If you feel as if chaos is accelerating you are not alone. I'm sure that most still reading this blog are completely aware of what I mean.
The irony to me is that Trump is right to call out the major institutions of our world as being dysfunctional. Yet his 'fix' is not really a fix, it is an acceleration of destruction. Perhaps, in the long run, that is actually a good thing. Perhaps humanity needs a major reset. But my fear is that it won't necessarily lead to a better path. The problem is that we humans seem incapable of learning from our past mistakes, even when we acknowledge them as mistakes and vociferously claim we will do better. We will not make the same mistakes again in the future.
I remember growing up reading about the rise of Nazism and Hitler and the Holocaust and wondering how on earth that could ever have gotten traction. The story line goes that the Germans were in a world of hurt after WWI and were ripe for his kind of 'leadership.' People needed to blame someone and the Jews were a convenient target with historical precedence. But I took great solace in the fact that knowing how that scenario played out, we human beings would never allow ourselves to go down that road again. At least not in the United States of America! As our role in WWII showed, we were the good guys.
What happened?
My theory is that we human beings are caught in an evolutionary purgatory, between our experience of self- and future consciousness that is just nascent and wisdom that uses that consciousness to project long-term consequences of our decisions. We evolved the beginnings of sapience but are not fully sapient in our current species. And like the old saying goes: "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing."
Back in 2009 I put forth a theory of the state of human evolution and of our capacity for wisdom that suggested we were not yet capable of true wisdom (sapience) for a number of reasons having to do with our brain's limitations. You can find the start of a series of posts on the subject at: sapience-introduction.html. This will actually take you to my personal repository where the whole series is stored and give you links to the later posts in the series. I have since expanded these posts into a full-blown book but it remains unpublished for the simple reason that, by definition, there is no audience for it. Who among the merely pseudo-sapient beings on this planet wished to know they are kind of defective? The publishers I approached, including my own for the systems science books, were loathe to publish something that basically concludes there is no hope for you mere mortals and here is why!
Honestly I think my message is more positive than that. I do believe there are true sapient individuals in our populations, though they are probably quite rare. I have been trying to convey the idea that the rest of us could take the brave stand of supporting them (if we knew who they were) and seeing to it that they would be able to survive the collapse of our civilization (an absolute certainty in my mind) and provide the seed stock of a new species of Homo. I have dedicated my efforts to encapsulating and codifying systems science as a seed knowledge bank that could be used to guide future populations of eusapients and provide the basis for a future science (e.g. systems biology) so they would not have to start from scratch. Thus far my efforts have gone well. My first book, with Mike Kalton, is very well received in the systems science and engineering communities and my second book, still in process, has received rave advanced reviews from many in those communities. I'm trying to fulfill my commitment.
How about you the reader? Know anyone who you think is eusapient and of breeding age???? Somehow, we need to find these people and get them together. That problem eludes me so far. If you have any thoughts let me know.
Meanwhile the day will be the longest of the year (in the Northern Hemisphere) and tomorrow we start the long descent into winter (passing Fall along the way). It is hard to grasp that with so much light from the Sun we are mired in deep darkness of understanding. Well, we are only human.