This will be a bizarre and uncomfortable event. The coverage will be embarrassed and sheepish. The celebration will be muted to the point of mumbling. It will be hollow and awkward. It will lead to national depression rather than national hope. The reality will finally sink in. By next week things will turn fissile. What fun!
The recent collapse of this psychological theory is not even a bit surprising. Five minutes thought could have persuaded anyone that this was yet another rickety psychological concoction. But people are gullible and will believe virtually anything if a psychologist tells them it is so. I gave up psychology over forty years ago because of methodological problems (among other reasons). Philosophers, in particular, should not accept uncritically what psychologists claim to have discovered.
What a dreadful dismal year that was. If you started the year with any faith in humanity, you surely didn’t end it that way. The dominant emotion of the year was disbelief and a sense of futility. You felt you were living through a bad dream. Perhaps strangely, I had a productive year philosophically: I wrote a lot and quite liked what I wrote. It felt like a refuge from all the nastiness and stupidity. Will 2017 be any better? I doubt it.
It could be argued that philosophy has always had suicidal tendencies. In the age of logical positivism philosophy tried to kill itself. Philosophy is a nuisance, a headache, a source of misery. I don’t think philosophy will ever die of natural causes (though science might). It is too pressing. But I can see that its practitioners might try to put an end to it. That could succeed, as a matter of institutional reality. That would be a bad thing, but bad things happen.
The recent revelations about the effects of fake news disseminated on the internet suggests that credulity is the main enemy of democracy today. What we need is anti-credulity training: that is, lessons in epistemology. I wish I could say that philosophers are immune to fake news–if it fits their ideological preconceptions.
I am going to make a prediction–a possibility not a certainty. The sybaritic businessman will quickly find that he is (a) not up to the job of president and (b) he doesn’t like the job. He doesn’t have the knowledge or the patience or the skills to do it adequately, and he chafes at the constraints imposed on him by security and scheduling. He’d like to give it up and go back to his old life (so would his wife), so he hands the reins over to some establishment Republicans and retreats into being a dummy president. Then it’s business as usual–by no means good but maybe not catastrophic. Alternatively, his unsuitability reveals itself very early on and the world comes to an end.
