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Can't Change Everything
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Perhaps,
Can't change anything.
Yes, everything changes. However we seem destined to keep fighting for maintaining why we know, which includes the status quo of the way we live our lives. This is what my wife and I were talking about this morning as we drove and me in my depressive way of looking at life was talking about how the majority of what we do as humans is unnecessary. She mentioned as an example of necessary being the work of doctors, but my retort is that the majority of what doctors do these days is treating unnecessary illness and disorder. If we lived in a healthier environment, much of what ails us as a species, disappears.
No one should be overweight, depressed, lonely, and many of the cancers and diseases are also lifestyle related.
Not just personal lifestyle, but lifestyle of society as a whole.
If we were to trace the entire economic journey of what we do, we would discover that a lot of what we believe to be necessary, is not necessary at all. For instance, a lot of people will cite "defence" as a necessary industry (war) because of dictators and hostile governments. Yet, if dictators are unable to accumulate wealth and power as they do, the dictator industry, or the superpower countries, are impossible to create, and the war industry becomes another pointless endeavour. It is us who give meaning to things and a lot of what we give meaning to, is useless and unnecessary - like the imaginary borders we create on a map to divide ourselves from others to create unnecessary conflict. Same for religion, and skin colour, and gender. We emphasise meaning in things that we should be minimising in society, while ignoring the things that actually matter.
But my wife said, "Can't change everything" as if this is actually true. It is not true, because everything changes. Granted, we as individuals don't have the power to make large changes to anything much at all, but everything we do, does have an impact and when we all do something consistently, it has a significant impact. At the moment, the majority of what we collectively do, is fight to maintain the system we currently have, which is the only one that most of us have ever known. And we know it through experience, without ever really exploring how what we know operates, let alone consider alternatives to the way things are done.
For example, while pretty much everyone one earth doesn't like the tax systems in their country (regardless of the country), relatively very few people know much about how it works, why it is the way it is, or alternative approaches that might be more equitable for the majority of people. As a result, other than complaining to people who can't do anything, we keep supporting a system we don't like under an assumption that it is the only system we can have.
It is like punching ourselves in the face, as if that is all we can do with our hands.
We have all these many options and tools available to us, but instead of working out what we can do with them, we do what we are told we can do with them by a system only interested in maximising resources into as few hands as possible. This means that while we can pretend that we are innovative, our innovation is constrained by incentive, and the incentive is designed so we are only going to innovate in that direction. And that direction isn't what is best for humanity, it is what is best for system maintenance.
But the system is broken.
But if the system is broken, why do we keep maintaining it? We know that it is not taking us where we want or need to go and we have known for decades that it is ultimately going to lead to our own destruction, because the system consumes itself, as it consumes everything. It is the snake that eats its own tail, and soon there will just be a head left.
But it is far easy to be complacent, far easier to choose convenience, and far easier to believe that nothing can be changed, so that we can stay comfortable doing what we have always done, which leads us to where we expect it to go. Down. The future with this mentality is no longer the bright, shiny, "new" we thought we were heading in seventy years ago, it is now about survival and "making it through" this life as well as possible, given the conditions. But there seems to be more a sense of resignation now, where people assume the end is just around the corner, so why bother.
And this gives us a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because once people resign to maintaining a destructive status quo, that is where we are going to end up. The only way out is to build and support a system that generates continuous healthy improvement that keeps getting better day, year and generation after generation. We are evolutionary, not stationary. Like all living things, we are meant to evolve and as we have quite evolved hardware, we are able to heavily influence the direction we take.
Originally, revolution comes from talking about celestial bodies, like a rotation of the earth or as a planet travels around the solar system. It is a "full circle" situation. However now it is also used to describe large political or social changes, often violent overthrows of government. However in this context, it is about fundamental change to the current system, and that is what needs to happen to what we are currently supporting. The revolution we are currently on is more the full circle and a return to the starting point. A bit like a Ferris wheel trip where for the first half we are climbing into the air, but the back half we are returning to earth.
But being evolutionary, not revolutionary, so we needn't come back to the starting point, as we can almost without exception, keep climbing into the sky. It is more like an endless rollercoaster with ups and down, but more up than down, meaning that it can never return to where we were. We can keep improving, but only if we are willing to perform the actions that take us up, rather than the ones that drop us down.
The system we currently have can only take us up so far.
Before it starts taking us down again.
And I think that this is where we are in our cycle as a species. We have advanced a long way and very quickly in the last few centuries, but the direction and way we have done so only does so for so long before it starts to collapse under its own weight. If we don't grow in another direction, we will be consumed by the system itself.
We can't change everything.
But we have to change something.
Taraz
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