..ism skism

Somewhere along the way we got Mxyzptlk'd (M-X-Y-Z-P-T-L-K). We moved from admiration to worship, from respect to contempt. The individual who can dunk, throw, and catch it too, who can be “method”, gets worshipped: brand deals, statues, keys to the city, grown adults screaming their name and acting the fool in their presence. The individual who can think gets ridiculed: “nerd,” “egghead,” “must be nice having all that time to read.” We turned one into a religion and the other into a punchline, then acted shocked when talk of banning books becomes action.

Why not? We’ve made it socially expensive to be a thinker. Cheap and easy to just be an empty barrel.

Call it what it actually is: laziness, intellectual laziness, to be nice, wearing the costume of conviction. Thinking is work. Declaring is an easy win, and free. An entire culture optimized for the free option: vibes over verification, a confident shrug standing in for an uncomfortable hour of actually reading the thing.

That laziness doesn’t stay contained to sports, entertainment, or social media. It’s the same muscle, or lack of one, we bring to economics and politics. Thinking through a system takes years, footnotes, and the guts not to fear “complexity.” Declaring a system good or bad takes four seconds, feels like winning, and God forbid, “not complicated.” So that’s the version that wins.

Watch how it played out with “socialism” first. Strip the word down to a verdict, bad, dangerous, a gateway drug to bread lines, and you don’t get a nuanced citizenry weighing tradeoffs, exercising their intellectual muscle. You get the word removed from the table entirely. Blasphemy. Nobody’s allowed to say “actually, that part of the Nordic model works pretty well” without being accused of wanting a gulag. The label did the thinking. The thinking stopped.

Now the same playbook is being applied to capitalism. Reduce it to “bad”, not flawed, not in need of better guardrails, just bad, and that immediately closes the door on a hundred thoughtful alternatives. Including the one alternative we just spent a generation discrediting. So what’s left on the table when both isms have been reduced to slurs? Not reform. Not a blend. Just the one option nobody bothered to rule out, because it doesn’t require a label everyone’s already decided to hate. Centralize it. Hand it to someone who promises to fix it personally. That’s not a solution arrived at by reasoning and logic, what the f... is that? That’s the only door still unlocked because we boarded up the other two out of laziness, one verdict at a time.

That’s the real machinery behind autocracy’s open invitation. Not a hunger for tyranny. A population trained to find thinking embarrassing and declaring through sound-bites effortless, applied to a question too important to answer in four seconds.

There’s a word for what a “system” becomes once you stop inspecting it and start just declaring on it. I’ve mentioned it before. Take a lazy stroll back to my previous work, if you dare.