It is entirely possible that the civilization I thought we were building will go away after November. Not a very cheerful thought, but we are moving through tectonic events much like the world faced in 1913. World War I shattered the foundations of what was then accepted as The Way Things Are. I will not quibble here about whether Word War II was a separate war or simply a continuation of the first. There are wars in the past that, if examined close enough, reveal themselves to be continuations rather than wholly their own catastrophes, so it would not be the first time. The immediate aftershocks of WWI were the collapse of accepted monarchies and a global depression that allowed for sweeping changes to expectations across the board. It may have taken the better part of the next fifty or sixty years for those changes to manifest, but 1919 was the signal. A decade later, after all the rearrangements of colonial assumptions, emergent republics, and the formation of new countries out of old empires (which experienced a coda after 1945) international finance nearly collapsed. Nothing, as they say, was ever the same again.
It seems to be such a time again.
Even assuming we scrape by without handing all the reins of power over to venal autocrats and narcissistic sociopaths, quite a lot will be different. The assumptions going forward will be different. Again, it might be decades before everything manifests, but that signal changes will have been rung.
The question then is, how shall we live with it all?
I’m tired, I don’t mind admitting. Emotionally exhausted. I’ve been watching as people all over the globe basically lose their minds over things which ought to be simple, if not for the money involved. And by that I mean the principle owners of capital, who seem at present to hold all the cards, all because they still hunger for slaves.
A bit hyperbolic, perhaps, but not by much. When you consider that all their effort is in opposition to equality movements and the funding of safety nets, it may not be so farfetched. Despite the advances in social philosophy, the “business interests” in the world generally still do not seem to divorce themselves from trying at every turn to reduce people to that status of parts. Employees, basically, are always Costs. Reducing costs means cutting people out of the equations of profit. We can’t seem to get past that. Business-think wants to reduce people in aggregate to a category—Labor—and treat it like any other material resource. Until we find some way to change that…
I will not hold my breath. But the question remains, how shall we live in the aftermath of yet another massive change?
The problems…many are the same we have always faced, but we have a few new ones added on to complicate matters. Despite attempts to recharacterize it, global warming is a fact. And, whether we like it or not, a good deal of it is driven by human action. We cannot wish it away, try as some people might. Tied to that is population growth, which Nature itself may take care of, in ways we will not appreciate. We face this at a time when people have access to information at an unprecedented level, much of it bogus, which gives them too often a false sense of entitlement to act in ways counter to reality. Urged on, of course, by those who think they can squeeze a profit out of the chaos.
None of these problems are new, but the degree and reach of them has escalated, and we often feel the crunch of too little time to deal with any of it. We might call this the Age of Acceleration.
Defining the problem helps. But it remains a problem and we are still left with the task of dealing with what comes next.
My mother is 91. She has been watching the last several years with sadness and surprise, having never expected her fellow citizens, at least not in such numbers, to be so short-sighted and, frankly, stupid. That’s the word she used, stupid. But she has gotten to a point where she says she probably won’t live to see the final phase of all this, and while she does not say it as if she wishes it to be true, it does give her the emotional and mental space to face it with a degree of calm. A calm I, with more years ahead of me, do not feel.
Of course, it may turn out well. Not immediately. Much has been broken. After all, what was once called the Liberal Consensus has suffered tremendous blows, and while it may not be dead, it will certainly never be the same. I know there are those who would hear those words—Liberal Consensus—and think, “good riddance.” I can’t help but feel much as my mother does. I do not believe for a minute they know what it is they condemn. They are filled with the mind-killing rage of resentment. We have been seeing it lately in those who supported what has been happening now realizing that it will fall on them, too, and a more revealing outcome I cannot imagine, albeit a sad one.
Whatever the source, we will still be left with the problems of moving forward.
I am, as I said, tired. It has become difficult for me to muster the energy to write about these things, and at times I find the same enervation poisoning my ability to write fiction. I will be 72 in a few weeks and the country I thought we were building has been crippled, possibly irreparably. The examples could run to many pages and I’m sad enough. It is as if we are being occupied, but we’re doing it ourselves. How does one deal with an occupation from within?
One of the biggest disappointments (for me, at least) has been to watch the promise of the dreams I grew up with become nightmares. AI, for instance. I could name any number of authors who wrote about it presenting a marvelous future where AI was used to our benefit, to aid us in our quest for better. But now that we are on the cusp of having it, we find it corrupted because we sense the abuse to which it will be put because we know the inclinations of the people who will control it. We have watched education be turned into a financial cage because instead of it being offered as a basic right, it is one more credit scam which hobbles more than frees, not to mention the revision wars we’ve been suffering. And of course the constant denial of accepted rights to sustenance—housing, food, education, medicine—not because it cannot be delivered but because delivering it would diminish someone’s profit margin. The constant battle of taxes is nothing more than an admission that we are collectively unable or unwilling to say no to those who believe private privilege is more important than general welfare.
November is coming. I have no idea how it will turn out. I have preferences, but I have lost confidence in the plebiscite. The social reforms of the New Deal era happened because the calamity of the Great Depression was so bad, government could not but act. Do we have to experience a similarly dismal calamity in order to do what, apparently, most of us want but because of the unending noise of fear-mongering we’re afraid to enact? Anyway, I would like to be surprised after November. Again, I’m not holding my breath.
I’m tired. I’ll only say, it was a nice future when we dreamed it.
The Distal Muse
What Next
It is entirely possible that the civilization I thought we were building will go away after November. Not a very cheerful thought, but we are moving through tectonic events much like the world faced in 1913. World War I shattered the foundations of what was then accepted as The Way Things Are. I will not quibble here about whether Word War II was a separate war or simply a continuation of the first. There are wars in the past that, if examined close enough, reveal themselves to be continuations rather than wholly their own catastrophes, so it would not be the first time. The immediate aftershocks of WWI were the collapse of accepted monarchies and a global depression that allowed for sweeping changes to expectations across the board. It may have taken the better part of the next fifty or sixty years for those changes to manifest, but 1919 was the signal. A decade later, after all the rearrangements of colonial assumptions, emergent republics, and the formation of new countries out of old empires (which experienced a coda after 1945) international finance nearly collapsed. Nothing, as they say, was ever the same again.
It seems to be such a time again.
Even assuming we scrape by without handing all the reins of power over to venal autocrats and narcissistic sociopaths, quite a lot will be different. The assumptions going forward will be different. Again, it might be decades before everything manifests, but that signal changes will have been rung.
The question then is, how shall we live with it all?
I’m tired, I don’t mind admitting. Emotionally exhausted. I’ve been watching as people all over the globe basically lose their minds over things which ought to be simple, if not for the money involved. And by that I mean the principle owners of capital, who seem at present to hold all the cards, all because they still hunger for slaves.
A bit hyperbolic, perhaps, but not by much. When you consider that all their effort is in opposition to equality movements and the funding of safety nets, it may not be so farfetched. Despite the advances in social philosophy, the “business interests” in the world generally still do not seem to divorce themselves from trying at every turn to reduce people to that status of parts. Employees, basically, are always Costs. Reducing costs means cutting people out of the equations of profit. We can’t seem to get past that. Business-think wants to reduce people in aggregate to a category—Labor—and treat it like any other material resource. Until we find some way to change that…
I will not hold my breath. But the question remains, how shall we live in the aftermath of yet another massive change?
The problems…many are the same we have always faced, but we have a few new ones added on to complicate matters. Despite attempts to recharacterize it, global warming is a fact. And, whether we like it or not, a good deal of it is driven by human action. We cannot wish it away, try as some people might. Tied to that is population growth, which Nature itself may take care of, in ways we will not appreciate. We face this at a time when people have access to information at an unprecedented level, much of it bogus, which gives them too often a false sense of entitlement to act in ways counter to reality. Urged on, of course, by those who think they can squeeze a profit out of the chaos.
None of these problems are new, but the degree and reach of them has escalated, and we often feel the crunch of too little time to deal with any of it. We might call this the Age of Acceleration.
Defining the problem helps. But it remains a problem and we are still left with the task of dealing with what comes next.
My mother is 91. She has been watching the last several years with sadness and surprise, having never expected her fellow citizens, at least not in such numbers, to be so short-sighted and, frankly, stupid. That’s the word she used, stupid. But she has gotten to a point where she says she probably won’t live to see the final phase of all this, and while she does not say it as if she wishes it to be true, it does give her the emotional and mental space to face it with a degree of calm. A calm I, with more years ahead of me, do not feel.
Of course, it may turn out well. Not immediately. Much has been broken. After all, what was once called the Liberal Consensus has suffered tremendous blows, and while it may not be dead, it will certainly never be the same. I know there are those who would hear those words—Liberal Consensus—and think, “good riddance.” I can’t help but feel much as my mother does. I do not believe for a minute they know what it is they condemn. They are filled with the mind-killing rage of resentment. We have been seeing it lately in those who supported what has been happening now realizing that it will fall on them, too, and a more revealing outcome I cannot imagine, albeit a sad one.
Whatever the source, we will still be left with the problems of moving forward.
I am, as I said, tired. It has become difficult for me to muster the energy to write about these things, and at times I find the same enervation poisoning my ability to write fiction. I will be 72 in a few weeks and the country I thought we were building has been crippled, possibly irreparably. The examples could run to many pages and I’m sad enough. It is as if we are being occupied, but we’re doing it ourselves. How does one deal with an occupation from within?
One of the biggest disappointments (for me, at least) has been to watch the promise of the dreams I grew up with become nightmares. AI, for instance. I could name any number of authors who wrote about it presenting a marvelous future where AI was used to our benefit, to aid us in our quest for better. But now that we are on the cusp of having it, we find it corrupted because we sense the abuse to which it will be put because we know the inclinations of the people who will control it. We have watched education be turned into a financial cage because instead of it being offered as a basic right, it is one more credit scam which hobbles more than frees, not to mention the revision wars we’ve been suffering. And of course the constant denial of accepted rights to sustenance—housing, food, education, medicine—not because it cannot be delivered but because delivering it would diminish someone’s profit margin. The constant battle of taxes is nothing more than an admission that we are collectively unable or unwilling to say no to those who believe private privilege is more important than general welfare.
November is coming. I have no idea how it will turn out. I have preferences, but I have lost confidence in the plebiscite. The social reforms of the New Deal era happened because the calamity of the Great Depression was so bad, government could not but act. Do we have to experience a similarly dismal calamity in order to do what, apparently, most of us want but because of the unending noise of fear-mongering we’re afraid to enact? Anyway, I would like to be surprised after November. Again, I’m not holding my breath.
I’m tired. I’ll only say, it was a nice future when we dreamed it.
I wish us all luck.
Share this:
Like this:
Related