Long ago I received my laminated membership card in the exclusive Cassandra Club. That’s a selective group of cynics in jaundice tweeds, who warned that if the masses obeyed elites who were herding them over a cliff like the Gadarene Swine, the outcome would be … mass drownings. But nobody listened, any more than they heeded Cassandra herself, who told the horse-happy Trojans to “beware Greeks bearing gifts.”

At the Cassandra Club, the drinks are always free, but you have to fix them yourself, since the bartenders all fled town when the Mongols smashed through the gates … exactly as you predicted. The architecture is classic — the place looks like ruined Pompeii. We sit on broken marble columns, wag our chins, and consult the thesaurus for new, creative ways of saying “I told you so” to each other. Kind of a drag, if I’m being honest.

An Oligarchy of Dimwits

For years I have been saying that we now live in the weirdest kind of oligarchy, where the rulers aren’t chosen by talent, virtue, creativity, or even something as random as the accident of birth. Instead, we’re micromanaged and tyrannized by pathological joiners, born followers (not leaders), the kind of person whom Aristotle dismissed as “slaves by nature.”