The Problem

The thing you have to understand is, well, the Industrial Revolution was a fluke. It centred around the advent of fossil fuel energy, which was not in any way a reflection of the next stage of the evolution of humankind. It's just something we figured out how to do, and ran with in our genius-for-innovation ways.

Jump forward a couple hundred years, and one of those pesky exponential growth equations is being played out in the form of our entertainment media technology. Entertainment media was inevitable for us, you see, because storytelling is the gift of our race. All the power of our diverse cultural expressions derive from the mechanisms by which we affirm our personal identities in society, identities being stories of ourselves. Entertainment media are a natural extension of this, being the same stories about people through which we've learned about ourselves told back and forth for millennia.

But we've reached a tipping point in the last few decades, a sharp upturn in media saturation and availability, spurned by the exponential growth of processor speeds during the same period. There is a generation of young adults right now which has been enculturized with unprecedented intensity, and the results so far have been fairly well captured by any given television newscast reporting on the lines to buy the new whatever. We are the gadget and show generation, the gamers who are inheriting society, and for the most part we just aren't that interested.

Among the consequences of this development, one has recently come to my attention. It seems reasonable to assume that(if there be a flaw, it be here), if the number of young people interested in participating in society(i.e, politically, socially, idk...productively?) were to decrease, but the number of positions of power remained typical for our government, that those seats would be filled disproportionately by persons primarily concerned with wealth and power. Now, I don't meant to suggest that an honest politician has Ever been the norm in our society, but only that by this effect the number of such idealists would be decreased relative to those who only sought such positions for personal advantage. Beyond some certain tipping point, perhaps when the actual leaders among their number had grown too sparse to keep the greater body of good ol boys and their kids from running the show, the leadership body might begin to resemble a room full of bickering children who casually hold breath-holding competitions with the national budget. This effect might be explained as the actions of a predominance of middle-aged born-rich idiots, using their jobs to build retirement or secure other jobs; who knows, perhaps some portion of the absurdity of our foreign policy in recent decades might be explained as well.

What strikes me about this explanation, though it may yet be missing something, is that no overarching malicious or exploitative intent is necessarily included; no conspiracies, no shadow government, no secret plans. Our current crisis in leadership, and the subsequent mismanagement of our country by a necessarily higher proportion of stupid and selfish people, can be captured as an offshoot of the entertainment revolution, itself an unintended consequence of silicon ships and fossil fuels. What we are seeing is just what the human race would inevitably do if it had all the power in the world: watch the biggest TV in the world and eat way too much.