I truly believe that historians looking back at the beginning of the 21st century will dub it "The Age of Fools." I am astounded by the radical and pervasive foolishness surrounding me. Never before in the history of the world have men been better informed yet acted less intelligently. The information age has created huge masses of people committed to mistaken, or outright fraudulent propositions. Those masses have surged forth on errant quests with serious intent to change our world in ways they don't understand and for reasons they do not comprehend.
As Marx said, "religion ....is the opium of the people." In the 21st century, "religion" is the unfaltering faith in science to provide answers to ultimate questions. The assumption that science will provide those answers is undoubtedly foolish in itself. But the idea that people will understand the pertinence of the questions or the relevance of the answers is unbelievably foolish. The fact is the faithful masses are not scientists. They do not have an understanding of higher math, or physics, or chemistry, or any of the other disciplines necessary to know what is actually science, and what is not. The masses take their beliefs from alleged scientific claims made by the media, or politicians, or sports and entertainment personalities, and accept those claims as their new gospel. They are like a crowd of ignorant town folk crowded around the wagon of a traveling snake oil salesman. They are buying into what they hear without any understanding. They are fools.
The election of Barack Obama is a prime example of foolishness. The great masses of people who voted for him have no idea at all what they were voting for. All they saw and all they heard was a carefully crafted image of a man promising them something good in the form of hope and change. None of them ever stopped to think that hope springs eternal. None of them stopped to think that change from where they are now most likely means sacrifice and depravation. They were a mesmerized mass of fools, eager to give away their most precious freedoms in exchange for vague promises of a better tomorrow. So, they elected a totalitarian Marxist, bent on establishing a socialist oligarchy in America. What fools!
Global warming hysteria is another example. A huge popular demand has arisen to cure a nonexistent problem. The sky is falling. Chicken Little has spoken, has made a movie, has enthralled politicians, entertainers, and the media. Billions of dollars await those who position themselves to collect on carbon credits and the industrial re-tooling to be mandated. Even today people have started driving around in cars the size of large baby strollers. The polar bear count is higher than its ever been, yet millions of dollars are being collected to "save” the polar bears. Errant fools!
The foolishness is everywhere. Demography tells us with mathematical certainty that huge populations are dwindling due to an insufficient birth rate to sustain them. Yet governments, environmental groups, and the media bombard us with claims of over population, and severely limited resources. And how do we respond to this foolishness? We organize entire communities to conserve, ration, and seek "alternative" resources. They have convinced us that the answer to contrived shortage is to do without and use less. Gross foolishness!
I would be remiss at this point if I didn't mention recycling. What a wonder that is! The best information is that only recycling aluminum makes any sense. All the rest of it simply costs more than it saves, uses more energy than it saves, and pollutes more than it saves. In other words, most recycling is a total waste of time and money. Fools!
The most foolish actions are those which abandon and demonize the very basis of our industrialized civilization. Oil has become evil, coal has become evil, dams have become evil, and nuclear power has become evil beyond mention. Those are proven sources of energy that actually work. But instead, we must have alternatives that don't work. Solar energy, wind farms, geo thermal, tidal, and every other crackpot idea that comes along. None of these idea will produce any significant amount of energy. None of these ideas are cost effective. And, none of these ideas will be sufficient to replace existing conventional energy sources. By investing in these phony alternatives, all we are doing is falling further and further behind the needed energy curve. Only fools would take such a course.
This truly is the age of Fools!