Remember Obvious Man? What an anachronism! Nothing is obvious any more, at least not to our political, academic, and media elites.

Latest evidence of this is recent trending news of China’s new “catastrophe,” a falling birth rate. Obvious Man would have said, Human population reduction is always good, and everyone would have known why that was obvious. Now it would need to be explained, to wit, a huge amount of human activity, associated with a huge amount of humans, has changed everything about Earth from its climate to its tilt; a lot of the humans are struggling or starving; ecosystems are being decimated to produce more disease-producing non-food.

Instead we have Capitalism Man, who explains that the only imaginable way for humans to organize themselves is to have younger humans donate part of their wages to support older ones, so China has to create some babies who they can quickly grow into wage-workers. To which O. Man might retort, Accepting your premise, though it seems dubious, China could achieve this goal sooner by inviting the underemployed folks willing to travel for work, like the ones who just finished building all the World Cup venues in Qatar, to China where they would instantly contribute to the economy.

If their families were also invited, the solution would be long-term.

About last year’s oil price rise, O. Man might have remarked, What a great motivation to stop using fossil fuels! Even C. Man could have commented on market forces now favoring renewable energy sources, if he hadn’t been too busy making deals with murderous sheiks to resume flow-as-usual. News reports mostly went with sound bites: Pain at the Pump!

O. Man would have had a field day with Covid. Obviously:

• Unless cancer screens are useless, canceling them will result in more cases of cancer. [It did.]
• Working at home is not an option for 90% of American workers, so if folks need to stay home, they will need to be paid to do so. [Zero support for this option, since those controlling the funds were mostly in the 10%.]
• Either cancer or heart disease kills more people per month than Covid, so to reduce unnecessary deaths, we should make the lifestyles choices associated with avoiding those diseases available to everyone. [We have been living with a much higher unnecessary death rate than Covid created for a while with no outrage.]

Jill Lapore’s extraordinary critique of the January 6th Report in this week’s New Yorker includes a characterization of what we once termed the Chattering Classes that gives us a clue as to why no obvious questions are ever asked, or alternate societal organizations explored: “…elite[s] … increasingly living their lives in a Met Gala to Davos to White House Correspondents Dinner world….”

That is, so cocooned in our greed-driven faux meritocracy that they can’t or won’t criticize it.