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They say we live in a post-factual age where we decide things irrationally, purely on our emotional feel, and most of that is decided on line.
We don't study, read or think anymore, or even watch TV like we used to. Teenagers text endlessly - through the night according to a recent report! - and send each other selfies that can get them into trouble, while adults actually find themselves in trouble for what they Tweet or Re-Tweet. The luckless Penny Sparrow springs to mind.
You will have your own view how far all that is true and links up. On one reading of history, things stay pretty much the same the more they change, though in the middle of our global world's unremitting electronic and social media din, you can be forgiven for thinking things have never been worse.
But could it all be just a case of temperament, of whether we as individuals are optimists or pessimists, see the glass as half full or half empty?
In a Business Day article titled Big Questions and a big day is upon us*, Peter Bruce editor-in-chief of BDFM writes: 'How does this all end? .. the war at the centre of our body politic?'
He presents the daunting list of so-called student protest that has burnt universities and their books; the alleged crimes and misdemeanours of President Jacob Zuma; the highly suspect case of fraud brought against finance minister Pravin Gordhan by SA's National Prosecuting Authority, which claims to be 'independent'.
Bruce passes on too the disconcerting rumour that a Russian delegation is in South Africa to push ahead the even more suspect, astronomically expensive nuclear deal Zuma and President Putin are supposed to have signed and sealed between the two countries. He questions how SA's state-owned Eskom, designated to handle it, can be capable of handling it.
And the 'big day that is upon us' is the long-awaited day the Public Protector Thuli Madonsela publishes her report (now declared final) on state capture, with its putative 'damning evidence' of an improper relationship between SA's president and his wealthy friends, the Gupta family. At the last moment, Zuma and his faithful servant Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs Minister Des van Rooyen are both trying to interdict it.
No wonder Bruce's gloomy conclusion is: 'Things have gone too far. The damage is too much. Jacob Zuma has broken the state.'
Yet is this where realism, with its different perspective and line of questioning, must come in?
The conclusion goes too far. The present major crisis has been incubating for years, the wholly foreseeable outcome of more than two decades of one-party government in South Africa.
As the local elections this year show and will turn out perhaps to prove, we are in fact in the throes of the most serious democratic challenge to ANC hegemony to date. It contains opportunities for better times as well as risks of worse. Democracy was and never will be a destination we reach. It is a way of life and, as with life, no one promised it was plain sailing.
US President Barak Obama said in his speech to the National Democratic Convention last month: 'It can be frustrating, this business of democracy. Democracy works, but we've got to want it. Democracy isn't a spectator sport.'
The state of South Africa is not broken. It is broken when the constitution is dumped and we have a Mugabe or Putin or a Julius Malema at the top of a new order. You can argue what is going on is a widespread, enormously promising fight against such a development.
So far at least, it is not the state but the ANC that is breaking. That was always certain to be a huge, noisy event.
Or is that not realism, but optimism?
*October 14 2016
