Irrationality: why?
I'm not alone in my dismay (and worse) about a rising flood of events and trends in the world that make no sense. I don't know how significant it is, but there are actually a couple of people who personify quite a bit of it. I'm talking about Trump and Musk.
In Trump's case, practically everything he does, from demolishing the White House to demolishing the United States' standing in the world, just seems demented. But he's been getting away with everything for his entire life. He's the statistical anomaly to top all statistical anomalies. When he obviously lies, everybody just seems to let it slide. And the people who, in the rest of their lives, at least give a lot of lip service to things like honesty, virtue, and honor completely ignore their own core values to worship the clod like a deity. Sometimes, I've read, literally.
Musk gets away with everything too, although he did have a couple of successes many years ago. Lately, none, and it really seems like there's something seriously wrong with him. Not just his racism and aversion to basic human empathy; I mean something medical. But regardless of that, what really makes no sense is that he gets a pass on everything too! He helps fund Tesla, and then claims to be one of the founders, which he was not. So the media, and the world, say "ok, fine, buddy." Then he put together a patently absurd payday for himself at Tesla — completely unprecedented and nonsensical from any reasonable perspective of corporate governance, and the board and shareholders said "ok, fine, buddy." Now he's snookered the investment banks and the ruling class of the financial world into valuing his clunky, money-losing companies as likely to grow by a factor of 100 in the next three years.
Speaking of the financial world, what about Bitcoin? It used to be that the whole underlying notion of "finance" and "investing" was based on "value". There's even something called the "Efficient Market Hypothesis" that says the value of an asset is critically important. Well Bitcoin doesn't have any value. The financial ruling class has let Bitcoin into their boardrooms as "an asset category", but as everybody now knows, you can't use it for anything. Not even money laundering any more; the bad guys for some reason used to think that they could stay completely anonymous when moving money around using a system that records every transaction in a ledger that can't be altered. Yeah, not so much.
Maybe I've been wrong most of my life and the world was always nonsensical, but I didn't see it. Or maybe King's The Dark Tower was channeling some kind of emergent reality and for arcane, mysterious reasons the world has moved on, and everything we assumed and depended on is just starting to decay and fall apart and can't be fixed — but nobody can understand why (except some rando cowboy with a six-shooter, of course).
Bottom line, like huge numbers of respondents to a poll conducted by The Guardian, it really feels to me like the world has changed, and for the worse. I'm worried about the future, both mine and everybody else's. But amidst what seems like relentlessly-increasing chaos, I don't know what to do about it outside my own extremely local sphere. I feel like the boy in the bubble.