I probably shouldn’t, but given our common moment here in October 2024, I occasionally allow myself to luxuriate in a dreamy reverie. About what, you ask? Well … about a day when I don’t have to give Donald Trump a single thought. Not so much as a second of my attention. A day when — like magic — he is simply gone. Ignored and fully forgotten. And the constant grinding idiocy stops.

That would be a day when I don’t have to react to the astonishing stupidity of claims that migrants from “Haitia” are eating cats and dogs in Ohio. That the vice-president of the United States waved 13,000 serial killers into the country, and that such momicidal maniacs are now everywhere in the country, slashing throats and raping women, (or, who knows, maybe even cats and dogs … I mean … people are saying.)

A day when I don’t have to listen to red-faced BS about children leaving home for school in the morning and returning a different sex in the afternoon … because surgeries were forced on them by that same vice-president. Or that the government, (controlled top to bottom by the vice-president) is spending taxpayer money giving gender-changing operations to prisoners. And that the current government is either, A: Geo-engineering hurricanes to strike only Trump voters, and/or B: Letting Trump voters and only Trump voters rot in their flood-ravaged houses while giving out millions of rescue dollars to … well, those 13,000 migrant/serial killers, I’m assuming.

The fundamental question to all this is pretty much what it has been since Trump metastasized in to our consciousness 10 years ago. Namely, “How Stupid Do You Have to Be to Believe Any of This?”, or, even you think it’s just a long-running act of morbid performance art, “Why Would You Think Someone Saying This Shit, Hour After Hour, Day After Day, Should Hold the Fate of the World in His Hands?”

Right now, a month before the election, it’s so bad the current President of the United States had to go on national TV during a monster hurricane and deny that the government (his and the vice-president’s government) is not controlling the weather, i.e. aiming hurricanes at Trump voters. Said a semi-incredulous Joe Biden to the American public, “It’s just so stupid.”

But that’s where we are. In 2024. In what is arguably the most technologically advanced society the planet has ever known. A society that has robots rolling across the cold deserts of Mars and has commenced what may well be the greatest evolutionary leap in the 4.5 billion year record of life on this generally unremarkable rock, namely Artificial Intelligence.

Which brings me to the latest book by one of my go-to guys for educated thoughtfulness, Yuval Noah Harari, the Israeli historian-philosopher., perhaps best known for his 2015 book, “Sapiens.”

This one, titled, “Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI” argues (among many things) that more information is not necessarily a good thing, in terms of contributing to a more rational society. He points out that in the first decades after Gutenberg’s printing press the “knowledge-seeking” world did not consume high-minded scriptures so much as lunatic tomes about witch-hunting and a lot of other stuff that appealed to (very) fundamental fears, superstitions and human’ primordial fascination with simplistic notions and mysticism.

Here’s a particularly good longer-form interview with Harari.

Few things infuriate the Trump base more than suggesting they suffer from some form of inadequately-evolved mental dysfunction, some entirely natural, physiological twist of brain engineering that invariably incites their appeal for … well … superstition, mystical thinking and fear-stoking nonsense. But that may very well be the case.

In evolutionary terms we are not even a blink of an eye further evolved from the alchemy and witch-hunting hysterias of the 16th century. Our amygdalas, left frontal lobes and limbic systems aren’t significantly better tuned for rational thinking today then they were 500 years ago. Maybe in another 1000 years. But not today.

Not with the way, as Harari argues, the algorithms of our nascent social media information industry can so easily inflame our mental processes. Not with how they can overwhelm rational thinking by seducing us with the fears and prejudices that motivate us most and the sense of an enormous community out there that sees the world precisely as we do.

That would be a world where the vice-president … a woman … of non-white heritage .. and a Democrat … from San Francisco … opposing a candidate who says he’s not only a self-made billionaire but God’s avenging angel sent to Earth in an act of retribution … a leader who tells us only he can protect us from 13,000 serial killers running amuck … amid the fury of targeted, liberal-engineered hurricanes aimed at true Americans.

I wish I had a better word for it all. Maybe I could linger longer in my Trump Free reverie. But I don’t. So I can’t.

So I snap out of it, look around, and am left, as I have for a decade now, saying simply and bluntly, “It’s just SO stupid.”