The Simulacrum of Civilization

Why allow the people to have what they need when a semblance of it will suffice? In this question is the reason why almost everything representing humankind's vaunted principles is little more than a facade. The only thing that can't be faked is individual volition. Ultimately, it is the people who build civilization and hold it together, or break it apart.

Instead of allowing the facades to be turned into the actual edifices needed by the people, the self-appointed keepers of humankind would rather induce the people to destroy them and replace them with new facades. It is the costly sacrificial maneuver which has ensured their power through the ages. They resort to it when they are losing control. In this new age of unprecedented information access, they are struggling like never before to incite the people to do their dirty work. Beware that they are looking for a cataclysm to preserve their advantage.

The possessors of civilization's institutions act with murderous certainty to determine the status of everyone and the value of everything. Rewards and punishments are meted accordingly. The vast majority is condemned by default to be metaphorically boiled in excrement, while the select elite are celebrated and compensated beyond reason. Despite thousands of years of information progress, the world is kept politically primitive to allow this preposterous level of control.

"Fake news" is one of many straw man decoys deployed in the past few years to defend the authority of this arbitrary reality. The full-spectrum media machine--the proverbial boiling excrement--offers what seems like an unlimited number of viewpoints of the same degrading composition. The dedication to dishonesty required for this daily production is pathological. It makes all of us ill to one degree or another.

An actual, existentially reliable civilization is what a sapient species naturally requires. The current alternative is too much like actual captivity to be anything else.

There is no downside to politically emancipating humankind if it is done sincerely with wisdom and sound judgement. That, after all, is the definition of sapience. There is nothing wrong with our species that an end to its abusive subservience can not cure.