March 14, 2024

Our Fake, Fake, Fake World

by J. B. Shurk
AmericanThinker.com

Will our historical era be remembered as the “Age of Fakes�? We have fake news, fake meat, fake elections, fake genders, fake vaccines, fake budgets, fake democracy, fake truths, fake hate, fake Russian collusion, fake insurrections, fake climate emergencies, fake freedoms, fake outrage, fake speech crimes, fake money, fake justice, fake intellects, fake women, fake borders, fake wars, and even a fake president. In some ways, it is a very silly time to be alive.

So much of our fake world has been built on two monstrously fake foundations: fake progress and fake liberalism. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson redefined progress as something that only Big Government can provide. Instead of celebrating human innovation, artistic achievement, work ethic, and private entrepreneurship as the essential ingredients for any prosperous future, progressivism insists that nothing of value can be achieved without a strong centralized government and a bloated administrative Deep State. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt then picked up the Big Government cudgel by redefining liberalism as a collection of freedoms that only government can provide. Instead of recognizing human liberty as diametrically opposed to coercive State power, FDR’s “New Deal� style of liberalism insists that only new laws, new social programs, new regulatory agencies, and newly discovered rights can ever make people free. In the last century of perverse word games, progressivism and liberalism promised progress and liberty and instead burdened Americans with the heavy weight of the government’s chains.

America’s commitment to individual liberty, private property, and free speech once distinguished it from all other countries in the world. When it began betraying those commitments and exporting a brand of “rules-based international order� scarcely different from those devised under monarchical empires of the past, it became a global ambassador for fake freedom. And in a world where freedom is fake everywhere, happiness appears to be fake, too.

Polls from countries around the world continue to show that humans are dreadfully unhappy. With new gadgets, pop stars, and trending hashtags being constantly unveiled, shouldn’t the global population be sufficiently entertained? With a never-ending string of celebrities advocating for the “most importantâ€� causes in our lifetimes, shouldn’t lonely people be inundated with purpose? Or could it be that we humans — regardless of race, religion, or nationality — are wired to seek something more than the shiny knockoffs, fleeting pleasures, and engineered emergencies that devilishly vie for our attention? Maybe somewhere beyond the ill-used brain of every social media addict is a lonely soul desperate for authentic truth. Perhaps a growing share of the population sees this glittery globalist cage as disappointingly fake. What happens when the world is driven mad by frauds, hoaxes, and shams?

Social revolutions begin. In search of meaningful lives, people will reject the fake authorities that control them. One of the first things to go will be today’s fake academic institutions because they no longer serve any purpose. Consider how far the state of Western education has fallen. During the time of our Founding Fathers, education was seen as the silver bullet against social inequality. It was widely understood that providing Americans with the foundations of civilizational knowledge equipped them with the tools to build better lives. Benjamin Franklin started the first lending library in the colonies. Thomas Jefferson established the University of Virginia on a farm once owned by James Monroe, and both James Madison and the Marquis de Lafayette were present for the school’s inaugural banquet. Their dedication toward creating an educated and self-sufficient society stood in stark contrast to the European colleges that catered to an entrenched aristocracy. The men who changed the course of human history with the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights understood that the promotion of learning across all social classes simultaneously promotes individual liberty over government tyranny. Destroying a ruling class’s monopoly on knowledge destroys its monopoly on power.

Note that knowledge is the key here — not the mere obtainment of some fancy degree. Neither Abraham Lincoln nor Thomas Edison had much in the way of formal education, but both were highly educated men who profoundly shaped this country. Mark Twain’s humorous wit is not less remarkable because he never attended high school, nor is the prose of John Steinbeck or William Faulkner less incisive because neither finished college. Degrees mean nothing if the knowledge that they represent is fake.

Yet what does a conferred degree mean today? Does it mean that a student has proven mastery in the arts and sciences, or does it mean that he has been deemed a politically correct cog for a world suffering from groupthink? Do universities still reward genius, hard work, and merit, or are they factories for producing intellectual mediocrity? The thing about a real education is that nobody can give it to you; it has to be pursued and earned. As colleges transitioned toward treating degrees like one of FDR’s government-bestowed rights, they stopped producing genuine thinkers. Fake educations and fake degrees have instead produced a society ill-equipped to fight for individual liberty against the threats of resurgent government tyranny. Fake experts maintain authority only when citizens lack the intellectual discernment to object. It’s as if the government’s funding of fake intellectuals has been part of the “progressive� plan all along.

So social revolution will begin in the schools — or away from the schools, that is. Interest in homeschooling will continue to grow. Young minds that bristle at the rigid and dogmatic worldviews currently being inculcated inside overpriced colleges will discover that there are better ways to learn. Real thinkers will rebel against intellectual prisons that prioritize “wokeâ€� nonsense over the rich record of Western scholarship. Parents will refuse to subject their children to the racist and sexualized curricula of Marxist indoctrination camps disguised as classrooms. Degrees that are earned without rigor will be understood as expensive fakes. Then one day, some entrepreneur will decide that it is more important to hire people who can actually keep planes from falling out of the sky than to staff up with politically correct fools who know only how to protest against hydrocarbon energy and for Hamas terrorists. Because academic institutions have betrayed their purpose, employer-administered entrance exams and other merit-based tests might even replace the usefulness of college degrees. The government’s stranglehold over thinking people is already crumbling.

Vladimir Lenin ominously boasted, “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.� John D. Rockefeller selfishly insisted, “I don’t want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers.� These sentiments have destroyed American genius and resiliency for the last century, and the harm that they have caused cannot be undone overnight. A nation taught not to think for itself is a nation that knows no other course of action than to obey.

However, when government artifice and manipulation become so outlandish that everything appears fake, traditional control mechanisms fall apart. Long-slumbering populations awaken from their State-induced hypnotic trance much like a hungry bear does from hibernation — shaky at first but ferocious in short order. Just as Central European countries trapped behind the Iron Curtain rebelled against the fake premises of Soviet communism, freedom-minded peoples of the West are already rebelling against the fake premises of the World Economic Forum’s “climate changeâ€� communism and “build back betterâ€� buffoonery. They will not eat the bugs or censor their own speech. They are not willing to let Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates, and other fake experts control their lives with CBDCs and digital IDs. They are not willing to live in a national security surveillance State that provides their children with fake futures.

This fake “new world order� is not making anybody happy, and as people begin thinking for themselves, they are learning to disobey.