A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. The adage has been around for years---millennia if we care to trace it back to the garden of Eden and God's dietary advice. To modern people it has always seemed little more than a trite cliché and not particularly relevant--until now, that is--until the Computer Age. The rapidly deteriorating situation we see all around us today could not be more dangerous, and it is a direct result of a little knowledge in the hands of a lot of naïve, ill-informed young people. It also has a name: Technology. And when technology becomes the golden calf, worshipped as a God by naïve, ill-informed young people by the millions, it becomes, for all us, a WMD--a weapon of mass destruction.
Been following the news lately? It is not good. Bombings in public places. Kidnappings, beheadings and burnings alive of people in cages. Drones over Paris and high school football stadiums. Hormone-driven teens from the U.S., Europe and elsewhere chasing their dreams of lust, romance and derring-do into the clutches of alluring, treacherous terrorists. Hackers shutting down critical systems and endangering peoples lives everywhere. All of these things are the direct result of young computer-savvy kids, Millennials mainly, who thought they knew it all when they proceeded to upset all the apple carts and then go merrily on their way. These are the same kids who grew up learning by way of violent video games how to employ their new-found anti-Christ--technology--to wreak mass destruction, and the art of sharing those skills via social media. Now a bit older and more bored, they are being easily lured into playing real-life killing games by predatory, radicalized cult-leaders who know exactly how to manipulate naïve, ill-informed young people.
ISIS and al-Qaida are the two biggest facets of a movement which is metastasizing at an alarming rate. Those groups are opportunistic, moving like blazing wildfire into failed states throughout the Middle East and Africa, or anywhere they see a power vacuum waiting to be filled. But why are these countries "failed"...and who made them that way? Let's review the recent history.
It began in Iraq when our coalition removed that nation's stable government, killing Saddam Hussein and replacing him with...nothing. Then came the so-called Arab Spring when more of those naïve, ill-informed young people, chatting it up with one another on social media, mistakenly concluded that they were ready for freedom and democracy, overthrew the stable governments of Gadhafi, Mubarak, and al-Assad, and replaced them with...nothing. Those power vacuums, now being eagerly filled by bloodthirsty, opportunistic psychopaths pretending to be religious, would never have occurred in the first place had it not been for social media and the dark side of technology. Yet, those who worship at the feet of that golden calf remain in denial, refusing to imagine that their little bit of knowledge could have led us directly into the jaws of the most dangerous situation the world has ever seen.
I have said it before that human civilization has very likely rolled up and over the pinnacle of the waning Renaissance--the Computer Age being the last stage--and is now poised to begin the long, frightening descent toward another Dark Age, where innovation ends and deterioration starts. And we have one thing to blame: a little knowledge and a lot of technological fire-power in the hands of the naïve, ill-informed, bored, and treacherous. That is the real WMD.
It is time to be afraid!
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