The Post-Truth Era
The 21st century was looked upon by many of us who are old enough to have seen out its predecessor as an era of emergent technological, social and political progressivism, and for the most part, that is certainly the case. Electric cars are finally on the uptake, you can marry your cat and people can now smoke a joint without being sent to prison and forced to play mummy and daddy with a six foot four scoliosis-afflicted transvestite named Georgina. What an age we are living in, eh? You can watch porn on the go thanks to streaming and advances in mobile computing, and in many countries you can now ask the medical profession to put you out of your misery in a manner befitting of a domestic cat if it means avoiding a slow painful death or in the more extreme cases, if you've simply grown bored of life. Or if TV no longer takes your fancy and you can't think of any other hobby to take up.
But sadly, and rather ironically I might add, it is also becoming an era of paranoia, fear, suspicion and regression. Science is now looked upon with great hostility and distrust by a number of sectors of society - vaccines are apparently evil and cause autism, the Earth is apparently flat, the government is poisoning us from the cloud tops and fluoridation is making children grow extra limbs. Oh, and "Big Pharma" (make quotation gestures with hands) is apparently out to make us perpetually sick just so they can have a "steady" income. Viagra's giving gramps the most petrified wood he's had since the Ford administration, making him happier than Ned Flanders on ecstasy, and in turn making pharmaceutical CEOs just as happy by allowing them to upgrade the 50-room sprawling penthouse with views of the Kuiper belt to the 51-room behemoth that'll make Buckingham Palace look like a corrugated iron outhouse in the wop-wops.
All decades, of course, had their quirks and more memorable aspects. Big hair, mustaches and fluorescent colors were all the rage in the 1980s. Alternative rock was the bee's knees in the 1990s. Crap music was in vogue in the noughties, and man buns and blatant ignorance are almost de rigueur in the "tenties." That's right. It's becoming somewhat cool for men to look like Wilma Flintstone and believe that the Earth is flat. And yes, it is true that many of us are moving forward in various aspects, but unfortunately, some of us are making sizable strides in the opposite direction, a regressive equivalent to traveling back in time a thousand years. Smartphones and social media have expanded upon that communicative wonder that is the internet and now allow us to communicate with anyone, anywhere in the world at any time, including the previously inaccessible types, such as celebrities and other high-profile figures. But that being said, paranoid and easily frightened types such as conspiracy theorists and professional chemophobes now have access to a medium that permits them to disseminate whatever bullshit it is they wish to tell the world about almost instantaneously to any of their fellow quasi-schizophrenic cohorts, wherever in the world they may happen to be.
It's only a matter of time before scientists are painted as heretical pariahs and chased into the sea or burnt at the stake, and where enlightened appreciators of science are sent to reeducation camps for putting forward compelling and logical arguments explaining why we actually did go to the moon. Heliocentrism will become part of the school curriculum and people who dare speak out against it will find their bloodied heads impaled on spikes outside parliament. But - there will be a silver lining to the reemergence of all this pseudo-scientific claptrap - viral and bacterial infections that could be prevented with vaccines will once again decimate large swathes of the global population, solving both the overpopulation crisis and allowing natural selection to hopefully create a new and better human race, with less idiots, and less people in general. On a funnier note, smurfs will become a real thing thanks to idiots using colloidal silver instead of actual medicine. And natural selection will weed out a few more idiots who wish to prove to the rest of us globetards that the Earth is flat by following the example of that idiot in a steam rocket and launching themselves either into the ground, or if they get lucky (and we get lucky too), shot into space, where their last moments of their lives will be spent bearing witness to the immutable proof that they were ultimately morons of the highest caliber.
But sadly, and rather ironically I might add, it is also becoming an era of paranoia, fear, suspicion and regression. Science is now looked upon with great hostility and distrust by a number of sectors of society - vaccines are apparently evil and cause autism, the Earth is apparently flat, the government is poisoning us from the cloud tops and fluoridation is making children grow extra limbs. Oh, and "Big Pharma" (make quotation gestures with hands) is apparently out to make us perpetually sick just so they can have a "steady" income. Viagra's giving gramps the most petrified wood he's had since the Ford administration, making him happier than Ned Flanders on ecstasy, and in turn making pharmaceutical CEOs just as happy by allowing them to upgrade the 50-room sprawling penthouse with views of the Kuiper belt to the 51-room behemoth that'll make Buckingham Palace look like a corrugated iron outhouse in the wop-wops.
All decades, of course, had their quirks and more memorable aspects. Big hair, mustaches and fluorescent colors were all the rage in the 1980s. Alternative rock was the bee's knees in the 1990s. Crap music was in vogue in the noughties, and man buns and blatant ignorance are almost de rigueur in the "tenties." That's right. It's becoming somewhat cool for men to look like Wilma Flintstone and believe that the Earth is flat. And yes, it is true that many of us are moving forward in various aspects, but unfortunately, some of us are making sizable strides in the opposite direction, a regressive equivalent to traveling back in time a thousand years. Smartphones and social media have expanded upon that communicative wonder that is the internet and now allow us to communicate with anyone, anywhere in the world at any time, including the previously inaccessible types, such as celebrities and other high-profile figures. But that being said, paranoid and easily frightened types such as conspiracy theorists and professional chemophobes now have access to a medium that permits them to disseminate whatever bullshit it is they wish to tell the world about almost instantaneously to any of their fellow quasi-schizophrenic cohorts, wherever in the world they may happen to be.
It's only a matter of time before scientists are painted as heretical pariahs and chased into the sea or burnt at the stake, and where enlightened appreciators of science are sent to reeducation camps for putting forward compelling and logical arguments explaining why we actually did go to the moon. Heliocentrism will become part of the school curriculum and people who dare speak out against it will find their bloodied heads impaled on spikes outside parliament. But - there will be a silver lining to the reemergence of all this pseudo-scientific claptrap - viral and bacterial infections that could be prevented with vaccines will once again decimate large swathes of the global population, solving both the overpopulation crisis and allowing natural selection to hopefully create a new and better human race, with less idiots, and less people in general. On a funnier note, smurfs will become a real thing thanks to idiots using colloidal silver instead of actual medicine. And natural selection will weed out a few more idiots who wish to prove to the rest of us globetards that the Earth is flat by following the example of that idiot in a steam rocket and launching themselves either into the ground, or if they get lucky (and we get lucky too), shot into space, where their last moments of their lives will be spent bearing witness to the immutable proof that they were ultimately morons of the highest caliber.
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