Frogs

 

Baroque / Adriaen van Ostade/ A Fight

Any individual conspiracy theories discusses, out of context,  just about 10% of what got us here.

When you're talking about politics all you're talking about is a conspiracy theory. Because, whether you like it or not, Politics as practiced in the real world in nothing but an interlocking and self-referential conspiracy.  

What we are facing right now is the endpoint of 40 years of mismanagement that we have allowed. You can't blame any single president for where we are right now. every president in the last 40 years has been part of the conspiracy theory.  I really have to look back at Jimmy Carter to come up with a person that I have any respect for.  

We are here and all are complicit.  We are here because of the arc of history and the consequences of our past decisions.  The arc of history has its ups and its downs and we have been on the downslope since the mid 1970’s.  We have watched a procession of presidents and congresses and supreme court decisions put paid to the idea that we could work it out.

The slope of the curve was such that each year more was taken away from the population.  Now don’t get me wrong, there were some that made out pretty well.  The slope was designed to take from the lowest and move the loot upwards.  The higher you were in the food chain of brains and connections, the better you did and the more you thought that this was the way that things should be.  The more that your ticket was punched with credentials and education, the more you thought that things were as they should be.  

But the curve keeps dropping anyway and the number of folks in the group that the system works for just keeps inexorably keeps  dropping every year.  Every year some of the folks that fed from the system get shoved out to join the ranks of “those people”.  The folks who got shoved out early just get angrier and angrier.  

The denial started reacting seriously a couple of years ago.  The first intimation of this was the “learn to code” message.  A joke of the highest caliber.  Every coder anywhere is all about taking a job away from someone else somewhere.  The gig economy and failed startups are the norm and unemployment is a way of life.  Folks who have it good just keep spraying about their Horatio Alger myths about if, “those people” were just more like them, they would have it good too.

Nope, the last forty years have been incremental.  The myth of the frog in the pan of water that the doomsayers use doesn’t really capture the reality.  More and more people are starting to notice that the amount of stuff around is more than adequate for everyone.  It is just that they aren’t welcome to enjoy it.

In the words of William Gibson “The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.”  (the quote was published in the Economist on my birthday in 2003.  When I read it, you could argue that moment was critical for my slide into heresy).    

We aren’t going back to the stone age, only a few will starve to death, but I really think that we have passed the point where the majority are content with the system, things will get worse for more folks and more and more people will lose their faith in a corrupt system that doesn’t have enough money to buy their love.