What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Hiroshima to be born?

On the occasion of the conclusion of the G7 dark sabbath of the demons held on the altar dedicated to the victims of nuclear war named Hiroshima, I am right now trying to write a proper essay detailing the horrific breakdown of thinking and living that permits these “world leaders,” caught in a nightmare of their own creation, to lament the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and to vow through twisted lips “never again” while at the same time holding classified meetings to discuss how Russia would be brought to its knees by the threat of nuclear war.

Could these leaders, and the corporate heads who yank their chains, be so insane as to believe that they must risk their own destruction to preserve their status and power?

There can be no doubt that this is precisely what they intend to do. There can be no suspicion that they are not that insane.

Let me quote first W. B. Yeats visionary poem “The Second Coming,” a poem written at another moment of massive institutional and moral failure, which sums up perfectly the spiritual crisis of the moment that is beyond the capacity of the fetid media, and the flaccid policy makers, to comprehend, let alone to respond to.

The Second Coming

1919

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

I would like to add a section from my essay

“An American Psychopathocracy” from February, 2019 to bring Yeats’ vision up to date.

Silent spring, summer, fall and winter

We have gone far past the warning signals that inspired millions to protest in the streets and form a counter-culture in the 1960s. Things are much graver today. We face the prospect of nuclear war, of extinction-grade climate change and of a criminal concentration of wealth. Yet few are able to get off their asses and discuss these matters with their friends and neighbors, let alone to take action.

Perhaps we are going through a period of decadence, like that of the late Roman Empire. Could it be that Donald Trump is a reality TV version of Emperor Nero, or perhaps a knock-off of Emperor Caligula? Certainly, Trump's decision to float the name of his daughter Ivanka as a candidate for president of the World Bank would fit in well with the late Roman Empire.

The fashion house Viktor and Rolf (founded by Dutch designers Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren) goes out of its way to find challenging images that can blaze new trails in haute couture. A poster from one of their exhibitions was so striking that they chose it for the cover of a retrospective.

/The viewer is confronted by a confusing image. A wealthy white woman appears as if she were lying on a bed, with a luxurious red blanket wrapped around her and her hair spread over an indulgent pillow. She is positioned vertically relative to the landscape behind her, cradling a blond-haired baby in her right arm, in the fashion of a Renaissance Madonna and child. Her blase facial expression suggests sexual indulgence, luxury and indifference.

But the image of wealth is set against a disturbing background. The mother and child are standing in front of the debris from a demolished home, perhaps from the aftermath of a Hurricane Katrina or of a Hurricane Michael.

Her wealth and her privilege are made more appealing, more intriguing, by their contrast with the sufferings of ordinary people that result from collapsing infrastructure, climate change and austerity policies. The fascination in image is that it allows the super-rich (and those who envy them) to experience the sufferings of ordinary people vicariously, much as Marie Antoinette enjoyed the experience of being an ordinary peasant by building a little farm on the grounds of Versailles.

Taking aesthetic pleasure from this image is quite simply a psychopathic act. After all, those rich are dependent on extractive industries and on fossil fuels to provide their big quarterly returns. Their search for profit has led to the climate change that makes such catastrophes and made it impossible for the citizen to generate his or her own energy.

They delude themselves into believing they will survive climate change by buying bunkers and vast land reserves, a movement vividly described by Evan Osnos in the New Yorker article "Doomsday Prep for the Superrich."

This sick culture radiates out throughout our society. Youth are forced to watch advertisements (whether they want to or not) in which bored rich kids lounge around, lost in a world of bored narcissism. Such images are presented to them as role models by marketers, suggesting that the only escape from of social inequality is through the worship of those who have the most.

How Google and Facebook shut down the American mind

But is this psychopathocracy simply a result of periodic decadence, or is there something else at play? The extremes of cognitive dissonance that allow highly educated people to blithely ignore climate change and the risk of nuclear war suggest that there must be another factor.

Perhaps the rapid advancement of technology has profoundly undermined our capacity to comprehend the shifts taking place around us and reduced us to passive consumers of games, social media, pornography and other distractions incapable of responding to crisis.

Could it be that our brains have been reprogrammed by the smartphones we use so that we will go to our graves with only a vague awareness that something is wrong? The cartoonist Steve Cutts describes this nightmare world in which discourse is impossible in his animation "Are you lost in the world like me". The acquired passivity affects all classes, all of the time.

Nicholas Carr's book, "What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains: The Shallows," provides extensive scientific evidence of how the internet is remapping our brains to respond to instantaneous stimulation and thereby rendering complex contemplation nearly impossible. That negative trend is proceeding at precisely the moment that we are being connected together globally in a confusing and contradictory manner by that same technology.

We are left dying of thirst in an ocean where there is information everywhere, but not a drop to contemplate.

Carr suggests that the brain's neuroplasticity allows it to change, often in a negative sense, promoting rigid behavior. Our neurons want us to keep exercising the circuits we formed through our internet surfing because they offer a seductive stimulation. Quick responses from a Google search, or from a Facebook posting, stimulate neurons and release pleasing stimulants.

The unused neural circuits that were once employed for the complex three-dimensional consideration of long-term personal experience and of shifts in culture and society are ruthlessly pruned away in an invisible neural Darwinism.

The neurologist Norman Doidge writes: "If we stop exercising our mental skills, we do not just forget them: the brain map space for those skills is turned over to the skills we practice instead." Carr puts it succinctly: "When it comes to the quality of our thought, our neurons and synapses are entirely indifferent. The possibility of intellectual decay is inherent in the malleability of our brains"

That means that hours on smartphones, exploring social media and chatting with friends, has created people incapable of comprehending the scale of the risk involved in climate change or in the arms race that has followed the February 2 decision of the Trump administration to leave the?Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. Few are even aware of these catastrophes. Even fewer rally with friends or family to discuss these developments that will end life as we know it.

Carr explains the reason: "Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, educators and web designers point to the same conclusion: when we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. It's possible to think deeply while surfing the net, just as it is possible to think shallowly while reading a book, but that's not the type of thinking the technology encourages and rewards."

If we have an entire population who are mired in the "shallows," in the rapid processing of information in return for quick stimulation of the neurons, might it be possible that there will be few, or none, who can comprehend the crisis we face, let alone formulate and advocate for a solution?

The psychopath behind the psychopath

But there is one more piece to this puzzle. It does not sound right that a handful of greedy billionaires who care nothing for humanity are responsible for our current condition.

Could it be that if we rip off all the masks and peer behind the curtains, we will discover that technology has taken over the entire system of things?

Yes, the ultimate psychopath that plays the flute for those billionaires as they lead us to our doom is not some horrific monster, but rather the networks connecting tens of thousands of supercomputers around the world. They purr softly as they calculate to the tenth decimal point how to maximize profit every day, every minute and every second.

Those supercomputers make the ultimate decisions for JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Barclays and Bank of America, because they are capable of something that no human can do: They can assess the monetary value of the entire Earth and extract profit in perfect accord with the algorithms they are assigned without any ethical qualms.
The banks of supercomputers that are stacked behind the investment banks perceive Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos as but bothersome appendages in their quest for ultimate and immediate profit.

We do not have to wait for supercomputers to achieve consciousness to lose control of our civilization. All we need is for computers to set the priorities for our society on the basis of profit without any consideration for the needs for the ecosystem, or for humanity itself. And if social networks, videos and games remap the neural networks of in our brains, encouraging dopamine-driven short-term thinking, the computers will take over, and will have no choice but to take over, long before they have developed any consciousness.

We humans have not lost our minds completely, but we have delegated the dirty work to supercomputers without even noticing it. In this land, the one-eyed are being led to the precipice by a massively parallel blind man.