"Things Have Never Been So Bad"

In a conversation with an older colleague who I respect and whose company I enjoy, he made an interesting remark which is worth contemplating.  He is a confirmed New York Times liberal and has always assumed I share his politics; I have never felt it important to disabuse him of the notion as we rarely talk politics.

He said that he was annoyed with a family member who is so concerned with the minutia of daily life.  He said, "we are killing each other all over the world; things have never been so bad."

I said to him that I thought it was a curious statement to make. I reminded him that he had lived through and fought in World War II, when we were killing each other in exponentially greater numbers than today.  The world today, compared to almost all of our history, is a place where people are getting along peacefully in unprecedented numbers.

He had the good grace to look abashed and our conversation moved on, but it led me to think about our times and our perceptions.

I suspect, especially when looking at polls tracking right track/wrong track numbers, that a great many Americans, indeed a great many Westerners, would agree with my colleague.

I have written about the impact of the rapidly accelerating rate of change that is impacting every culture around the world.  Even the most nimble cultures and individuals often experience disorientation in the face of such change.  In Changes, I wrote:

I wonder, have we, in effect, already reached a kind of Singularity?  Has the accelerating rate of change in our world already out-paced our National and International Institutions' ability to adapt?  If so, chaotic change is likely and that favors regression, not progression.

And, in Irrational Terror, I wrote:

We are living in a time of intense stress.  The stress arises, in part, from the accelerating rate of change in society that threatens so many who have difficulty adapting to near constant dislocations.  This leads to intense anxiety about the future, encapsulated by the fears that the world is coming to an end because of Global Warming.  The stress also involves a difficult war with savages who have shown us our vulnerability in ways that even the cold war failed to make real.  Everyday the worst aspects of the savagery in Iraq and around the world, in all its bloody glory, is brought into our living rooms by the ubiquitous 24 hour news services and the always "on" internet.  In response to such stressors, our society is clearly regressing to more primitive modes of thinking.

There is an additional component to the anxiety we feel and to the perception that "we are killing each other all over the world" and that "things have never been so bad."  There are three parts to this.

The first aspect is the ability of the MSM to magnify and distort current events in ways which have been skillfully leveraged by enemies of civilization.  In true "if-it-bleeds-it-leads" fashion, the MSM as well as the new media have placed the worst atrocities under klieg lights and amplifiers.  Two or three bombs in Baghdad make it seem that the entire country is in flames.  Likewise, 50-100 angry men with guns make it seem that entire communities have lost their ability to reason.  Thus the average viewer is left with he impression that violence is endemic and increasingly out of control and that the violent men who wave the bloody banner of Islam are representative of cultures foreign and unknowable to us.  If there are "moderate Muslims" you would never be able to discern their appearance from the MSM.

A second aspect is pointed out by Ralph Peters this morning, who answers a question that I have been wondering about: how many men with guns does it take to destroy any hope of a civil society:

Polls showing that most Iraqis "want peace" and don't support the extremists only deceive us (because we want to be deceived). It wouldn't matter if 99 percent of the Iraqis loved us like free falafel, if we're unwilling to annihilate the fraction of 1 percent of the population with the weapons and will to dictate the future to the rest.

At the height of last week's fighting in Gaza, one Palestinian in 300 carried a weapon in support of Hamas - a third of one percent of the population. Now Hamas rules 1.5 million people. [Emphasis mine-SW]

Numbers still matter, of course. But strength of will can overcome hollow numbers. And nothing - nothing - gives men a greater strength of will than religious fanaticism.

Between the reality that a small fraction of a culture can in fact seize control of the levers of power ("through the barrel of a gun" as Mao so aptly put it) and the MSM magnifying lens which paints them as emblematic of the entire population, most of whom, in fact, will support the men with guns if only out of self-preservation, we are left with societies regressing to the all-good vs all-bad level of organization, and this leads to the third aspect of the problem and the one which leads directly to the perception that "things have never been so bad."

Consider: Less than 0.3% of Gazans now define Gaza.  Likewise some fraction of a percent of Iraqis now define Iraq.  In the MSM, with their inability to convey much in the way of nuance, al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, angry mobs of young men screaming for blood, and mad Mullahs threatening genocide are now the face of Islam's 1.2 billion adherents. 

The idea that some significant fraction (in popular perception, a majority) hate us and want to destroy our way of life is the meta-communication conveyed on a daily basis by the media, old and new.  The possibility of resolving our differences peacefully has been successfully destroyed by Hezbollah, the Iraqi insurgents, and now reiterated by Hamas, groups of vicious men willing to kill their own rather than risk peaceful accommodation. 

In the simplified world of the regressed and anxious, this leaves the only options to be total war or surrender.  Since most shy away from the unavoidable conclusions of their own faulty perceptions, denial replaces perception of the faux reality on the TV screens and in the newspapers and on the internet. 

In such a setting, it is all too easy to believe "we are killing each other all over the world; things have never been so bad."  Sadly the easiest route to just that outcome is to retreat into denial, take the short term route of retreat and gaze inward while our enemies gain strength unimpeded until ready to escalate their war against us. 

This will be the subtext and background for General Petraeus's report in September.  He will undoubtedly report significant progress and significant problems.  Our Congress, perhaps even more prone to over-simplification, anxiety, and regression than a minimally informed observer, will then be left to determine whether we enable things to indeed become infinitely worse.