I guess I’m not done.
Rewatching this QAnon patient (below) and consider the accelerating environmental crises and political ones afflicting the planet, the more it seems what ties them together is the same self-centric philosophy behind Covid denial. Simon and Garfunkel famously parodied that view: “I am a rock | I am an island.”
On New Year’s Day 2009, David Dayen saw the philosophy already fully formed. “Conservatives may have dwindling ranks, increasing illegitimacy and the headwind of a very well-liked incoming President eager to implement a popular agenda to deal with,” he wrote. One could see the “me-first” philosophy in the tweet of T-PartyTexas congressman John Culberson (replaced by Democrat Lizzie Fletcher in 2019): “Texans core belief =leave me alone: gov’t stay away from my home, my family, my church, my school, my bank account & my guns.”
Covid denial. Climate denial. Biden denial. It’s all driven by the belief that the individual is supreme and society an annoyance. It drove Trump to attempt a coup. He wants what he wants and he wants it now. As do his followers. Sharing is for weaklings and simps. Ayn Rand’s sick philosophy conquers the world. And ends it.
“There is no such thing as society,” British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously said during the “greed is good” Reagan era (1987). Thatcher tempered that statement by adding, “It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours.” Like a global game of “telephone,” that admonition that we have a duty to look out for our neighbors has morphed since then into Me and Mine, screw you. Donald Trump and his family live by it, making him the patron saint of metastasized, post-T-Party conservatism.
And so, in the fullness of time, nations slip beneath the waves, the planet bakes, Japan and Europe drown, Australia is plagued with mice, men slaughter women and girls, Covid evolves to kill millions more, and none of it has anything to do with the Almighty Me.