degringolade

On the Morning Walk

Off and on day today. Temp and Pressure are pretty steady at 49℉ and 30.3 in/Hg. So that part will be pretty well springlike, but I think that we are going to see some rain today.

I think that there is just too much going on for anyone with any intellectual honesty to come out and tell folks the way that things are going. The reality, at least the way that my simple mind sees it, is that we have reached a level of complexity in a society that is simply not sustainable.

I have, at best, an astonishingly small and insignificant grasp of the events taking place in the world. I have a similar understanding of the issues taking place in the USA. There is just too much happening that depends on everything else. My opinion (and it is just an opinion because I have no say in the matter) is that we are hitting the point where the consequences of past actions and highly regarded beliefs are taking place.

We are at the point where the collective pays the price for the actions of the collective. A common belief is that when the consequences of the actions of the past come due, individuals shouldn’t share in those consequences. Nothing could be further from the truth.

J. and I have had an ongoing discussion for decades now concerning the nature of society. Does society progress in a linear fashion or is it cyclical (J. loves to use a sine function as a metaphor in his dismissal of the concept that ascent is followed by decline).

My feeling is that the discussion is merely one of sampling rate. Us lucky boomers have been in a space and time where everything looked to be linear moving in an upwards direction. But that is just our lifetime. We were living in a “sweet spot” of conditions. It looks to me that those conditions that defined our lives weren't permanent and now that the slope of the curve is changing, we are working out just what we “deserve”. The younglings see the decline and are trying to figure out what side to land on.

There are two ways of looking at the world today. One is that people make a culture and the individual comes first. The other is the the culture is the font of the individual. Both are partly true, but by choosing sides in this argument, one becomes wrong.

I think that at its core, our upcoming decline is baked in because the two sides can’t accept that the other side has about the same amount of “truth” in its beliefs.