Quote:
Originally Posted by trfour
This is why we are still in the Covid-19 Pandemic. NO guessing! NOT the world most of us were brought Up in.
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Trfour, I understand what you're saying about the world we were brought up in and obviously you're right. But in the world we were brought up in, the seeds of today's crises had already been planted. We just didn't realize it at the time. For baby boomers, everything seemed wonderful in the 1950s postwar economic boom. Our parents had jobs and could afford to own a house. People seemed to act rationally. There was far less antisocial behavior. Neighbors didn't come to blows about politics. We had respect for one another. Government mandates were reasonable and we followed them willingly.
What we didn't realize at the time:
- The economic boom that made our lives so much better depended on overexploition of the earth's resources that would lead to pollution, deforestation, carbon in the atmostphere, global warming, etc.
- Economic progress created a new class of super wealthy people at the expense of the other classes. That division would eventually mean that things like home ownership would one day be out of reach for many.
- We had in no way solved the racial injustice that this country was founded on, that would later lead to almost irreparable divisions.
- We were failing to train children and adolescents to live in a society with others. We got rid of religion in schools but didn't replace it with any other kind training in self-control and moral conduct.
- We were not doing anything to correct the U.S.'s reliance on war as our main foreign policy strategy.
The perception that things were safe and good in the 1950s held true only if you belonged to specific groups who had access to the benefits of the economic boom and democracy. Millions of people did not and they would soon start raising their voices.
All of those unaddressed conditions were intensifying in the 1950s and they led up to the stunning crises of 2020: refusal to adopt rational behaviors during the Covid crisis, the economic crisis, race riots, the unfathomable near-collapse of our democracy, lawlessness and the climate crisis.
Had we been studying events since the 1950s and projecting their logical outcomes, we might not have been so surprised. What is the logical outcome of the fact that today, 60% of the world's population (41% in the U.S.) is unvaccinated and the virus has ways of outsmarting us?
The explanation for this state of affairs is simple: our systems of government, the economy, education, and social organization as designed and practiced are insufficient to bring about the things we say we want (life, liberty, happiness, prosperity etc.), but we are either unwilling or unable to envision and enact systems that would work better for us. We cling to things we hold sacred even when 250 years of history reveals them to be inadequate. The world changes as a result of our actions in it, but we fail to evolve in our thinking and ways of being. That's irrational, and humans at bottom are not programmed for the complexities of modern rationality.