The empire of shriveled souls

Several times over the last few decades, I've read of foreign observers asking some version of this question:  Given the great numbers of brilliant and talented people who live and work in the United States, how is it that the reins of power are almost always in the hands of such mediocrities?  Over time the question has come to feel more and more painfully acute.  Looking at the top figures in politics and the corporate world today, the term "idiocracy" can hardly help springing to mind.  Indeed, we would feel blessed by comparison if mere idiocy were their worst feature.

We still do not lack for intelligent, creative, ethical, dedicated people.  US labs and universities still lead the world in most of the sciences.  Where US film and literature remain free of corporate or ideological influence, they continue to produce innovative and meaningful work.  Our popular culture is still the most pervasive and influential in the world.  So how, indeed, did this country end up with the reins of power being held by people like Trump and Musk and the current crop of cretins dominating Congress and Silicon Valley?  Why is the country that invented mRNA vaccines and sent space probes to the planets being strangled by idiocy like "AI" and random tariffs?  Why does everything have to be so dreary and stupid?

The fact is, politics and the corporate world simply do not appeal to the best minds.  The work involved and the rewards offered do not align with what such people most deeply desire and need.  The best minds go into the sciences and arts and academia because those fields do offer what nourishes their souls.  Politics and the C-suites mostly get the dregs -- emotionally-stunted trolls obsessed with accumulating money and/or power, and willing and even eager to dedicate their time and energy to the drudgery and dirty dealing necessary to succeed.  Just consider how most politicians and business executives talk.  They can't seem to help sounding like badly-programmed robots trying to imitate human communication with slogans and buzzwords.  A few of them are even fairly intelligent, but it's a cramped, obsessed, sterile intelligence, devoid of breadth, the kind that never flowers into wisdom.  And what can we make of the type that believes working sixty or eighty hours a week in pursuit of some dreary corporate vision is normal or even admirable?  Is such a person even really human?

To make things worse, over the last couple of decades those grey men in grey suits have exerted an increasing, and increasingly suffocating, influence over the creatives.  The deterioration of Boeing as MBAs displaced engineers at the top levels of the company is one of the best-known examples, but it seems to be happening everywhere.  Look at Hollywood, which is now far more a factory churning out drab mass-produced movies than a house of artistic endeavor.  The film industry has become a barren wasteland of franchises and reboots and remakes, with the occasional projects that buck the system -- The Shape of Water or Get Out or Sinners -- standing out like gems among the chaff.  And now even science is being subjugated to the rule of pitiful ignoramuses with no background in science and in many cases actively hostile to its methods and its achievements.  Hence the defunding of mRNA research, the attack on climate monitoring, the abandonment of NASA's real scientific missions in favor of Elon Musk's idiotic fantasies about colonizing Mars.

This is the strangulation of a culture -- the subjugation of the thinkers and dreamers by shriveled souls who think only of power and quarterly financial statements.  They cannot thrive or create for long under such rule, any more than a rose can grow in toxic waste.

I don't think much can be done about this.  The conditions that keep mediocrity enthroned will not change.  We are not going to see a wave of poets and virologists running for Congress or trying to fight their way up the corporate ladder, nor would they succeed even if they did.  Government support for science may improve after Trump is gone, but many of our best scientists will be settled in new careers in Europe or Canada by then.  The best we can hope for as a future president is a Gavin Newsom or a Marco Rubio.  Dr Fauci and Guillermo del Toro don't want the job, probably couldn't do the job, and would never get elected anyway.

Our country had a good run, but given the notorious anti-intellectual streak in our culture, it was always living on borrowed time.  If our future is to cheer from the sidelines as innovation in science and the arts shifts to Europe, Canada, Israel, and wherever else the freedom of the mind is respected, well, it could be worse.  The important thing is that that innovation continues -- somewhere.