‘Things Fall Apart’
I feel that I’ve traveled back in time to eight years ago when Donald Trump was first elected president. The president, playing the role of the agent of chaos, has created the same tension filled atmosphere as before. Each day we awake to some new and increasingly outrageous ideas flowing from the White House. We seem to be watching January 6 all over again, but this time the violence and destruction is coming from within the executive branch of our government while still being directed at our governmental institutions and at our public servants. The difference this time is that the destruction in not being carried out by the ad hoc groups of citizens who were motivated to overthrow an election. This time it is being methodically carried out by presidential appointees and their cohorts who are systematically taking control of multiple departments of our government. I suspect they would argue that the goal is for agents connected to the tech industries to ‘streamline’ government and to implement AI for the efficient running of things, thus creating a smaller, less expensive and more efficient government.
A government driven by AI would certainly be efficient, but it is based on the false assumption that governing in a democratic republic such as ours is merely a mechanical process, a zero sum game with winners and losers. A democratic republic is about so much more than efficiency or being the winner and others the losers. To work for the greatest number of people, governing must be a give and take, a constant search for common ground, for compromise. The resulting policies, and even the process itself keep us working together. It requires collective effort on the part of individuals who know each other, understand each other, and trust each other. This keeps participants from going to extremes at which point little positive can happen to address common concerns, and we evolve into chaos or are tempted to fall for strongman rule. A working democratic republic requires understanding, participation, and trust. This is core, the center. Without it our common cause falls apart. As Yeats put it, when things fall apart, the center cannot hold. Have we allowed ourselves to evolve into an age in which we cannot hear or see each other, trust each other? Have we descended to the point at which we don’t even desire to work for a common ground? Have we created our own kind of rough beast about which Yeats warns in his poem?
