The Corroboration Begins...

I've been reading Tom Nichols (currently at The Atlantic) for years via his Twitter feed, watching him home in closer and closer to one of my pet propositions: that the problem with this country - and other First World societies - is that it's all way too Utopian.

We're so wealthy and comfortable (even our "poor" are so rich that their most pressing problems include an overabundance of food and possessions) that we all behave like aristocrats: bored, entitled, viscerally cocksure, highly narcissistic, and loudly, stupidly angry (Mrs. Howell is often piqued over the lack of available manicure appointments, or her lazy, awful servants' inability to remember to water the very delicate hydrangeas).

The more delightful it all gets, the more delight we feel entitled to, and the more supremely irritated we are by petty irritations. As I've noted two or forty times, (most recently here), we are princesses constantly scanning for smaller and smaller mattress peas.

I've watched Nichols dance closer and closer to this recognition, and he's finally arrived:

Nichols' is the first high-profile voice to fully recognize the counterintuitive truth that we all feel aggrieved, victimized, put upon, and perennially disappointed (to the point where we're ready to burn it all down) because, well, I'll let him say it this time:

"Thirty years of prosperity and affluence and a narcissistic, leisure-oriented society have brought us (and other democracies) to the impasse where we will destroy ourselves out of boredom and emptiness."

He has, however, not yet linked this in with the Great Filter - the mysterious trap preventing alien civilizations from reaching a point where they'd be easily apparent to us (as I explained here, "Comfort and wealth, baby. That's the perilous X Factor. Comfort and wealth").


Has he been reading me? Did I do this? No, of course not. As I keep saying, the first popping kernel doesn't make the other kernels pop.