WARNING: this week moves from on the couch to on the soapbox because sometimes a little curiosity leads you down a long, dark hole.
Having floundered through yet another week despairing for humanity, contemplating world government, commerce, 2024 election machinations and artificial intelligence and dumbfounded by the ‒ I don’t even know what to call it: ineptitude, hatred, greed, wilful stupidity, dirty dealings, corruption, criming, tyranny, all of the above ‒ made me wonder about the expression “every nation gets the government it deserves”.
I have never fully understood what this means. Millions don’t get to choose but are bloodied into submission and kept there with tear gas, cages or bullets. Others can be won over by lies, broken promises, T-shirts and food parcels. Or to “earn” a place at the trough. Not one human (except perhaps those guilty of said sociopathic attributes) deserves the actions taken by people whose lizard brains believe their destiny is to rule the world.
So I started to delve a little and found the dude ‒ one Joseph de Maistre ‒ who originally coined the phrase in a letter dated August 27, 1811.
It’s frequently attributed to Abe Lincoln and he may have pinched it, but De Maistre was the original.
With apologies to proper historians, philosophers, scholars and political scientists who know more, I think there is reason this charming piece of work’s name has not been assimilated by humankind’s masses. In short, his “civilisation” was founded on the pope, upheld by the Spanish Inquisition, ruled by Christianity’s “divine” kings ‒ queens were mere women, inferior appendages ‒ and those with religion (only Christian, of course) and morality. Not “ordinary” people like heathen French and Russian revolutionaries, who inspired his ire and scorn.
They were brutish, violent merchants of chaos wanting constitutions, rights and opportunities that were undeserved and willing to be governed by their own stupid choices. Filthy peasants were of no account.
Seems not much has changed for our Dear Leaders.
A meandering trail of couch contemplation mulled through history to find examples of a government deserved by a nation. Right up to the war instigated by Putin and to our governing class which has found a way to allow said warmonger to grace our shores with diplomatic immunity (this move is still mired in murk). The Ukrainians can’t even get the government they chose, let alone deserve. At least the Orange One got the boot after he made the first incisions that exposed the foul belly of US fascism.
Our African tyrants and demagogues shed blood at the wrong drop of a ballot. Our children can’t read well enough to identify the Gucci labels on those who promise to deliver the promised land while they still die in pit latrines or shack fires.
Clearly lacking our own, we can always look forward to artificial intelligence. Growing number of tech boffins are warning it’s the end of humanity as we know it. Others are figuring out how to put it in their toolbox of rule-the-world implements.
What will get us first: AI or a climate-changed and uninhabitable planet?
Perhaps De Maistre was right about what we deserve, but he couldn’t have foreseen the technology that would deliver us. The end of the world is nAI ‒ prepare to meet thy doom.
Now I’m going back to the couch.
- Lindsay Slogrove is the news editor
The Independent on Saturday