The paths of those making decisions are ignorant, foolish, and short-sighted, amplifying the destructive effect of past foolish, ignorant, and short-sighted decisions. I have made my share of short-sighted, ignorant, and foolish decisions. I have had to live with the consequences of those decisions, and taken my lumps. Out of those experiences I draw several lessons:
- There's no free lunch. When you screw up, you or someone else pays, one way or another.
- Violate Walter's Law that the unintended consequences of any decision always vastly outweigh the intended consequences and its corollaries at your peril.
- Delay in taking corrective action makes things worse, not better. Things don't fix themselves. See item 1.
- We do not live in an existential universe where belief orders the universe. Just because we would like something to be true, does not make it so.
- Reality always trumps pretend in the end.
The current irresponsible actions that ignore each of these realities — such as the recent tax vote; action rejecting the new START treaty; the failure to regulate systemically threatening institutions; the failure to act so as to preserve a viable middle class as a large portion of the population; the allocation of resources to consumables instead of true (not financial) investments in people and projects having long-term, general benefits; the sacrifice of individual liberties for apparent security; and the deferral of costs into the future — are simply continuations of threads begun many years ago. My impressionistic belief is that these threads came into being in the U.S. as those who had experienced want and the implacable, impersonal impact of extrinsic forces — primarily, for the generations immediately preceding us, World War I, the Great Depressions, and World War II — ceased to be the primary decision makers. Instead, both individually and as a society, those who had inherited prosperity from those who had come before and had faced only (seemingly) individual hardship transitioned into decision making positions, believing that they, not their precursors, were the creators of the blessings of political security and liberty and economic bounty bestowed upon them, or, even worse, that these conditions are the natural state of things and not the result of vast efforts by many people over many years.
As this transition occurred, the fallacious belief also gained ascendency that individual actions are the sole cause of consequences to the individual, and that therefore the conditions each of us finds ourselves in are a result of our own actions. On one level this is certainly true, but it is also incomplete, since actions are taken in the context created by the greater community and the objective reality of the universe. If left alone without the context of the community and the resources we together provide to each other, most of us would starve within weeks. We must view our actions as having both individual and community consequences, and take responsibility for both.
Altruism is a species trait because it is beneficial. We take care of each other not only because there will be times when we cannot take care of ourselves, but also because the aggregate of contributions by all are greater than the sum of the individual contributions of each. Synergy is real.
Perhaps each cycle must have its ragnarock. I hope this is not true, that we can learn from what has gone before, and act in wisdom reflecting the realities listed above, but the course of events is not encouraging. If we do not learn from the past, reflect, and act in wisdom, catastrophe and re-creation await.
Wow. I wish I could say that I disagreed with you, but I'm afraid I you're right. We've been promised a free lunch for way too long, and it's so comforting to believe it's true.
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