Alicia Peters should have known better - graduate of a decent college with a good mid-level job in consulting, reasonable parentage and upbringing - but somewhere along the way she got loose-shunted. bumped aside from a path which should have taken her to finance or investment banking, but channeled her to the world's end reaches and then to political dementia.
The West African country to which she was assigned was one of the region's and the world's sinkholes, a miserable place of disease, crime, dysfunction, and misrule.
Alicia had been one her agency's 'bus driver' hires - not too dumb to avoid accidents; not too smart to get bored with long hauls and fall asleep. Her company needed to fill hundreds of posts around the world, saved the gems for the best and the brightest, and handed out 'starter' positions with the promise of advancement to stolid, limited vision but patient employees like Alicia
She plugged away at donkey work, kept her own counsel, and presented a chipper face to colleagues and government counterparts. Few Americans except international development consultants who had to visit the country ever set foot there. They were inevitably the targets of scams, intimidation, robbery, and assault and penniless, ended up charity cases of the US government.
Alicia was overworked and disaffected by both the conditions of the country and those in which she worked. Because the country was low on her company's list, it never got the logistical support common to other, more privileged places. As a result, Alicia simply soldiered through; but a good bus driver, she never complained, never was the squeaky wheel, did her job, and hoped for the best.
Perhaps because of this rather difficult experience and those to follow - she never was moved up as she expected, but got sent to one miserable African country after another - or some fleeting commiseration with the poor and destitute whose ultimate welfare she was to indirectly oversee - she became politically progressive. Africa was just a microcosm of the ruinous history of capitalism.
If it hadn't been for predatory colonial interests followed by collusion with the corrupt 'big men' who followed after independence; and had these countries followed the socialist example of the Soviet Union and developed a more equitable, just, and sharing society, they wouldn't be in the situation they were in.
By the time she left international consulting she was completely disaffected with American neo-imperialism and the complicit role of Western governments and joined the ranks of progressive activism. Whereas one person's efforts for world peace were only drops in the bucket, a unified, consolidated movement of likeminded people could make a difference.
Because she was so limited in vision and understanding, the politics of idealism were perfect for her. There was no need for rational exposition, analysis, or exegesis when the truth was a plain as the nose on your face. There was simply a right way and a wrong way, and the choice was clear.
Modern progressives' forbears Brandeis, Lafollette, Gompers and other early Twentieth Century liberals were optimistic in their struggle for workers' rights. They valued both the capitalist engines of productivity that engineered America's rise to industrial power, and the labor it took to keep the machinery running they were not naysayers but constructivists. They fought on the side of labor but sought accommodation and compromise with capital as the only solution.
Today's progressives see things quite differently, and are limited in their political viability by true belief and the isolated perspective it demands. Everything in America is wrong, and everything the conservative opposition does or proposes only compounds the error and plunges the country farther into a capitalist morass. Ever evil derives from capitalism, is forever tainted by its greed. If capitalism were replaced by a more congenial, inclusive, fair and just political philosophy like socialism, the country could be righted immediately.
Which is why Alicia and her progressive colleagues have been completely, utterly befuddled by the radical innovations in technology which will usher in the post-human generation. Artificial intelligence, complete electronic-human computer symbiosis and the ability to remake the human genome will make the human race unrecognizable to future generations.
'Elon Musk is a racist', said Alicia when the conversation turned to the genius cluster of Musk, Huang, Brin, Zuckerberg. Rather than see them as a modern parallel to Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, and J.P. Morgan - innovators, entrepreneurs, social revolutionaries, she could only brand them as racist tyrants who seek only to rob the poor and enrich themselves - wolfish predators, murderers, and dictators-in-waiting.
Artificial intelligence was designed by this cabal of sorcerers only as a means of stealing the livelihood of working class Americans and black people. It is devilish, evil, and satanic; and the very idea of a post-human, technologically facilitated generation is horrific, an end to liberalism, compassion, consideration, an unholy hell of capitalist doing.
The more she howled about AI and its perpetrators, the more agitated she became. Not only was Musk a racist but an anti-Semite, pedophile, and serial misogynist. The more she spoke, the more unhinged she became. She was a woman possessed out of control, completely at the mercy of some violent eruption of unambivalent, excoriating hatred.
'Conviction is the disease of the inferior mind', said Immanuel Kant in 1764 in his Critique of Pure Reason, and he could have been writing about the likes of Alicia Peters who was simply incapable of seeing anything clearly, so addled with conviction and true belief that she was. There was no equilibrium in her intellect, no ability to see anything but the Faustian deception and corruption of the world.
'She's nuts', said someone who had suffered through Alicia's harangues; and off her rocker she certainly seemed but she was part of whole movement which espoused the very same bilious hatred as she. An entire political party had seemingly become unhinged.
Alicia once completely untethered from the reasonable expectations of the gathering, wandered from one pus-filled sore to another - the continuing plight of the black man, consigned to desperation in ghettoes created by white racism and male privilege; the expatriation of legitimately needy asylees, the blaspheming of hopeful transgenders, the cronyism of unnecessary wars. Trump...Trump...TRUMP! she wailed.
It was always thus and never thus. It is not surprising, therefore, that people at the turn of the century thought that the telephone was the end of the cohesive, respectful society of the day. It would, they said, destroy the carefully-woven fabric of the community because women would no longer gossip over the back fence, friends would no longer drop in for coffee, and the personal contacts which assured social adherence and avoided larger disputes – engagements, arrangements, negotiations, and settlements – would disappear.
More importantly the very character of America – farms, small town, and tightly-woven, friendly communities -would disappear. The country would become more impersonal, less concerned with the lives and well-being of others, selfish and enclosed.
The fear of course was unfounded, and the telephone expanded personal contact, facilitated social dialogue, and connected family members like never before. The telephone facilitated commerce, increased efficiency, and became the centerpiece of rapid economic expansion.
Americans were wary of ‘The Horseless Carriage’ and ‘The Iron Horse’ for similar reasons. The car and the train would disrupt a very pastoral, settled, and community life. They were not unlike the telephone, instruments of social reconfiguration which would change the settled, predictable, and comfortable life of America forever.
Smoke-belching, banging, and rattling trains disturbed the tranquility and integrity of the Great Plains. They cut through the heartland, disturbing its natural rhythms. Connection to the land was not disrupted or disordered by the horse, just modified. The natural order of things – plants, man, and animals living together – remained intact. The train, early critics said, would destroy this harmony, one that had existed forever.
Today's progressive is different - not only is there great suspicion of technological advances but condemnation of the economic system that produces them and most of all the individuals behind their creation. Hatred all the way around. A different algorithm, a different ballgame.
'What can we do?', shouted Alicia about the onslaught of new technology and its co-opting of society, a dinner guest suggested that smart people always figure out ways of dealing with change and lead others. To which Alicia now feverish with anger, shouted him down as arrogantly racist. 'Smart??', she yelled. 'Smart?? You mean white, privileged....'and on and on she went with increasingly warped non sequiturs.
She was simply unable to understand the simplest notions of history, humanity, and human intelligence, so immured as she was within the walls of an intellectual prison of her own making.
'Nuts is hardly the word for it', said another; and so it was that Alicia Peters already completely off the rails, ended - a crazed, possessed, demented woman called out for lunacy but obliged to creep back into whatever dark place she came from. Insignificant, unnoticed, supernumerary.
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