The parasites versus the empiricists: How the political class is taking you for suckers
I keep hearing that America is polarized.Republicans vs.
Democrats.MAGA vs.
DSA.Wokesters vs.
anti-wokesters.It’s true, up to a point.
But I believe there is a more consequential divide, one growing wider and more perilous every day.I am talking about the division between the empiricists and the parasites.The empiricists are most of you reading these words.Entrepreneurs.
Blue-collar workers.Engineers.
Scientists.Business people.An engineer has to be in touch with empirical reality because if their assumptions about gravity are inaccurate, their bridges will fall down.
An entrepreneur has to be in touch with reality because if he can’t persuade customers to buy his products, the businesses will go belly up.America is the undisputed world leader in empiricism: more Nobel prizes than any other nation, dominance in the frontier technologies, an army of highly impressive (and hugely industrious) blue-collar workers, a spirit of enterprise that remains the envy of the world.When you live here, you probably don’t notice what outsiders sense the moment they land.The buzz.
The sense of possibility.The American dream is perhaps not what it once was, but it’s still alive.
Almost two centuries ago, de Tocqueville wrote “No sooner do you set foot upon the American soil than you are stunned by a kind of tumult ..
.Everything is in motion around you.” The words ring as true today as in the 1830s.This is a nation that once pushed at geographical boundaries but is now pushing at what the philosopher Sir Karl Popper called “the frontiers of knowledge”: quantum, robotics, AI, medicine and the vast array of entertainment products that course through the limbic system of the Republic, even if in the case of social media not always for the better.Ancient Rome pales by comparison.
As do the Abbasids, Persians, Greeks, Phoenicians, Carthaginians and Babylonians.The American-led global order has incubated more prosperity in the last 80 years than most of the previ...