over again we see people become wealthy through public service–or even the attempt to win office as providing opportunities for grifting. Similarly, we see people with obvious mental disorders (who often brag about their supposed neurodiversity) seeking the position of authority as a teacher to gain the support as well as to corrupt youth by setting them against more conservative parents and engage in immoral grooming behavior. Likewise, we see companies bow to the pressure of radical political groups and actively seek to alienate large amounts of their customer bases, thus sabotaging their own profitability in the pursuit of intangible and largely worthless “social capital.”

What is it that prompts this disconnect between the power that people seek obviously and openly, and the total lack of competence or even interest in knowing how to govern and rule effectively, how to serve the interests of ordinary people, or how history provides plenty of evidence for the pattern of failure that inevitably follows when rulers forget to at least keep up the act that they are engaged in public service? While it is certainly a truism that our age has grown increasingly hostile to the cultural, historical, moral, and philosophical traditions we have inherited from the past, and shown hostility even to the value or idea of the past as a model for the present, it is nevertheless striking that those who seek power seem so incurious about the basis on which that authority rests in their heedless and headlong attempt to rule and ruin all possible social institutions. Searching for power while being uninterested in how it can best be maintained and respected and honored is a self-defeating task, and to do so threatens the willingness of people to give legitimacy to any people who act in such a fashion.