A respite from this blog for a few weeks to recharge my creative juices hasn’t made the world seem to be an any more enlightened place.  We are seeing across the world a progression in dissonance and downright strife when anything short of a passive acceptance of another’s world view is expressed.  Express free speech against the grain and you are banned from speaking in universities or physically harassed.  Reveal a thought or collection of thoughts on Twitter, Facebook, or You Tube that manages to offend others and risk erasure from the social medium.  If your thinking survives the initial onslaught, a phalanx of labeling invectives are hurled against you in an effort to humiliate you into silence.  Have a reputation for alternative views, and you risk violent harassment in public when you sit down to eat, or socialize with friends.

At a political level, socialist governments designed to redistribute wealth, horde it among a few elite, and can’t even distribute the most basic in sustenance.  Democracies are held hostage by parties that cling to power rather than solutions, and can’t marshall  even a tepid  response to the simplest challenges .  Dictators….well, they at least, dictate.  Overwhelmingly, regardless of foundation, all governments are progressively corroded by corruption and clogged up with incompetence.

And yet… the world has never had more globally available sustenance, opportunity, reduction of poverty, clean air and available water, health care, and general aversion to war to resolve conflict.

Maybe we have lost our collective minds.  Why must the  world that has positioned itself for the future so well,  submit to our need to bollux it all up so?

Loss of Civility 

It starts with our current inability to recognize that  the rules of civil discourse developed over thousands of years served a purpose.  Being considerate of others – provided the environment for a basic respect for their discourse, and your willingness to listen.  Think before you speak-implied an effort on your part to organize thoughts, reflect upon your past experiences and understandings, before assuming your view.  Agree to disagree – submitted a pact of understanding that ideas are always in flux, and you absorb from others and mature your own opinions.  Courses in civics, how various views are elucidated, how discourse is organized, how problems are solved in a civil society have lost favor with a modern tendency to consider one’s own views superior at face value to all others.  Civility is a foundational cornerstone to returning to a public discourse that converts our modern advantages into the building blocks of real progress.

Loss of Responsibility

The collective no longer expects the individual to hold up his end of the donkey.  The modern charge is for security, not responsibility.  The loss of freedom , the ability to effect one’s own life journey and outcome by accepting personal responsibility, is not mourned in the rush to level the playing field and reduce risk injected by individual choice. With the loss of responsibility has come the plague of incompetence.  Roads crumple, bridges collapse, and projects lapse because it is always someone else’s responsibility to confirm the decisions made.     Yet, the great advances of the last several  hundred years have come out of individuals take risk, taking owner ship  and pride in performance and competence,  and being incentivized for it.  It is the freedom to fail, that has lifted the great majority to succeed.  The gift of freedom, so casually tossed aside by those who are ignorant of its enormous power,  forms the way forward out of  the current malaise.

Loss of Morality

In a twentieth century where the world almost eliminated itself in horrific slaughter, morality died.  The recognition that a right and a wrong, a good and an evil, existed  required the combined will of all that was right and good. Creating  such supreme sacrifices to ultimately prevail exhausted the human capacity for objective morality. A religious world became an irreligious one, where residual religion retreated to relativism,  or in the case of Islam radicalized into death cult lunacy.  People have accepted progressively relativist arguments regarding abortion, spiraling crime rates, and sexual and drug promiscuity, ignoring the moral questions in favor of the relative — if it feels right, it must be right.

Loss of Truth

The concept of the narrative has strangled the search for the truth.  Narratives are nefarious memes to enforce behaviors and squash the skeptic.  ‘Human caused Global Warming’ declared man as the dominant actor in the 3.5 billion year history of earthly climate change, not because the world had not been warmer or colder before man, but that humans were uniquely flawed and could only ‘save’ themselves by surrendering their modern mobility and trillions of dollars to a global elite that would redistribute it to “appropriate climate friendly” causes.  Facts have butted up against the hysteria, presenting a much more measured reality as to the complexity  of climate, but that hasn’t stopped the increased righteousness of those convinced by the narrative.   Decades of victimization designed to elevate the narrative of a genetically controlled otherness, whether race, color, or sex, has led to the narrative of intersectional oppression – literally the cumulative victimization obstructing the oppressed from succeeding in a world where the “fix” is in, needing the ‘oppressor’ to stand aside.  The facts of poverty, education gaps,  the incongruity of continued vast safety nets helping the ‘oppressed’ the least have no place in displacing the narrative of oppressed and oppressor. On and On.

We Got Here, Now What?

Can society restore civil, responsible, moral, truthful conditions of discourse?  The progressive anarchy would suggest we may need to return to a dark place to be shaken back to the classic foundations of a productive engaged society.  In a somewhat bizarre turn of events, a politician flawed in his crudity and venality may have applied a slight break to the runaway train.  His unwillingness to allow the narrative to dominate, his determination to provide conditions for opportunity and reward to individuals, may prove to provide more corrective than all the think tanks seminars passively pontificating about how the world should be, if only people would see the light.  This crass man responding instinctually is upsetting the apple cart and waking us up a little.  Now, if he can only somehow recover his long lost civility gene, when one is called for.

Probably too much to hope.