Here’s a trivia question for you:
What’s the opposite of myopia?
Yes, it’s hyperopia. You have heard of the former because it’s more common, but hyperopia (i.e., farsightedness) is a real thing. People with either of these conditions just don’t see very well.
These terms are a nifty metaphor for our political situation, which is somewhere between authoritarian-leaning and full-blast oligarchy. We can’t be sure because we are living it, and people are notoriously bad at identifying the eras in which they exist. We need the perspective of time.
For example, baby boomers weren’t nostalgic for the 1950s while they were kids. It was only when they hit middle age that they proclaimed that those were the days and insisted on dragging the country back to this mythical decade that was vastly overrated, never mind the consequences.
So while it is perfectly obvious that the America of 2025 is a shitshow, it is unclear how much of a catastrophe we are enduring. We will have a better answer circa 2050, if the nation survives until then.
The effects of myopia and hyperopia exist on a political scale. People who are too close or too far from a situation often have a skewed perspective.
Consider the Y2K bug, that wacky relic of the Clinton years. I’m old enough to remember computer scientists who insisted civilization would collapse. They knew all the risks and potential for disaster, so they focused on that. At the other end of the spectrum, people who thought the fledgling internet was a fad and didn’t know the first thing about technology were busy stockpiling canned goods for their underground bunker. They didn’t understand how any of this worked, so they freaked out.
One set was myopic, and the other was hyperopic.
You can see the same results with the Iraq War, when experts smugly asserted that Saddam Hussien had weapons of mass destruction, while people who couldn’t identify Canada on a map yelled, “Invade somebody now.” Yeah, they were both wrong.
There are other examples throughout human history, and in our current maelstrom of misery, it is difficult to figure out who is overreacting and who is way too chill about all this.
Experts on fascism are fleeing the country. Are they too close to the situation or spot on in their analysis?
People who have no idea how tariffs work are saying everything will all be ok. Could this blasé attitude possibly be correct, or is their ignorance not just reprehensible but dangerous?
Is the right path somewhere in between, a concoction of justified anxiety mixed with Zen-like hope?
Again, we don’t know.
I will say, however, that my theory is not perfect. You know all those experts who said Covid-19 would kill a million Americans? They were criticized and ridiculed, but yeah, they were right.
Sometimes, the alarmists are absolutely correct.
