"Don't let your imagination be crushed by life as a whole. Don't try to picture everything bad that could possibly happen. Stick with the situation at hand, and ask, "Why is this so unbearable? Why can't I endure it? You'll be embarrassed to answer. Then remind yourself that the past and future have no power over you. Only the present - and even that can be minimized." - Marcus Aurelius
I find great solace in the Stoic quote above, and I chose it specifically for this post, which is a bit on the depressing side. It's also a bit long-winded.
From Wikipedia:
Cognitive Dissonance: In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance occurs when a person holds contradictory beliefs, ideas or values, and is typically experienced as psychological distress when they participate in an action that goes against one or more of them. According to this theory, when two actions or ideas are not psychologically consistent with each other, people do all in their power to change them until they become consistent.
I've been reading articles and books recently about the glowing future that we were led to expect back in the day. There is a stunning difference (a "dissonance" one might even say) between what was presented then, and what we've ended up with. The books are "Cadillac Desert" by Marc Reisner, and "The Long Descent" by John Michael Greer. I've also taken the liberty of distilling a few thoughts from commenters at JMG's blog, Ecosophia.
"Cadillac Desert" discusses water policy in the US West, which was initially based on an abundance of water, with the goal of using that water to settle and farm the west. The book spells out how those early policies now prevent practical water policies today - even in the face of multi-year droughts. Due to bureaucratic inertia, entitled early water rights holders, and legacy laws, these harmful and unbelievably wasteful water policies will continue until the water is gone.
"The Long Descent" by John Michael Greer is incredibly entertaining and thought-provoking. The author makes the claim and provides many examples of US society being in the midst of a decades-long decline. He makes the compelling case that decline is a *process*, not an event. This or that might get a little better - briefly, but the course in general is always gradually downwards.
Examples of the *process* of decline are many. We have schools with leaking roofs that cannot be repaired, when at some previous point in time, we had more than enough money to build the school - including a brand-new roof. There are many other examples, but you get the point - failure to maintain a school roof would have been unacceptable in the not too distant past, but now such things are fairly common.
The goal of the US professional and managerial class appears to have altered course significantly within my lifetime. At one time the goal was once to guide the country (and maybe the world) in an always better direction. Now, the goal has shifted to managing/overseeing a declining quality of life and the slow decay of our infrastructure.
Below: A concept car from the late 1950's. Nobody believes this concept car was intended to become a production model, but it shows out-of-the-box thinking and the notion that the future will be better than today is. Quaint concept.
Instead of that car, you got this one, below. The complexity is much greater than a family car from the 1950's - so complex that you likely can't even perform your own repairs. Yeah, it gets better mileage, pollutes less and is quite a bit more safe. But it's not a hover-car, and the principles are no different than those of a Model T built 100 years ago.
Below: Moonbase Alpha, from the TV series "Space:1999" 
Do you remember the moonbase we inhabited in 1999? Me either. I remember everyone nervously awaiting the over-blown Y2K software glitches that were going to end civilization as we know it.
Predictions from the 1950's, when science and engineering were so beneficial to society, are almost painful in their naivete. The comparison between the assumption of continued progress and what we actually have are laughable. Donald Fagen from Steely Dan wrote a sarcastic song about the failure of the future to live up to the hype in 1981 called IGY:
Lyrics to the above song:
The future has now arrived. We don't have the scene below. Instead of this:Standing tough under stars and stripes
We can tell
This dream's in sight
You've got to admit it
At this point in time that it's clear
The future looks bright
On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
Well by seventy-six we'll be A.O.K.
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
Get your ticket to that wheel in space
While there's time
The fix is in
You'll be a witness to that game of chance in the sky
You know we've go to win
Here at home we'll play in the city
Powered by the sun
Perfect weather for a streamlined world
There'll be spandex jackets one for everyone
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
(More leisure for artists everywhere)
A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We'll be clean when their work is done
We'll be eternally free yes and eternally young
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free.....
We have this: (That's where Packard automobiles were once built, by the way)
Who knew we would find ourselves living in a post-apocalyptic video game? Below, a screenshot from the "Fallout" video game series. The condition of the buildings in the game is much better than reality...
Maybe the cognitive dissonance caused by expectations vs reality helps to explain the chart below:
"As for (Jetson's) saucers landing on the manicured lawn in California weather conditions, families with 2.5 kids, a dog, and a lawnmower... Who could have predicted in 1955 that Mom would be a closeted ex-Marine, Sis would sport nose-rings, purple spandex butt-huggies and green hair, while Junior wallows in mountains of porn as he wavers between pot, meth, and Oxycontin.
Dad found his "Good Steady Job" disappearing, or his wages staying the same while every buy-able object jumped in price by several orders of magnitude. He had to compete not just among other White Men of His Class who Follow the Rules, but with all the sexes, colors, and cultures of humanity, all hungry for a juicy piece of the American Pie.
And there was this commenter, probably more on point.
"I was born soon after the end of WW2, and grew up with this kind of narrative. What's important to understand though, is that it was primarily a symbolic narrative, not necessarily a serious set of predictions. It was the mythology, if you like, of a time when science was manifestly being used to improve the lives of ordinary people, and when it was seen as a force for good, if properly controlled. For a generation after WW2, science and technology was, indeed, responsible for an unparalleled improvement in the conditions of life for ordinary westerners.
Mundane technologies like hot running water, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners and washing machines freed people from domestic drudgery: when I was small my mother and grandmother spent all day every Monday washing and drying the family's clothes by hand. In those days, monsters called Smallpox and Polio still stalked the land, but they were conquered by vaccination and improved health-care and sanitation. In Europe, at least, public transport, power distribution and other infrastructure was rebuilt and modernised, technical and scientific training was heavily promoted, and the scientists became popular heroes because they were seen as working to improve the lives of ordinary people. Even nuclear power was essentially part of the same argument. It promised an end to the pollution-filled air, filthy coal fires in houses, deadly urban fogs, and dangerous and unpleasant jobs in mining.
The future would be as much clean power as you could want, effectively free, provided by a highly-trained specialists. Television when it started had an enormous educational impact on ordinary peoples' lives. I still remember the shock of watching David Attenborough's Zoo Quest programmes on a black and white TV. Even something as mundane as the record player and the 33rpm long-player brought previously unreachable cultural goods to ordinary people. Flying cars, to the extent that they were ever taken seriously, were a symbol of the idea that technology would continue to be developed and employed for the good of ordinary people.
What changed, of course, was not technology but politics. In most western countries, utilities passed into private hands, spending on R and D was cut, and technology companies were sold off or just closed down. Rent-seeking, through looking around for ways of making a quick profit from the inventions of the past, became the order of the day. Technology was only interesting as a way of making a quick fortune or for purposes of surveillance and marketing. Technology companies, with a few exceptions, gave up trying to improve the lives of ordinary people decades ago, and now only seek to exploit them.
The Internet - born in the last days of optimism about the possible uses of technology - turned into a nightmare of surveillance and exploitation, because that was where the money was. (Indeed, the open technologies of the Internet simply could not be developed today). As a result, and for the first time since perhaps the eighteenth century, people now increasingly assume that the future will be worse than the past. I would suspect that, for anyone born after about 1970, this is simply the story of their life.
The result is a kind of cultural pessimism - the "end of the future" discussed by critics like Franco Berardi and Mark Fisher, where there is nothing to look forward to, except for the ironic recycling of the history, culture and technology of the past to make money.
The facile explanation - technology over-promised and didn't deliver - is, like all such explanations, partly true. But it's only a small part of the answer. The political cancellation of the future at the expense of strip-mining the past is at the heart of it. I don't know that my generation ever really thought there would be flying cars, but we did have a fundamentally optimistic view of the continued political will to use technology to make our lives better."
"And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
"When I was young I was poor. But after years of hard, honest,
painstaking work I am no longer young." - Unknown. This is the true
nature of the world we inhabit.
There you have it. Things are *not* going to get better, and the world is in a state of semi-managed decline and neglect. That's because the people who have enough juice to change the world don't much care. Here we have a billionaire celebrity interviewing two millionaire Royals about how oppressed they are. How will things get better for ordinary working folks if this is how the wealthy and powerful choose to see themselves and to behave? Joel Osteen ought to be ashamed of his lifestyle, but he ain't.
Is there no higher calling for these folks? This is so pathetic. I'm not even picking on them specifically - just using them as an example of powerful and wealthy people who are too self-absorbed to use their position to improve the lives of those less fortunate. Mother Teresa is dead, and the wealthy (Bezos, Gates, Buffett, Congress) are too narcissistic to show more than a passing concern about the downtrodden. They are too busy with their mega yacht dick-wagging contests.
So yeah, I guess the country is dealing with a bit of Cognitive Dissonance. Maybe that's a partial explanation of why there's so much angst in our society these days. This golden future we are living in hasn't even managed to hang on to what we took for granted in the past.
1 comment:
Technology hasn't progressed as quickly as we were expecting because those companies learned they can go much slower with the progress and make more money. All boils down to greed, and basically "follow the money". Apparently/obviously enough isn't yet and never will be enough, for all those you mentioned who are billionaires, and of course congress.
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