For the last twenty years, I have had the peculiar sensation that I am living inside a psychiatric experiment designed by people who failed psychiatry. Every year brings another revelation, another movement, another self-appointed redeemer promising to heal humanity while simultaneously making it impossible for neighbors to speak to one another. The modern world suffers from a surplus of prophets and a shortage of adults.
The messianic crazies are everywhere. Some predict the end of capitalism, others the end of democracy, others the end of Western civilization, and still others the end of the world itself. Every one of them claims to possess secret knowledge unavailable to ordinary mortals. They speak with absolute certainty because certainty is the only asset they possess. Facts can be challenged. Evidence can be questioned. Certainty, delivered with sufficient arrogance, can attract millions.
The ancient rabbis understood something that modern society has forgotten: anyone who claims to know everything is usually advertising his ignorance. Yet ours is an age in which humility has become a disqualification. The man who says, "I might be wrong," is ignored. The man who declares, "I alone understand reality," gets a podcast, a book deal, and twenty million followers. Confidence has replaced competence. Volume has replaced wisdom.
Never in human history have so many people known so little while speaking so much. The internet promised the democratization of knowledge. Instead, it often democratized nonsense. Every uninformed opinion now arrives dressed as expertise. Every rumor is presented as investigative journalism. Every conspiracy theory comes wrapped in the language of courage and independent thinking. Millions spend hours consuming content hosted by people whose primary qualification is possession of a microphone and an inflated opinion of themselves.
A civilization that once produced engineers, scientists, philosophers, and statesmen now seems increasingly fascinated by influencers explaining geopolitics between advertisements for dietary supplements and sports betting apps. The old village idiot at least had the courtesy to remain in his village. The new village idiot enjoys global distribution, sponsorship deals, and a devoted audience.
Meanwhile, hatred has become society's most successful growth industry. The political Left manufactures it. The political Right manufactures it. Activists manufacture it. Media personalities manufacture it. Social media platforms distribute it with industrial efficiency. Entire careers are built upon convincing one group of people that another group represents an existential threat. Fear sells. Anger sells. Humiliation sells. Revenge sells. Truth struggles to find investors.
The result is a society increasingly incapable of distinguishing between disagreement and evil. Every argument becomes a crusade. Every election becomes "the most important election in history." Every policy dispute becomes a cosmic struggle between absolute good and absolute evil. Such thinking may be emotionally satisfying, but it is intellectually infantile. A civilization cannot function when every debate is transformed into Armageddon.
The Jewish people have seen this movie before. We have watched societies lose their minds. We have witnessed mass hysteria dressed up as moral virtue. We have observed educated people repeat obvious falsehoods because those falsehoods were fashionable. We have seen crowds intoxicated by slogans, leaders elevated into messianic figures, and institutions surrender their judgment to collective madness. History's most dangerous moments rarely begin with tanks. They begin with lies.
Small lies become acceptable. Large lies become profitable. Eventually, truth itself becomes negotiable. Once that happens, everything becomes possible. The most remarkable feature of modern civilization is not its technological brilliance but its intellectual recklessness. Humanity has invented machines capable of connecting billions of people instantly across continents. We then used those machines to amplify every prejudice, every delusion, every narcissist, every charlatan, and every fanatic we could find.
The result resembles less a global community than a global food fight. Everyone is screaming. Nobody is listening. Everybody belongs to a tribe. Nobody belongs to the truth. The tragedy is not merely that so many people have become dishonest. The tragedy is that honesty itself has become unfashionable. Admitting uncertainty is viewed as weakness. Intellectual caution is viewed as cowardice. Reflection is viewed as hesitation. The loudest voice wins, not because it is correct, but because it is loud.
And so humanity marches forward, armed with supercomputers, artificial intelligence, instant communication, and the emotional maturity of a middle-school cafeteria. The rabbis taught that wisdom begins with recognizing one's limitations. Modern civilization teaches the opposite. It teaches that ignorance accompanied by confidence is a substitute for wisdom.
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/watching-humanitys-descent-into-chaos/
That lesson may prove to be the most expensive one humanity has ever learned. A society can survive disagreement. It can survive hardship. It can survive political conflict. What it cannot survive indefinitely is the systematic destruction of the distinction between truth and falsehood. That, more than any election, ideology, political party, or public figure, is the real crisis of our age. Not that people disagree about reality, but that increasing numbers of people no longer believe reality has any authority over them at all. The road from civilization to chaos is shorter than most people imagine.
The first step is not violence. The first step is convincing ourselves that truth no longer matters.
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REPUBLISHED https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/watching-humanitys-descent-into-chaos/ |
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