I think Glenn Reynolds argued that the biggest destabilizing factor in the world today is the dysfunctional political class in the West. They think funny. For example, the biggest problem in the world today, according to Noam Chomsky, is that the Republican Party refuses to take global warming seriously. “You could almost interpret it a kind of a death knell for the species.”

This is a message from a self-referential, heremetically sealed universe. It’s an insane universe that thinks it is perfectly rational.

The dysfunction makes it very difficult for the West to focus analysis and resources on anything of importance. The current political elite doesn’t solve anything. Like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, the spend the live-long day typing “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”. Over and over. They don’t really modify reality; they just interpret it or sweep inconvenient parts under the carpet.

What is worse, we are all, to one degree or the other, products of the same system which created the current elite. To a large extent we are going to have to rediscover a whole lot of things from first principles.

Whether Boehner can contribute to fixing the problem depends on two independent variables. How much of a deviant he is from the norm and what kind of resonance he can find in the outer margins of the system. The main driver of change in next few years will be reality itself as it shakes apart the little dream world of Chomsky and his ilk. But early adopters of change — the guys who see what is wrong and are willing to accept that they’re going to have to pick up the pies — are going to prove crucial.

I believe that nobody can cause the changes necessary to fix the system. About the best we can hope for is the development of a kind of awareness among the political class that the changes their ability to see what is happening and therefore create in them a kind of ability to manage developments to a degree.

A lot of the stuff coming down the pipe, I think, is out of our hands. It’s inertia driven by the system that we haven’t got the energy to completely deflect. What is in our hands is the ability to purposefully react to events from an understanding of their nature. That is, to introduce some change in trajectory that with any luck, will eventually effect a course change.