The future looks increasingly Orwellian.

What is a dystopia, really? It’s a world where the majority believe in the necessity of violence and conflict. It’s a world where those who have vision, and motivation, choose violence and related means to achieve it. Meanwhile, as the poem says, “the best lack all conviction."

W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming

Are we stuck in a cycle of history, without hope of escape? For around half a century, after the end of World War II, it seemed that humanity was intent on transcending its old ways of paranoia, hatred, and violence. But was that anything more than a temporary reprieve?

For years, Pollyannas have been trying to draw conclusions about the future from a relatively short burst of improvements brought about by technology and the spread of democracy. Well, the returns on technology are not just diminished, but positively reversed. They have transformed from liberating to constraining. Democracy is in retreat in nearly every corner of the world. People have lost interest in the real issues. They long for escape into dreams.

When the people lose their taste for reality, it opens the door for opportunistic villains with suitcases bursting with gifts, scams, and conspiracies, both imagined (for sale) and real (for execution). The people have always been vulnerable to frightening tales of monsters and secret societies. Few things capture their interest so intensely. Ignorance is a vacuum that is more readily filled with nonsense than useful understanding.

The people have never really been in touch. And they are more out-of-touch now than they have been in a generation. It isn’t going to improve. Myths, fictions, fantasies, dreams, delusions: these are what the world is made of, for the majority. Not that the elites are immune, with their ideologies and rarefied versions of the same paranoia and tribalism which drives the mob.

Preventing a society of rigid, hierarchical authoritarianism—of any stripe—requires a strong counter. It requires an ideal of moral and ethical behaviour, driven by an identity as more than just intrinsically better, but of acting in a demonstrably more virtuous manner. When a people assume they are inherently better, and no longer need to earn their self-worth, then they immediately devolve into abusing their power. Everything is justified, when you think you are God.

We don’t need to believe in God to be humble. But we need to believe in something, other than our own superiority. Unfortunately, we seem to have abandoned any such standards. We have freed ourselves of all restraint, all responsibility, all ethical or humane obligation. We have replaced it with a freedom to inflict whatever harms we wish, on whomever we wish, for our own betterment, amusement, or in some cases a fantasy about our imminent ascendency to Heaven, either as God’s reward, or as gods ourselves.