We have not entered a new era, we have entered a new Epoch. The difference?
Scale.
Remember around the millenium when the previous generation moaned they were sold a lie that they were special. The current one will soon realise they’ve been sold an even bigger lie that the west is unique and fated to succeed, like the preceding generation were brought up to understand the happy summer of childhood would never end.
Our social and economic worlds have irrevocably changed and it’s a flood of technology that has swept old realities away, just as the arrival of American troops wrecked the societies of Melanesia during and after WW2.
When endless manufactured goods appeared from ships and local elites clearly had no idea how it all worked, a phenomenon called a ‘cargo cult’ spread across the pacific to numerous confused communities. These peoples saw the arrival of a civilisation with advanced manufacturing technology into their long established but static world and could not imagine how it all fitted together. Instead they concluded this magical resource allocation must naturally apply to them.
So they waited and held to their beliefs that they too must receive such riches, expecting that this observed abundance must arrive for them also. It was clear that no work or effort would be necessary, only the right flags, magical thinking and faith it was their right to receive free goods, that would cause them to appear.
How could it be fair if it were any other way?
We might consider it foolish that these primitive societies did not consider:
1 That resources are not created out of thin air.
2 Hope is not a strategy (Source: Prof Sarah Paine)
3 Cargos come from work not words
4 Beliefs are not reality
5 What you see is just the small part of the complete process.
6 Strength comes from effort not consumption.
It seems obvious looking back at simple cultures 80 years ago. How about our societies now?
How many of us living in the modern world are making the same set of mistakes and relying on very similar assumptions.
Our goods appear on ships, made in factories the likes of which we do not have or even comprehend. So many sit idly by, expecting to be looked after by one ritual or another. How many have even the slightest idea how the system that encapsulates their lives work? How is it all funded, by who and what? Meanwhile our societies magically think their way towards ruin as they trudge along an unsustainable economic path.
So before us went the Romans dissolved in luxuries, Tokugawa Japan crippled by arrogance, The Soviet Union bathed in stupidity, The Spanish Empire drenched in laziness, Weimar Germany entranced by financial engineering and Nauru, which conclusive proved that while hope is not a strategy, nor is bird poop.
So what to do?
Sit under a tree and moan and perish?
No, the answer is to crack on.
The future belongs to the active and I’m guessing, if you have read this far, you are part of that group.
The world will move on and remain an oyster.