Before passing judgment, one must of all see the phenomenon and see what it is.
A part of that is the means by which things reach one. News about that vulgar man, the POTUS to be who throws his weight around, comes to one through some medium, the BBC, CNN or X. The men and women involved in that all have their prejudices and opinions; they got up in the morning with distressed livers, or having argued with their spouses. Indeed, just examining the means that bring one the news, the banking finance and the technology and its élite and their interests etc., then we somehow have to take that into account in our seeing the phenomenon.
But even more so, one is oneself a significant part of the phenomenon, perhaps the most significant part. One is not an abstract and detached subject watching and evaluating. Thus the phenomenon includes in itself all the intermediary means that bring it to one’s attention and one’s own being and the state one is in, one’s confused heart and disturbed mind.
Thought
The modern age dawned with the conflagration of the religions in the Reformation, and in the Thirty Years War (1618-48) that followed, which may have consumed as many as a third of the population of Europe, and which the English Civil War (1642-49) ran in parallel with for some years. Worse even than that appalling sum of dead in Europe was the collapse of civilised, courteous and reasoned discourse. Worse even that must have been the psychological collapse that underpinned everything else.
Looking for ways out, René Descartes (1596 – 1650) reached back to Euclid as did Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679). Euclid had an enviably simple subject to deal with, involving points, straight lines and the various geometric figures, planes and so on. Nevertheless it took him a great deal of ingenuity to make a watertight logical system from it all. That system was the admiration of intellectuals in an epoch in which all the certainties were untying quite violently.
Define your terms carefully. That’s the beginning.
Now in our world today, the terms are POTUS, Blackrock, China, NATO, Brics and the Global South, for example. Even though people toss these terms around as if they could treat them as logically as Euclid did points, lines and geometric figures, the slightest reflection would convince one that one cannot define any individual or any nation-state or political bloc, none of our terms, with the precision that you can a geometric figure. And yet we use the terms in various establishment ways such as the way that the Sunday Times or the Economist do, or in the alternative ways that Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson or any number of social media pundits do. And they are all equally flawed, except that the official channels have greater staff and resources and can assemble more data, which is not nothing.
Add to that that Euclid’s work suffered collapse in the modern era and the logicians had to work hard to rescue something from the debacle, in spite of the seeming simplicity of the model. In the end, Gödel showed that it couldn’t be done. And he did that logically.
Where does that leave us? The intellect is baffled by it, but we still have the capacity to ‘see’, although it is over-crusted by that intellect. It is that rusty and long discarded faculty that we need to reclaim.