(no subject)

I think that the most natural thing in the world is for an old man to explain how things are all bad and the world in going to hell in a handbasket.  In that vein, I would like to engage in a spot of pattern recognition and try to explain instead how things are getting poised for change and how the vast majority of folks will get through things.

First of all, I can't see anything ahead of us that lends me the idea that extinction of the peculiar apeling that we have named homo sapiens is going be happening.  Or that the world is going to become uninhabitable in the near (<250,000 rotations around the sun) future.  Granted, there might be a lot fewer of us in a century or so in the future, but the facts of the matter is that there were a lot fewer of us a century ago, so that pencils out just fine.  Best information that I can access is that a century ago, the world population was right around two billion.  Since we are currently past eight billion, it seems likely that a trimback is in order.

But the trimback is not the subject that I wish to discuss in this bit of pattern recognition.  I think that I want to discuss education and the roles that it prepares people to be in the world.  The education here in the empire, due to our wealth and relative security has made a choice to

I have a hunch that the real problem is the rise of the cult of individual man.  For some reason, we have decided to simply forget the roles and the system that we live in and focus on the primacy, nay holiness, of individual freedom and fulfillment of desires.  We seem to only pay lip service to the idea that the individual is a part of a greater society.   Now, I am not advocating a return to systems of the past.  The churches that got us to the mess that we are in now and the corporations that are making every attempt to enslave us aren't the answer.  But we are going to have to spend the next century or so coming up with a system where the rights of the individual and the rights of the society are back in a reasonable balance.

Right now, things are a mess and there isn't enough time and/or consensus for me to have a look at even the options that will be finalists in this existential debate.  My great grandchildren might have a look at the future, but I am content with my lot this ninth of Ventose, day of the Goat Willow, of the year 227.  I wonder what the children of the Jacobins and the heirs of the Cultural Revolution will reach their normal expansion and begin the contraction.