One Small Step for Dictatorship

[Repairman]

From one of my favorite episodes of the classic Star Trek series:

Spock: Your world was on the verge of a dark ages.

This piece of dialog from science fiction was an apt warning to the people of our time in this place in history. Having read the above mentioned article by Okhar Ghate, I am reminded of the significance of every single day in our lives, in which any event or combination of events may shape the future for better or worse. When the history books of the future are written, what will they say of us? Will they suggest that the original ideas of Revolutionary American liberty were too complex for the average individual? Was democracy such a bad idea that no rational society should ever consider entrusting their future to the whims of the common people? Will they write books in any form at all, or will our descendants return to being the illiterate savages from our ancestral past--a past ruled by symbiosis of the mystics of muscle and the mystics of the mind.

The ascent of Donald Trump to the highest national public office is at this time a matter of concern and circumspect. His tenure in office will prove to be interest to say the least. But as Mister Ghate points out, the tragedy is not that of Trumps ambition, as formidable as it may be. The greatest danger exists in the fact that so many American voters came to the support of a candidate with little if any credibility in his rhetoric, and no record at all in public office. So many people supported him not for what he championed, but more for what he condemned in the most vulgar and unspecific terms. If the Founders of the United States intended that the people should choose their representatives, literally, what does it say for a generation of Americans that could not choose better a representative than Donald Trump, or for that matter, Hillary Rodham Clinton. I can understand the voting block that chose Barack Obama. He represents a collective coalition who had long considered themselves under-represented. Obama's legacy will be a deepening of the social divisions within the US.

A divided society doesn't bother me; what does bother me is the violence resulting from a nation whose best days are history, and has lost the will and understanding to go anywhere but into chaos. If Trump does not transform the US into a Banana Republic, who in our future might have more success in further corrupting and crippling our nation? The stage is set. The people have spoken. We live in interesting times, times ruled, in the words of Mister Spock, "by dozens of petty dictatorships."

[MisterSwig]

8 hours ago, Repairman said:

When the history books of the future are written, what will they say of us?

I love these sorts of questions. I think future historians will say that human societies clung to collectivistic philosophies because they were too ignorant to properly integrate individualism with government. Why are we, as a species, still so ignorant? Perhaps we lack the psychological tools required to make individualism universally obvious, like the telescope and space travel made the solar system universally obvious to even moronic onlookers. Perhaps we gave up on enlightened monarchy too early. Perhaps we should have developed individualism more before designing a new rights-based constitutional Republic. Perhaps we are suffering the inevitable consequences of institutionalizing even a little bit of irrationality in making rights God-given and government part-statist.

[ARI Media Feed]

Is that statement hyperbole or prophecy? To find out, read ARI senior fellow Onkar Ghate’s careful analysis of Trump’s election to the presidency, what the election means for America and why Ayn Rand’s philosophy is more important than ever.

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