Good lord, brain rot is real.

When I was a grad student at a prestigious east coast research university in the eighties I was struck by the nihilism of the intellectual left at the time. Post-structuralism/post-modernism was de rigueur, and truth claims of any sort were imperialistic meta narratives to be dismissed as exercises in power. Empiricism was evil and truth was positionality. Not surprisingly, many of those leftists became neocons.

Four decades later and the war on truth has led to this moment of secular, and religious, faith in ephemera, and a complete disavowal of an empirically accessible real. I’m not surprised the right has embraced this nihilism as empirical reality sits at odds with their world view, and a tendency towards faith has prepared the soil for baseless belief.

Ironically, the last bastion of empiricism on the right is in the investment world where facts matter to the bottom line. You won’t find an actuary doubting climate change, and everything I learned about the Iraq war I learned from the WSJ reporting on the oil industry. Facts mattered.

In the end I have to believe in an empirical truth because my neighbor hit a 500 foot satellite orbiting an asteroid with a rocket at more than 7 million miles from earth. It’s called science.