Politicians have lost their edge because of they have been busted with mass media. This is the wild card in our future and it runs in our favor. Twitter, Facebook, et al…is the voice of the every man.
How this plays out will surely be painful and arduous, but I see the people becoming empowered with crucial decision making.

Its not surprising that you may have trouble following his logic, especially if you only read my isolated quotes from it. You also have to keep in mind the Guardian is a pretty left-wing rag, and like all ideological sources, views the world through thick, distorting prisms. This is why I included the link, so you can read it for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

But the whole point of this kind of academic stream-of-consciousness is not to come up with a final comprehensive explanation, an AHA! moment that settles some highly complex issue once and for all. Or conversely, which can be summarily dismissed the moment you have convinced yourself you have found even one tiny footnote error or misplaced comma. The world is not easy, history is not mathematics, and some questions may have no answers at all, much less straightforward demonstrable ones. Some connections are illusory, some are open to interpretation, some are biased and correlation is not evidence of causation.

Educating oneself on the frontiers of knowledge is a hit or miss affair. You try to collect as many facts as you can, and try to absorb the opinions and conclusions of others who do the same, and then you let it all stew in your brain, finding its own neuronal connections. Education isn’t about learning the facts, its about trying to make sense of things when facts are lacking. Eventually, you will come up with your own way of viewing reality. It will not necessarily agree with everyone elses. In fact, it may not agree with anyone elses. When out on the frontier, everything is dim and foggy, and you never get a chance to see the whole picture at once. We are forced to base decisions on insufficient data, on biased reports, and on honest but mistaken assumptions.

I’ll give you an example. I heard one “scholar” (James Cameron) the other day blame the flood of Syrian refugees into Europe on climate change. His idea was that over the last few decades, a drought in Syria has ruined much of the agricultural base of the country. Many farmers have abandoned the land and poured into the cities looking for work, where there are few jobs and social services to absorb the refugees. The result has been civil unrest, which has led to political instability, and finally, civil war and an exodus of refugees.

I have also heard other scholars come up with entirely different causes to the problem, such as the so-called “Arab Spring”, where middle eastern and north African populations have risen up against corrupt authoritarian secular governments in that region. This process in Syria resulted in civil war because instability due to the American intervention in Iraq provided a militarily trained and politically unified Sunni Baathist insurgency which eventually led to ISIS. Shiite Iran, of course, blames the Crusader West, especially the Great Satan, Amerika, and its Zionist lackeys in Israel, for stirring up trouble in the Islamic world. There are other theories, too.

So which is “true”? Maybe they’re all true, or maybe none of them, perhaps there is some conspiracy of bad guys somewhere behind the scenes which we’ve missed altogether. The whole point is the situation is complex, and only history will come up with an “explanation”–an explanation, by the way, which will reflect the opinions of historians and who they work for more than anything else. Syrian refugees dying on the Hungarian border are not the direct result of climate change, the Arab Spring, displaced Iraqi generals, the Zionist conspiracy or Barack Obama.

History is not a glacier, or even a flowing river, it is an avalanche, a flood, a waterfall. Sure, the root cause is that water flows down hill, but there’s a lot more going on too.

So what can one do to make sense of the world? Learn as much as you can about what is happening, and consult with those who do the same. Take careful note of what they have seen, and especially what they believe, and why. Then ask yourself, why do these scholars disagree so much? They rarely come to the same conclusion, and they are usually squabbling with each other, or forming up into little groups that push a world view associated with a particular agenda (as they used to do here on “Flame” and “Current Events”).

And you are just as qualified to do this as anyone else. Like I said, there is no reality, we all create our own universe as we go along.

I. A.M. C.L.U.E.L.E.S.S.