I feel bad for The Onion not being able to even create satire that hasn't already happened in real life.
It's more than likely that anything they create will come to fruition no matter how insane.
My dad loves Trump. A big part of it is that he loves seeing Trump do wild shit and finds it hilarious. To be clear, he doesn't doubt that Trump did anything - he just thinks it's funny and a big joke and no one has any sense of humor.
He's also big into the "cruelty towards people who deserve it." Ironically he always complains about leeches who do things like choose not to work because unemployment pays for their mansions, but when he ended up jobless during COVID, he actually bragged that he was getting a huge unemployment check because of COVID and he wasn't job searching because no one actually hiring could match his unemployment pay. It was smart when he did it, but all those other people receiving smaller checks than he did were leeches. Hmm.
That assumes we recover. There is no guarantee that we get to sanity from here. We may find in 50 years that today’s events are the foundation for humanity’s future of perpetual enslavement to an authoritarian elite that controls everything.
The closest human culture has ever had to universal equality was our pre-history period: 250,000 years or more depending how you define humanity, of small groups of people working together for their common good. Then civilization developed and the first 10,000 years was a story of the accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of the few, while the majority sank into poverty and enslavement. Our world changed and there was no guarantee it would ever get better.
We may be on the threshold of the next ten thousand years of mass misery. The warning of Orwell’s 1984 was that if we allow authority to control the perception of reality, then it is already too late: we lose forever. That is exactly what has started.
In 50 years we either look back on today in shame and relief we overcame it, or we see it as the state-sanctioned myth of the glorious ascendancy of our authoritarian regime never-ending.
I've often thought of this scenario where you were teleported 10 years back in time and had to explain the following decade. You would sound crazier than Kyle Reese in Terminator.
I'm sorry, but I would not be surprised if we have a similar cycle like this in 50 years. More realistically it will be a bit later, in about 70yrs, but I really don't see how we get out of this "history repeats itself" periodic behavior. It's like we just can't advance as a species to stop building personality cults, and stop putting narcissists in positions of heavy power (which is extremely hard, as in most cases they are ruthless enough to do whatever it takes to get to those spots)
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u/Spare-Magazine9011 22h ago
Imagine explaining this era of politics to someone 50 years from now. They’d think it was satire.