Watching the recent US presidential debate led me to the saddening yet bitterly true conclusion that we live in an age of decay. Two adult men, with past records filled with corruption, take the stage trying to convince you that one of them deserves to decide for you – instead of you. The show was nothing more than a laughingstock, and people seem to be aware of that – which is the most frightening part. Donald Trump had a temper of an 8-year-old – maybe less, while Joe Biden was hardly able to phrase a complete sentence without a cognitive ‘black out’.
Many Democrats have come to suggest that this election is the “most important one in American History” because – supposedly – ‘democracy’ is at stake with Donald Trump refusing to give a clear answer as to whether he will leave the Oval Office if he is defeated in November. Well I am sorry to break it to them, but if a choice between a corrupt politician and a multi-billionaire is what democracy looks like I do not think there is much point in ‘saving it’, it is already dead.
Most younger people, like myself, realize this. Politics to us seem like a bad anecdote, we laugh at it because we do not know how else to respond. We, being naïve to the power of the status quo, believed in the vision of the progressive movements that former leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn, in Britain, and Senator Bernie Sanders, in the US, represented. We hoped that perhaps we would not have to pay enormous tuition fees in order to get basic education. That maybe we would live in a world where decent healthcare would be provided freely, or that when we grew up we would be able to have a well-paying job and then earn a satisfying pension. Instead of this the ‘great leaders’ of the world have set out to reverse the clock of history and undo all the great accomplishment that, through the bloody protests and revolutions of the past century, humanity had come to enjoy.
In this war against the many, nobody seems to be doing anything. This is why I call this age ‘the age of decay’ – we sit un-bothered as the decomposers of the world cause us to rot. The Millennials will be the first generation in the history of humankind to be worse off than the generation that preceded it. Here I urge the reader to re-read the previous sentence and let it sink in. This halt of progress is nothing more but the result of a society that can no longer question and oppose its leaders. The revolutionary specters that haunted the ruling classes of the 19th and 20th centuries, forcing them to behave, have been shot down through the well-planned propaganda of the educational system and mass media, or died by suicide due to their own contradictions. ‘Parliamentary Democracy’, this child of Aristocratic French ‘Parlements’, seems to be the only legitimate and acceptable system of governance. People have stopped seriously doubting it or bothering to find alternatives. ‘Change’, now, only comes through elections and in a packet of two.
A great Prussian philosopher, Immanuel Kant, when set out to write an essay answering the question “What is Enlightenment?” that puzzled 18th century philosophes, claimed that they did not live in an ‘enlightened age’, but they did live in an ‘age of enlightenment.’ According to him, being in age of enlightenment meant that people had finally begun to doubt the age-old hierarchical structures and authorities that stood above them. Be it religion, monarchy, feudalism (or Parliamentary Democracy, or Presidency) people who wished to be ‘enlightened’ needed to never accept someone’s rule without first questioning its purposes. Sounds simple, but apparently it is not. Of course, that was the age when humanity made its leap to the modern world, leaving back the tyrannies of the Middle Ages. Sadly for Kant, and perhaps even sadder for us who are still alive, three centuries later the ‘enlightened age’ has not arrived, but worse: ‘the age of enlightenment’ seems to have receded. Humanity’s blindfolds are being worn again.
So, in the question Biden or Trump, I answer cake.
Image credit: cbcindustries
The really well-constructed and opinionated account of the theatrical performance that was the presidential debate that anyone would expect from Alex.
His words, albeit depressing, hold a truth to them that should speak to all of us about the current state of the world and hopefully shake us to our core so we can somehow escape this age of decay he vividly describes, wake up from our lethargic indifference and take to arms.
We cannot sit idle anymore.
Keep inspiring, Alex!