16 wnt. There is Confidence and there is Doubt
Are our Lords and Masters over-optimistic, just to convince us that they are good leaders? Should we share their optimism, or vote in someone new?
Is this something that we can contemplate here? It also depends on our platform. Perhaps our followers expect (demand) that we parcel-out good feelings? “We already know things are NOT-RIGHT, so don’t rub it in”. Let’s just tell a few jokes.
AMERICA FEELS LIKE IT’S UNRAVELING, and the West along with it.
With the continuous war-on-terror and Russiagate notwithstanding, we seem to live in an era of relative peace and comfort. But we have settled into a mood of pessimism about our long-term future, fearful that our superpower nation is somehow rotting from within.
Neither an epic victory over Communism nor an extended upswing of the business cycle can buoy our public spirit. The Cold War and New Deal struggles are plainly over, but we are of no mind to bask in their successes. The America of today feels worse, in its fundamentals, than the one many of us remember from our youth, then a society presided over with a supposedly lesser consciousness. Wherever we look, from L.A. to D.C., from Oklahoma City to Sun City, we see paths to a foreboding future. We yearn for civic character but satisfy ourselves with symbolic gestures and celebrity circuses. We perceive no greatness in our leaders, and a new meanness in ourselves. Small wonder that each new election cycle brings a new jolt, and its aftermath a new disappointment.
Not long ago, America was more than the sum of its parts. Now, it seems less than the sum of its parts. Around World War II, we were proud as a people but modest as individuals. Fewer than 20 % said yes when asked, “Are you a very important person?” Today, more than six in ten say yes. Where we once thought ourselves collectively strong, now we regard ourselves as individually entitled.
Yet even while we exalt our own personal growth, we realize that millions of self-actualized persons don’t add up to an actualized society. Popular trust in virtually every American institution—from businesses and governments, to churches and newspapers—keeps falling to new lows. Public debts soar, the middle class shrinks, welfare dependencies deepen, and cultural arguments worsen by the year. We now have the highest incarceration rate and the lowest eligible-voter participation rate of any major democracy. Statistics inform us that many adverse trends (crime, divorce, abortion, scholastic aptitudes) may have bottomed out, but we’re not reassured.
Optimism still attaches to self, but no longer to family nor community. Most Americans express more hope for their own prospects than for their children’s—or the nation’s. Parents widely fear that the American Dream, which was there (solidly) for their parents, and still there (barely) for them, will not be there for their kids. Young householders are reaching their mid-thirties, never having known a time when America seemed to be on the right track. Middle-aged people look at their thin savings accounts and slim-to-none pensions, scoff at an illusory Social Security trust fund, and try not to dwell on what a burden their old age could become. Seniors separate into their own Leisure World, recoiling at the lost virtue of youth while trying not to think about the future.
We perceive our civic challenge as some vast, insoluble Rubik’s Cube. Behind each problem lies another problem that must be solved first, and behind that lies yet another, and another, ad infinitum. To fix crime we have to fix the family, but before we do that, we have to fix welfare, and that means fixing our budget, and that means fixing our civic spirit, but we can’t do that without fixing moral standards, and that means fixing schools and churches, and that means fixing the inner cities, and that’s impossible until we fix crime. There’s no fulcrum on which to rest a policy lever. People of all ages sense that something huge will have to sweep across America before the gloom can be lifted—but that’s an awareness we suppress. As a nation, we’re in deep denial.
While we grope for answers, we wonder if analysis may be crowding out our intuition. Like the anxious patient who takes seventeen kinds of medicine while poring over his own CAT scan, we find it hard to stop and ask, “what is the underlying malady really about?” How can we best bring the primal forces of nature to our assistance? Isn’t there a choice lying somewhere between total control and total despair? Deep down, beneath the tangle of trend lines, we suspect that our history, or our biology, or our very humanity must have something simple and important to say to us. But we don’t know what it is. If we once did know, we have since forgotten.
Wherever we’re headed, America is evolving in ways most of us don’t like and don’t understand. Individually focused yet collectively adrift, we wonder if we're heading toward a waterfall.
Are we?
I DON’T KNOW IF ANY OF THIS IS TRUE? Sorry to leave you with this STONE. What is happening with your vision? Do you see a light that is shining through? Please put something positive in the comments to redeem this article. Or answer one of the three questions up above.
.
Here is a great paragraph from this book. It says old people are deluded into thinking that they will save the world. But isn't it them who are destroying the world? (Good Luck to the YOUTH.)
The bulk of today’s gerontologists (Gerontology covers the social, psychological and biological aspects of aging), and demographers, do not yet grasp what’s coming. Ken Dychtwald’s 'Age Wave' and Cheryl Russell’s 'Master Trend' create the impression that Boomers will be much like today’s busy senior citizens—except better-educated, more selfish, and (an easy prediction) much more numerous. This kind of forecast leads to the conclusion that early this century, younger generations will be overwhelmed by extravagantly doctored, expansively lobbying, age-denying old people. To support their consumptive 'Sharper-Image' lifestyles through old age, Boomers would have to impose confiscatory taxes on younger people. This would be an enormous dead weight, if it ever happens. (It won’t.)
Clues of what old Boomers will be like can be glimpsed in the “conscious aging” movement. Cutting-edge books like 'From Ageing to Sageing' speak of new “spiritual eldering-institutes” teaching people to engage in “vision quests.” These new “elders of the tribe” see themselves as “wisdom keepers” who must apply “their dormant powers of intuition . . . [to] become seers who feed wisdom back into society and who guide the long-term reclamation project of healing our beleaguered planet.”
Whew!
Boomer gerontologist Harry Moody sees a twenty-first-century shift to a “contemplative old age” that eliminates today’s focus on activity, and instead “transcends doing, in favor of being.” Elders will be defined as spiritually gifted over their juniors who “are too busy to cultivate the quietness and inwardness, from which mystical experience is possible.” Pain and bodily decline will be accepted, even honored as the necessary burning off of worldly DROSS for the purpose of acquiring higher insights. In sharp contrast to the youth-emulating “uninhibited octogenarians” of Gail Sheehy’s 'Silent Generation', these new earth sages will want to be authentically old people, the critical links in human civilization, without whose guidance the young might sink into Philistinism—but with whom the young can craft what gerontologist David Gutmann terms “the new myths on which re-acculturation can be based.”
I suppose I sort of lean toward contemplation, and away from excess activity. Some of my relatives are trying to prove they are still 40, with 30 mile bicycling, and flying all over the country each month. They know all the airports well.
.
I feel that this is kind of inevitable - if you lead the world, as the US is often claimed to do, you will be the first to hit new issues while everyone can just follow. Particularly if the pursuit of profit is made the ideal, since the best way to be profitable is to find an unoccupied niche and milk it for all it's worth. Once you start doing that, people drift farther away from each other until they don't understand each other anymore.
Leverage means different things to different people. A physicist or engineer might think of the length of a lever and the amplification of the force applies. A lawyer or policymaker might think of a key statute or interpretation that lets them do what they want - a loophole. Someone in finance will think first of debt - leverage as in a metaphorical lever to improve returns by using other people's money.
And that's a relatively easy term. Try something like "racism", "border control", "freedom", and it'll be so much worse. So, so much worse.