In a review of Robert D. Kaplan’s The Return of Marco Polo’s World: War, Strategy, and American Interests
in the Twenty-First Century ("Foreign Policy From the Dark Side," NYT, 3/28/18) Bret Stephens quotes the
author thusly, “The very idea that some sermon or blog or tweet has gone viral is a sad reflection on the state
of individualism in the 21st century. The electronic swarm is a
negation of loneliness that prepares the way for the new ideologies of
totalitarianism.” Kaplan’s locution is a brilliant statement on the narcotic
effect of technology. The internet of everything has become so all consuming
that solitude is misperceived as depression. The Opium of the Intellectuals is the title of a book by Raymond Aron rephrasing Marx’s famous quote, but it's not ideology as the hive mentality that's increasingly becoming operant in
political culture. Populism has come a long way from the era of La Follette and
Huey Long. Now it’s a tribal mentality whose ethos is ultimately technology.
Tyrants spare their followings from the burden of freedom by offering a cloak of belief.
But cybernetics has ultimately created a
human ant colony that’s ruled not by thinkers but algorithms masking as
historical dialectics.
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