From a news standpoint I’ve been out of the loop for a few days. This morning while reading up on the latest I asked myself the question.
What’s the matter with us as a species?
There are a number of high profile court cases going on and the pandemic controversy and drama. Then there the floods in BC where some are critical of government. Throw in some are upset with the Merry Christmas Happy Holiday thing and I swear some wake up looking for a problem.
Then it struck me, there is nothing wrong with the world. The problem is our personal level of inability to adapt to the world around us.
If you go back in time the saying has been the same “The world has gone nuts.” The reason it doesn’t get worse or better is because we are successful on the sliding scale of the Peter Principal. There is a book about this written by Lawrence J. Peter.
The gist of it is ”People in a hierarchy rise to the level of respective incompetence.” how does this effect the collective outcome of progress in society in my opinion? Individually no matter how forward thinking we are, we resist some level of change.
The problem is there are thousands of things that need change. We tend to stop at the one thing we are going to draw a line in the sand. Everyone’s line in the sand is different therefore we tend to say if it ain’t broke don’t fix it……. about the other things.
Lets look at the flood situation in BC. At the turn of the last century a lake was drained to create farmland. It returned to being an unwanted lake. We have laws saying we cannot build on a flood plain. So instead of calling it a lake or flood plain we call it Sumas Prairie …….drain the lake spend hundreds of millions on dikes and spillways – drain the lake and rebuild on a flood plain.
COVID is another controversy that’s said to divide us. Well over the last century or so we had the same controversy, Polio and other outbreaks 1881 Pasteur vaccine for anthrax, Pasteur came with a rabies vaccine In 1914 there was a whooping cough vaccine. In 1926 a diphtheria vaccine there are a host of vaccines for everything from polio to smallpox. Many of them controversial. One of the worst pandemics was the Spanish Flu that infected 500 million people and killed 50 million world wide,
Interesting notes to be aware of. There never was a vaccine and it never died out. It became a standard strain of the h1n1 infectious flu’s.
As for court cases, scandals, serious crimes, and storms and a host of social issues that never get resolved is because the fights for justice often end up in the hands of cause crusaders, that come down to competing interests for priorities. As a result we subject ourselves to information fatigue and it creates a social paralysis creating the illusion that nothing happens. Stop and think for one second. We are not living in the same world as we were twenty years ago let alone fifty or a hundred years ago. Progress takes time whether its construction methods, the environment, social programs medicine and a hundred other fields of endeavor progress is being made whether we as individuals grasp it or recognize it is another matter. Most of the reasons change is resisted is out of fear of change yet change is what civilization thrives on. The world is not going to the dogs it is the challenge to our comfort zone or a challenge to our state of contentment that triggers doubt.
The positive in all of this is change will happen whether we like it or not. In a hundred years people will say. “if they only knew then what we know now things would be so different.”
Fred Steele