OK, not all people of course, but quite a lot.

How else to explain the rise of reality shows, influencers, scam artists and dictators run amok? Realpolitik be damned, when corruption and stupidity is this rife you have to consider that the politik has tilted into the surreal.

One tries to ignore all the eejeets who want to separate or break things but hands over the ears and la-la-la only works so far.

AIn’t Misbehaving.

There was a terrific cartoon in The Economist a few weeks back. I can’t reproduce it here because I have too much respect for copyright but the gist of it was a parallel with Jurassic Park. Cyberassic Park, with a Jeep driving into a compound surrounded by barbed wire assuring guests that the “creatures” were safely inside and couldn’t escape. Meanwhile, you saw a hole in the other side of the fence and the tail end of what looked like a brontosaurus. Given the number of AI um agents/actors/programs having hacked into various and sundry “unhack-able” systems, it seemed apt.

Of course the real question is who will be left to tell the story if AI really does get out of its cage and becomes sentient or conscious or just plain mean.

Meanwhile, a rather lovely woman, Dolly Parton, died not so long ago. I’ve never been a country music fan but of course like everyone I knew of Dolly. Her Imagination Library sent books to children; her songs lifted our spirits and her many, often quiet, donations to the needy meant she died a “mere” multi-millionaire, not the billionaire she could have been. Could one even picture a Zuckerberg or Musk doing that?

A short while later Gloria Steinem died, at 92. Dolly was 80. They both lived long, full lives but somehow it seemed wrong to lose to strong, resilient women in one month. Of course in Dolly’s case her husband of nearly 60 years had died less than a year before and grief has a way of catching up to one.

Mais c’est la vie

But things happen, people come, people go. Good people die and horrid ones hang on. This isn’t the first time in history things looked pretty grim but it is the first time we’ve been informed of it every minute of every day. So it seems to me that the only way to think about it all is to broaden our horizon and put things in perspective.

During the sixties, when I was too young to care, nuclear annihilation was around the corner as the Soviet Union loomed large and evil. Any second now we were all going to die. But we didn’t.

At the turn of the century the Y2K software hiccup was going to turn the world upside down, destroy all our records and turn us into some version of the Lord of the Flies. It didn’t. Life went on. We endured.

And while it may seem as though there’s more crime, more stupidity, more nonsense. if you think about it from a statistical perspective it’s really not that different. Think about it. Only a few decades ago, global population was around three billion. Now it’s eight. Eight billion people. So if you shift from thinking about it all from absolute to relative terms, really, there’s always been some monster lurking under the bed. But in relative terms it hasn’t changed so much. After all, if only (let’s say) about 10% of people do awful things, ten per cent of eight billion is a lot more people.

OK, I admit it’s difficult at the moment to retain one’s equanimity when we seem to be living in some dystopian Russian novel what with The Idiot, War and Peace – or was it 1984?. Still, in the grand scheme of things we’re all still breathing, still here, still robust enough to complain and, in a pinch, reach out to friends and family. Which hopefully we still have. After all, a lot of those lost puppies did get found; Timmy did get out of the well; Dorothy did find her way back to Kansas and while we may not all have lived happily ever we read the stories and were hopeful. So hang in there. Eat the butter, have a glass of wine, play some happy music and watch a sunset. Most important: ignore the news.