The Age of Authority, now drawing to a close after ten thousand blood-stained years, has also largely been an age of witlessness and fraud. Stripping history of all of its excuses and rationalizations, it is surpassingly difficult to find a single ruler or leader who was capable of finding his own fundament with both hands and a six-cell Maglite.

Examples would (and do) fill encyclopedias, but one sample will suffice: the way that wise, bewhiskered, august politicians in their distinguished frock coats and top hats insisted on sending their sons and grandsons off to savagely murder one another from 1914 to 1918—for no good reason anyone, from Barbara Tuchman to Bob Dylan has ever been able to discover—and thereby set the tone for the next hundred years, an unbroken century of total war and mass slaughter, through their stupid, hypocritical treatment of Germany following that initial conflict.