I am convinced that most of the turmoil in the world can be traced to an epochal paradigm shift in human thought, and that it is driven by two irreversible trends. First, the Abrahamic faiths are dying and, second, automation and artificial intelligence are changing the nature of work or, more prosaically, the skills needful for self-sufficiency. These trends, in turn, have made possible the rise of reactionary vandals such as Donald Trump, whose appeal is to those made anxious by changes for which they are unprepared.
The falsity of the Abrahamic religions is too well-established to belabor; those who doubt that should acquaint themselves with modern Biblical scholarship, or pickup and read a copy of John Spong’s book, Rescuing the Bible From Fundamentalism. Whether or not Judaism, Christianity, or Islam is true is not, really, an interesting question any longer; they are false, one and all, and the matter is settled.
And the progress of industrial automation and artificial intelligence is in plain sight of anybody with eyes to see. A Ford factory in Brazil now assembles automobiles scarcely touched by human hands. The clerk who once shuffled paper at Sears is now unemployed, and so too is the guy who hawked washing machines. And that steadily-dwindling number who have jobs are … worried; they know it’s just a matter of time.
Bricklayers are worried in Japan, because there is now a robot which does that work, too. Nor can the day be far off when that robot is building homes in your hometown.
What is more, unlike previous industrial and social transformations, there does not appear to be a lot of brand new manual-labor spinoffs. The rise of the Interstate Highway System, for instance, created millions of entry-level jobs in the fast-food and hospitality industries. The disappearance of conventional retail is at least creating jobs in Amazon’s warehouses, but many of those jobs are going to be eliminated by robots over the next decade.
And automation isn’t creating new jobs for anybody — except programmers.
And so the number of marginalized people grows. The Devout are ridiculous and embarrassing, and the skilled are no longer needed except as objects of study by … programmers.
Thus Trump, a demagogue and amoral cynic who exploits the frustrations of the unskilled and increasingly irrelevant. Thus Cesar Sayoc and Robert Bowers, too, the would-be letter-bomber and Synagogue shooter, respectively — men for whom the modern world has no place during the years that ought to be the most productive of their lives. Their numbers are growing, and so will their violence.