It's a complex world...

And everything will be fine. Just do better tomorrow.

We are all currently wading through a series of man-made disasters and witnessing the feeble, feckless response from our leaders, and it is difficult to decide whether it is more appropriate to scream in frustration or throw up my hands and laugh very loudly. Really. Who didn’t see this coming? From silly rules regarding Covid that are quickly broken by the people who made the rules, to a non-existent southern border, to inflation, to the erosion of property rights, to rampant crime in the cities, to the coming slaughter in Afghanistan, what we are seeing is postmodern bullshit running headlong into reality. It was always going to happen.

Generation Z is defined as those Americans born between roughly 1990 and 2010, give or take a few years. These are generally good kids. Most of the members of Gen Z I know grew up without the homophobia and racial suspicion that marked many previous generations. On any scale, that is a good thing. Yet? Consider what they are expected to believe. To believe that if a man says he is a woman, he is a woman. one must accept without question that truth, that reality itself, is also malleable. The jury is still out on whether this flexibility of fact extends to racial identity. Personally, being polite, I’m happy to pretend that someone with an X and a Y chromosome is a female, but I’ll always be aware that it is a game of pretend because reality remains reality. Genetics don’t change. Having a surgeon put a horn on my head won’t make me a unicorn, whatever I believe. This sets me apart from Gen Z. Understanding the limits of wishes is the new generation gap.

1990 doesn’t seem so long ago to me. Since 1990, though, the nation has seen a series of failed wars, a major recession, and politicians, one after another, labeled “The Next Hitler”. The last thirty years were steeped in a technological revolution that brought us the internet and put the wisdom of the ages at everyone’s fingertips, but it is used primarily as a distraction while ignorance is celebrated. There are two sets of laws and the boundary between them is entirely arbitrary. Government, authorities, and big tech will, and do, lie because experts believe the world is too complex for a citizen to understand and he or she might not do what they should if they are told the truth. Morality is relative. It is entirely possible to hold mutually exclusive beliefs. Women’s rights are paramount, as are the rights of LGBTA minorities, but any criticism of their treatment under Sharia law is Islamophobia. The United States is among the least racist nations that have ever existed, but white supremacy and institutional racism (which pretty much do not exist) are touted as the major issues we face. Socialism has always failed, but it is fair and should be pursued. Free speech is important, but there are things that must never be said, and punished if they are. On and on...

This is the only world anyone less than about 30 years old has known. This is the world our experts have constructed. It is not real. It is a miasma of half-baked theories, cooked data, and deliberate misinformation.

In the past, considering this would have made me sad. This isn’t the world that I grew up in, where questioning authority was a bumper sticker and Rock was free speech; where “Do your own thing” and individualism was understood as the baseline for freedom. In my youth, people would say, “I hate what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” and mean it. But it doesn’t make me sad to find myself a stranger in my home nation today. I take the long view.

In the field of evolutionary biology a phenomenon has been discovered. Traits among populations of organisms fluctuate wildly in the short term, but over time these fluctuations become noise. Mutations happen all of the time, but few stick, so if we look at a population (horses, say) we would find drastic variation at various times in the fossil record, but over a million years or so horses would not be changed very much. It is like looking at an individual stock at Dow Jones. Over hours and days we might see what appear to be wild fluctuations, but if we expand the graph to look at decades, the changes in the stock do not seem very drastic at all. Everything levels out.

The same is true of ideologies. Today popular US culture seems like Bizzaro Upside-Down World when compared to, say, 1980; but it is far less out of line if we stretch that timeline back a few hundred, or a few thousand, years. People have always believed crazy things. Maybe we were more free in the US forty years ago and we pissed that away, but happiness was and remains a personal choice and we are under no compulsion to participate in the delusion du jour.

Over the years, as the paradigm shifted and many Rock-n-Roll rebels became bitter scolds, I have shed many people. Some just wandered away as our understanding of things changed. Some were offended that I didn’t go along to get along. Some, sadly, I abused in the mistaken notion that I might change their minds. This, too, is okay. I feel no obligation to validate anyone’s crackpot theories, and no one is obliged to validate mine. Obama was a lightworker and Trump just like Hitler? Okay. I think you’re nuts, but party on.

In the past I would feel the need to argue the point, to disabuse someone of such notions. I don’t any longer. Reality is a much more effective teacher than I have ever been. The quickest way to learn not to touch a hot stove has always been to touch a hot stove. Accepting double standards and a corrupt government, where no one is punished for using a complete fabrication to spy upon a presidential campaign and then subvert an actual sitting President; where no one is held accountable for a year of violence and arson but the book is thrown at a small group who dared challenge the Capital; in voting for the obviously impaired Biden and enabling inveterate lunatics, the nation chose to place both hands on the hot stove. It is also the inevitable result of believing wishes are real and as important as actual results. Anyone who believed this would end well was kidding themselves.

We should all watch in the coming months with clear eyes as the horrors stack up in Afghanistan, as prices rise here and people discover that their rights have eroded, as (rather than end racism) Critical Racial Theory in our schools makes racism worse, as the completely avoidable human tragedy on our southern border worsens, as the reputation and strength of the USA on the global stage takes a massive hit. We put our hands on the hot stove and we should feel and accept the results. We did this. It was always inevitable once we put our feet on the postmodern path and accepted wishes as reality.

But in the long term, humanity continues to improve. We are not perfect by any stretch, but we have improved. Individual rights are now a thing, intrinsic to being human, and people are rarely murdered as a sacrifice to one god or another. In a thousand years we will be incrementally better still. Utopia will remain out of reach so long as individuals conflate their personal wishes for facts, or try to beat their fellows into submission, but things will be better than they are today. In 1990, globally, 1.9 billion people lived in extreme poverty, defined by the United Nations as "a condition characterized by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information. By 2015 that number had fallen by 1.16 billion to 0.74 billion. This is no small thing. Capitalism and the innovations it brought caused this change. That’s the future. It can be slowed. We can take the various dead ends (socialism, communism, etc.) that have failed in the past, which will cause more suffering and slow the progress of humankind, but we can’t stop this progress from happening.

The universe doesn’t care what we do. It’s up to each of us, to not be stupid, to not be navel-gazing loons, to not imagine that we’re each the center of a cosmos. Currently, it looks like such traits are trending, but it’s such a tiny slice of time. Just a blip, really. Do better tomorrow.

That’s my plan, anyway.

Peace.