Infinite Shades of Strange
And it is certainly not simple
By Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ May 26, 2023
You think we would start figuring this stuff out after several decades of constantly accelerating change? But, that is not so.
Our social tools are the equivalent of buggy whips in an age of lithium-ion automobiles and planetary disaster.
We still have millions of people in the leading countries who insist that things are not that bad. And that this is all being blown out of proportion. And things are entirely normal depending on where you are on any given day. Lots of problems but not constant disaster.
And that is true. We are overwhelmed by tremendous success and horrendous failures. Things are not neatly packaged. The evil and the good are entangled with the very strange.
That is a part of the problem we are all facing. People are very much prone to accepting that things are how they are supposed to be and that problems are specific events. That makes identifying items representing local aspects of planetary problems challenging.
Identifying accelerating trends is not natural for us. Hence our constant surprise at the difference between arithmetic progression and geometric factoring. We deal with this constantly in our 21st-century world but have gotten by without applying it, except as something we must work through. It requires slow thinking because our instincts are arithmetic.
On any given day, in vast areas of our planet, things are fine. It’s just that the number of disasters is growing but also expanding in areas affected. So it is a very mixed world.
The incremental problems related to our vast climate problem are periodically frightening but easy to forget when things return to normal. We tend not to notice that normal is never quite the same. If we do notice we just ignore it.
Constantly discussing the trends and rates of change cascading on our areas of the planet is depressing and boring. That is why we see articles asking for proof. Where are the major disasters we have all been talking about for years? The economy has inflation problems, but that is an old problem, and things are working well and getting better for most of the industrial world…
