While we live in a world where people throw missiles at each other with God’s approval, an Australian senator wears a burqa to inflame people and wins approval, and the United States president wears orange make-up and a baseball cap to honour the return of dead American soldiers and win the approval of his followers — it’s easy to forget it wasn’t always like this.
We were once flawed but reasonable people who aimed to answer probing questions with quiet dignity and settle arguments with informed debate.
How and why did we get to this place where truth and science is either flexible or denied, the cultural clock is returned to the 1950s and children are being bombed?
To probe complex, multi-threaded stories such as this, I always return to the Occam’s razor of story gathering.
Occam’s razor is a rule-of-thumb scientific tool that says if several answers explain the same phenomenon — the simplest is likely to be the correct one.
So let’s start with the six basic questions used in story gathering — the five Ws and one more. Who, what, where, when, why and how.
Four of these are already established, so that leaves why and how.
So why is Trump being allowed to smash Iran and generally set the Middle East and the wider world on fire?
The best and simplest explanation to this question I can find comes from an internet post that went viral way back in September last year.
Musician Patrick Cosmos posted on Bluesky social media: “Working on a new unified theory of American reality I’m calling ‘everyone is 12 now’.’’
He followed this up with several other posts along the lines of:
“I’m strong and I want to have like 50 kids and live on a farm: of course you do. You’re 12.”
“If there’s crime just send in the army: bless your heart, my 12-year-old buddy.”
“I don’t want to eat vegetables. I think steak and French fries is the only meal: hell yeah, you’re 12.”
“Let’s just bomb them ...”
The ‘Everyone is 12’ theory took off and spread to X, TikTok, Reddit and other platforms where it became the standard response to infantile right-wing posts.
That was six months ago, but it still does a lot to explain the rise of anti-vaxxers, Brexit and One Nation, all of which depend upon ignorance, bullying, fear and lack of critical thinking.
Why are people regressing to pre-teen thinking? The instant platform of social media, falling literacy standards and a hankering for a golden age of perfection — that’s my Occam’s razor explanation.
So what about the how? How did we get here?
To answer this, I can’t go past Spanish painter Francisco Goya’s 1799 etching called The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, which shows a man asleep among his drawings and writings, while a flock of owls and bats appear from the darkness behind him.
In an age when the scientific Enlightenment was under attack from superstition and romanticism, Goya was saying that abandoning rationality and intellect unleashes chaotic, dark and uncontrollable forces.
The image is more than 200 years old, but it is still a powerful symbol of what we are experiencing today.
Far from being woke, we have been asleep at the wheel and allowed our democracies, our science and our mature and hard-won values of tolerance and kindness to be trampled by idiots and monsters.
Simplistic, uninformed thinking and brutal solutions to complex problems are on the rise.
You can see it everywhere. Unless you’re 12.
John Lewis is a former journalist at The News.
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