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This started in another thread, but I composed this and then decided that this reply really belonged in Rant and Rave, so here it is. Sorry for the lack of a link back to the article, but it disappeared from my search results after I had read it.
Whether it is global warming, gross environmental contamination, natural resources inadequate to our desires, the population bomb, financial fraud on a planetary scale, repeating bubble - collapse - bubble, grossly unbalanced wealth distribution, genocide, automation, globalization, or the ascendance of terror as a means of political expression, mankind is getting progressively less competent in dealing with the changes it is facing. Future Shock did a good job at alerting us to the impending problem, but instead of taking its warnings to heart, mankind decided to "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead". While 144 years ago in a naval battle, that constituted strategic genius, this time in a different context, mankind now finds itself in the midst of a swarm of torpedoes impacting and blowing up both frequently and disastrously. The torpedoes can no longer be ignored, but in its ill-equipped psyche, mankind can only react, not plan, and the reaction is fear and greed, not strategy and cooperation.
Man's culture is increasingly unable to cope with the magnitude and rate of changes that the world is imposing. Tools that were once more adequate to the job, such as science, mathematics, philosophy, ethics, morality, psychology, and sociology, are now conspicuous in their absence from the public dialogue. Intellectual pursuits that once promised solutions are now rejected out of hand as elitist. Populists with their own agendas substitute pseudoscience for science and promise painless solutions to painful problems. Trusted institutions have collapsed, burying their ethics in stinking piles and now greed, ideology, and fear prevail. For each issue, the power whose ox is being gored, appeals to rampant institutional distrust to fight progress. Thus, well reasoned solutions become the spawn of eco-totalitarians while ill conceived compromises are adopted to maximize pain, minimize progress, and shift the burden to the powerless and the profits to the powerful. While maybe in the past the rich and powerful better concealed their excess, now they engage in greed proudly and openly, challenging the rest of humanity to stop them. Media learned the rules of 1984 very well and the financial sector adapted the strategies in Animal Farm to what was once a more or less free system. Widespread illusory wealth concealed the first halting steps into The Lord of the Flies and now it is clear that mankind has not the slightest inkling of how they might escape the island.
I often think that the '60s-'70s were the last time that powerful ideas were allowed by the powers that be. The problems of the era - Future Shock, Silent Spring, The Population Bomb, Peak Oil, even Global Warming have now turned from books and research into monsters that fed on our greed, ignorance, and lack of foresight for decades. Now well fed and full grown, the monsters are ready to storm the planet and mankind will pay the price. Of course, nobody could have foreseen the way that unrestrained financial fraud and greed would act as an enabler, taking over the government while also bringing untold destruction to the economy, but that is just frosting on the decades old cake recipe.
But on the bright side, in the scrapheap that was once our economy, newscasters are finding shiny little objects like the second derivative going positive. They might scarcely comprehend what they find but they know they should hold it up to be worshiped by the hopeful.
I remember my teacher making us watch this documentary back in the 70s when I was a grade school kid. Kind of lame by today's standards, but even then people saw that life was getting ever more complex at an exponentially increasing rate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock
Man's culture is increasingly unable to cope with the magnitude and rate of changes that the world is imposing. Tools that were once more adequate to the job, such as science, mathematics, philosophy, ethics, morality, psychology, and sociology, are now conspicuous in their absence from the public dialogue. Intellectual pursuits that once promised solutions are now rejected out of hand as elitist. Populists with their own agendas substitute pseudoscience for science and promise painless solutions to painful problems. Trusted institutions have collapsed, burying their ethics in stinking piles and now greed, ideology, and fear prevail. For each issue, the power whose ox is being gored, appeals to rampant institutional distrust to fight progress. Thus, well reasoned solutions become the spawn of eco-totalitarians while ill conceived compromises are adopted to maximize pain, minimize progress, and shift the burden to the powerless and the profits to the powerful. While maybe in the past the rich and powerful better concealed their excess, now they engage in greed proudly and openly, challenging the rest of humanity to stop them. Media learned the rules of 1984 very well and the financial sector adapted the strategies in Animal Farm to what was once a more or less free system. Widespread illusory wealth concealed the first halting steps into The Lord of the Flies and now it is clear that mankind has not the slightest inkling of how they might escape the island.
I often think that the '60s-'70s were the last time that powerful ideas were allowed by the powers that be. The problems of the era - Future Shock, Silent Spring, The Population Bomb, Peak Oil, even Global Warming have now turned from books and research into monsters that fed on our greed, ignorance, and lack of foresight for decades. Now well fed and full grown, the monsters are ready to storm the planet and mankind will pay the price. Of course, nobody could have foreseen the way that unrestrained financial fraud and greed would act as an enabler, taking over the government while also bringing untold destruction to the economy, but that is just frosting on the decades old cake recipe.
But on the bright side, in the scrapheap that was once our economy, newscasters are finding shiny little objects like the second derivative going positive. They might scarcely comprehend what they find but they know they should hold it up to be worshiped by the hopeful.
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