What If They Were All Wrong?

As we find gravity in the Age Of Fallibility, it occurs that we never really considered how wrong so many people could be.

We always knew so many had it wrong about so many things. After all, you can't help it as you spend a little time here. We become inured to the fact that as a species we are more likely to make the wrong choice in almost everything we do. We see ourselves doing it and make excuses and watch others do it and shrug. We let the little things go and pick our battles. To do otherwise is an invitation to hell.

I suppose we expected more. In an information age there are so few excuses for not getting the facts right or reading the data. We understood it was a lack of initiative in many, a lack of intelligence (or self-preservation) in others, and a willful neglect for purpose of perceived personal advantage in some.

Maybe we were optimists to believe that the sample of those we knew and watched each day was a poor one. That somewhere, there were so many more who were right, balanced in a reciprocity to all that we saw going wrong around us.

I am increasingly convinced that there are not. At best, there were those who merely tried to change the rules to provide a more predictable and selfish outcome. If they were the "best and the brightest" to many, it was only because they were better at painting a bullseye around wherever their arrows landed.

All evidence points to a conclusion that they were wrong for some time and could no longer maintain the artifice of getting others to call it "right" in numbers large enough to discourage debate.

The good news is that there isn't any monolithic, intentional conspiracy to make so many things go so wrong. The bad news is that the Emperor has no clothes and the result to many is the same.