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On Social Naïveté, AI, and National Suicide … (2025-09-24: The Atlantic)

An Excerpt from “America's Zombie Democracy,” by George Packer 

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Editor's note: From time to time I run across a string of words that strike to my heart. Such was the case last night when I found George Packer's latest missive in The Atlantic. The whole essay is elegant and profoundly relevant to our current reality. But there was one section that made me say, “Wow, I got to share this.” So it's pasted below. His comment on the lack of engagement by Americans in resisting tyranny, and his categorical rejection of the possibility that AI can produce “art” are the twin-cores of what he is saying.
For those of you who don't know Packer, he's considered by many to be the brightest star in the constellation of very bright stars that comprise the writing staff of The Atlantic. When I say “by many,” I heard Jeff Goldberg, the remarkalby good and successful directing editor say Packer was the best he has. So Goldberg himself is a member of that consensus. Undoubtedly, the Atlantic has the best stable of top-notch writers of any publication in history, largely because of Goldberg's leadership, and in good part because of the WaPo diaspora that took place when Bezos decided to corrupt the newspaper beyond the tolerance of most of its good reporters and writers.
WaPo's loss was definitely The Atlantic's gain, and now it is quite possibly the best magazine ever published.
Anyway, here's the excerpt:
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The philosopher John Dewey believed that democracy is not just a system of government but a way of life, one that allows for the fullest realization of every human being’s potential. I was granted more than half a century to benefit from it in the country that practically invented democracy. It makes me heartsick that my children might not have the same chance. What can we do to prevent authoritarianism from becoming our way of life? How can we change the habits of our heart and our society?
Foreigners are baffled that Americans are allowing an authoritarian to rob them of their precious birthright. I’m baffled, too—but I also recognize that we have no experience resisting this kind of government. So we can study what ordinary people living under other modern authoritarian regimes have done. Witness, protest, speak out, and mock in creative ways that catch the popular imagination. Politicians can run for office, lawyers can sue, journalists can investigate, artists can dramatize, scholars can analyze. Americans are already doing these things, but so far none of it has made much difference because the public isn’t engaged, and without the public on their side opponents of authoritarianism are too weak to win.
The greatest temptation and danger is to withdraw into some private world of your own and wait it out.
 
Sam Altman, a co-founder and the CEO of OpenAI, recently appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience. When Rogan floated the idea of an AI president, Altman envisioned a system that would be able to talk to everyone, understand them deeply, and then “optimize for the collective preferences of humanity or of citizens of the U.S. That’s awesome.”
 
I’m suspicious of anyone who suggests being governed by a machine that’s made him a multibillionaire. I remember Mark Zuckerberg’s utopian dream of a platform that would create a more open and connected world, uniting humanity across tribal lines, perhaps even ending wars in the Middle East. The unforeseen damage that social media has caused democracy seems likely to be dwarfed by that of artificial intelligence. It won’t just substitute an algorithm for our ability to make decisions. It’s coming to replace us—to be our therapist, our doctor, our teacher, our friend, our lover, our president. But if one day a chatbot writes a poem better than Frost or Bishop, it will still be worthless—because it’s only the human intention, the search for meaning and effort to reach others, that give a poem its value. There’s no art without us.
 
Chatbots feed on some longing we must have to be relieved of our humanity, as if being human is too hard, too much trouble to have to think and judge for ourselves, to define who we are and what we believe, to suffer the inevitable pain of consciousness and love for another human being. This longing seems especially acute today.
 
So artificial intelligence promises to do what an authoritarian regime does: take our place. They’re two sides of the same coin—one political, the other technological—both forfeitures of human possibility. We’re surrendering our ability to act as free agents of a democracy at the same moment we’re building machines that take away our ability to think and feel.
 

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