Seems to me the problem with trying to be a voice of reason is that reason is increasingly being denounced as fantasy and lost beneath the babbling ignorance of the righteous.
Once upon a time a good factual argument would be tested on its merits, and either found held or wanting. And policy - be it for government or industry or social development - would be set in accord with that result.
But in today's greed-is-all oriented society, facts are an inconvenient distraction, and the idea of testing them with any sort of scientific rigour deemed almost laughably pedantic.
So out they go, to be replaced by one mutable product that can be sold to almost anyone: ideology.
This is the operative rationale of the New Right.
Of course to be able to sell nothing as if it were priceless requires a popular mass acceptance as buyer.
Unfortunately, that too has been arranged.
In order to obtain the lowest and commonest of denominators, a number of overarching strategies have been implemented.
First, fracture the education system so that unless you can afford otherwise you are (at best) fitted for a cog-wheel job rather than being taught how to learn and devise your own choices.
Second, mass-medicate with a popular media "culture" that rewards crassness and defies overnight "celebrities", and concentrate your "news" on shock crime and exposes of everyday banality instead of in-depth discussion of anything substantive.
Third, devalue the democratic process by putting up goons and cartoons and never working to a pre-set public agenda while assuming mandates that have no real validity, until anyone with half a brain is driven to opt out in despair.
And underpinning all of these, unravel the carefully woven fabric of the scientific method to allow any throw-away theorem equal if not greater claim - as decided by public perception - than a painstakingly proven-by-experiment regime.
Welcome to the world we now inhabit.
The Right has been running this agenda for at least the past 40 years and, abetted by the universal reach of technology, has successfully managed to both dumb down and disenfranchise a probable majority of the world's population - certainly of the "developed" world.
This works to retain them in actual power because, contrary to popular misconception that it is the "average working man" (assumed left-wing) who fills this niche, most conservative voters are, to put it bluntly, stupid.
I've always known this, but you don't have to take just my word for it. A recent Canadian large-group study of citizens of the UK and US has shown that, overall, conservatives have a below-average IQ and are more racist, sexist, homophobic, and otherwise irrationally prejudiced than their more liberal counterparts.
Obvious? Well, yes. But nice to have it formalised as fact, all the same.
The study shows people with lower intelligence are drawn to conservatism for its perceived coherence and order and because it emphasises the maintenance of the status quo.
But the most fascinating and important point it highlights is that prejudice is not inherent in the cognitively-challenged but arises from exposure to those "attractions" of the Right to which sub-par intelligence is drawn.
Which is why, to quote former Republican ideologue David Frum, we are now witnessing a "shift to ever more extreme, ever more fantasy-based ideology" which has "ominous real-world consequences".
Or as my peer on The Guardian, George Monbiot, dryly observes, "conservative strategists have discovered that there is no pool so shallow that several million people won't drown in it".
Monbiot argues that the Left is failing to counter this by being too polite - too reasoned, when reason is what has been (ostensibly) discredited.
Trouble is, we're caught in a Catch-22.
If we stay polite, we'll be subsumed by the creationist climate-deniers for whom reason is anathema; if we become more aggressive, we'll face a barrage of damning invective for having proved ourselves radical.
The one hope - though not a healthy one - is that those on top of this right-wing jack-up, who (arguably) are intelligent, have created a vicious tiger and are barely managing to hold onto its tail.
If the tiger gets loose - possibly as soon as the next US Presidential election - all bets will be off.
Personally I can't decide whether to wish for or fear that.
That's the right of it.