Since when did disruption become a good thing? In days past, if a proper Victorian hostess had her garden party disrupted by a swarm of bees (or anything else), she would have complained mightily. Nowadays, people proclaim themselves “disrupters” and expect to be applauded.

How did this happen?

Well, first of all, disruption has always been the go-to tactic for some groups. Children love to be disruptive. And invading hordes (Visigoths, Huns, and more recently terrorists) have all used it to their advantage.

And when you think about it, disruption is good for so many things. It’s good for causing a distraction (and making a quick getaway). It’s also good for drawing people’s attention (blow something up and you’ll be noticed). And more generally, breaking the rules is simply fun (as both children and invading hordes will tell you).

And it’s also good for one other group: speculators.

My, what an old-fashioned word! Speculation calls up images of Dickensian swindlers, but it simply means betting on short term swings in the stock market (arbitrageur is another fancy word for it). Today, if you say, oh… “I’m going to bomb Iran,” and you happen to be the President of the United States, you can make some stocks go up (oil, Treasuries) and others go down (almost everything else). Tomorrow if you say, “Actually, I’m NOT going to bomb Iran,” those same stocks will move in the opposite direction.

Oh, how I wish we were just being ruled by speculators! Life would be so simple. We’d be whipsawed between news bulletins, and our 401Ks wouldn’t be worth shit, but we’d know the people manipulating us were simply animated by good, old-fashioned GREED.

I don’t know about you, but that would give me a lot of peace of mind.

If all the disrupters just wanted to get rich (or richer) I could relax and say, well, they may be bankrupting me, but at least they’re operating by some sort of logic. Today, however, our disrupters seem intent on merely promoting chaos, under the belief that this will somehow give birth to new ideas and fresh perspectives.

How this is supposed to happen isn’t exactly clear, but who cares? If you “disrupt” the world’s health care system, or the world’s economic system, or the world’s balance of power, it will somehow usher in a brand-new shining day of innovation. People will start “thinking outside the box” and “shifting their paradigms”…that is until they catch the measles or they starve because there’s no fertilizer for agriculture or immigrants to pick their crops, or there’s no money to pay the TSA agents and no more fuel to fly the planes and they’re trapped wherever they are, and there’s no gasoline to power the trains and trucks and no goods can be shipped to market, or the temperature hits 110 degrees and the power grid fails, and some people despair and beg their God to annihilate you as the Great Satan, even if they end up being annihilated at the same time.

Now we are ruled by a King Disrupter, a child playing with toys until they break, or until he gets bored with them. And we can’t even count on his own greed and self-interest anymore, because after a point disruption leads to one thing: nihilism.

Nihilism: the philosophical viewpoint that rejects generally accepted or fundamental aspects of human existence, such as objective truth, knowledge, morality, values, or meaning. Derived from the Latin nihil (“nothing”) it posits that life has no meaning.

I don’t think we’re there yet, but we’re close. There’s still one distinction to be drawn between a disrupter and a nihilist, and that’s that a disrupter is essentially childish, smashing his own toys, while a nihilist is world-weary, a bored adult, exhausted and cynical.

Both those things are awful, but nihilism sounds worse. I hope to God we don’t have a nihilist in charge yet.

XXX,

Adrienne V. Parks