Rupert Darwall – författare

Age of Error examines the incompatibility between the obsession of Western elites with allegedly catastrophic climate change and net zero and the West's capacity to safely navigate a 21st century world riven by geopolitical tensions and the rise of China as a great power to rival the United States. Since the trauma of the 2008 financial crisis, Western democracies morphed into technocracies. Elected politicians lost legitimacy and sought to regain political authority by co-opting experts - central bankers, who failed to revive stagnant economies with ultra-low interest rates; public health experts, who gave politicians cover to impose draconian lockdowns during the Covid pandemic; and climate scientists to justify economically disastrous and socially divisive net zero energy policies when the Global South, including China, powers ahead with carbonizing their economies. A necessary accompaniment to dependence on experts is the growth of what's become known as the censorship industrial complex and the aggressive silencing of dissent, especially with respect to pandemic policies and climate change.The book provides a narrative account that takes the reader through the years 2006-2009, which form the gateway of the age of error in which we now live. It concludes by suggesting that the age of error will either be followed by a new age of realism or an age of catastrophe and the disintegration of the West to earn the epitaph: "The West's undoing was its own doing."