I’m hearing from some folks about Brexit and by and large what I’m hearing says this is a calamity. The idiots “broke the U.K.”
There were plenty of people explaining what would likely happen if they did this, but hey, what do experts know?
Well, quite a lot, actually, but that fact alone makes them unpalatable to the voters who actually cast a Leave vote. We see precisely that kind of—what would we call it?—“learning fatigue” here. Who do you think supports Trump? People who know little or all the most useless things when it comes to politics and economics and quite adamantly do not want to know, because knowing would contradict the fantasy world in which they stand forth at weekend keggers loudly proclaiming positions that might hold some value in a Game of Thrones episode, but since the folks they’re holding forth to know just as little or less, no one challenges them and they feel justified in clinging to their ignorance.
This is the same crowd whose collective eyes glaze over when you start talking about the mechanisms of trade deals, the dynamics of boom-and-bust cycles, or the pathology of bigotry. People who can’t seem to think outside of very broad categories (i.e. Radical Islamists are Muslims therefore all Muslims want to kill us) and feel empowered whenever someone gets up on a podium and tells them they’re right to be terrified of boogeymen.
So a lot of people, and by the demographics a majority of older British voters, decided that leaving the EU is the same as getting rid of the immigration problem (and somehow they’ll be safer, even though they ought to know better because of past history, namely the IRA, but they at least were white) and that all their money, which will now disappear at an even greater rate because of the catch-up homegrown institutions will have to do to replace EU systems (either that or just let people die, which may happen anyway), will magically reappear in their private bank accounts, and anyway they didn’t understand a lot about what was going in Greece much less down in the Levant and they’d rather not know, as if removing themselves from a source of information somehow eliminates the problem.
Look, knowing things is hard. Not only is it a bit of work to find out in the first place, but it can be difficult to know what to do with what you’ve learned, and often enough knowledge has the consequence of making you feel responsible.
And that, I think, is where much of the problem is. People are past exhausted being told to give a damn. And the less they know, the easier it is to be confident in dismissing problems that don’t seem to have anything to do with them.
But of course, problems always have something to do with you. Maybe not directly or even tomorrow, but somewhat and eventually, and left ignored will grow.
Isolation is a guarantee of eventual extinction.
I’ll let that sit out there for a while. More later. But think about it.
Isolation is a guarantee of eventual extinction.