There is a tide in the affairs of men

I think there must be a great number of people who have this annoying subliminal sensation that we have extended beyond the edge of society’s steady-state development model that we all assumed would continue indefinitely and are now in a sort of flux or hiatus before the next configuration starts. What that configuration will be, I don’t know yet but I’m expecting and watching out for it, partly because I want to be sure it is not going to hurt us.

Several things could happen but all our guesses are based on what has gone before, which is a logical fallacy because the circumstances and moods are different. New context now, no clues. Yes, partisan politics has outlived its usefulness to the population. Now, I think, globalisation has taken liberties in both senses of the word. Will humans of the future lose their right to influence decisions and be told what to do with no recourse (even more)? I think that is the way it is drifting. Will shallow entertainment be used to satisfy the people and take their attention away from moving decision-making into anonymous hands? Again, probably. Will there be more people and fewer jobs? What happens if people in Bangladesh and North Africa have to move out of increasingly uninhabitable regions? These are serious problems. Economically, the centres of wealth are changing. The debt issue is so crazy that no one is brave enough to think about it — until there’s no choice and they have to.

We naturally assume that other people have the same core values as us, but I think that isn’t true. Some principles are so obvious that we don’t even bother to articulate them, like believing that the system should be good for the majority of the people under it, or that everyone should have the opportunity to make something of themselves. It seems now that if you believe that, you are in the most numerous but least empowered group. The people at the top, designing the way they want the world to go, simply do not share our common values. I don’t believe they are coordinated like a secret organisation, but I see they have arrived at similar conclusions and share a belief across oceans that the world should be configured to serve a minority of the like-minded. If you are on the largest group’s side of this separation, your words and your abilities will at some point meet resistance.

I do waste a certain amount of time thinking about and debating how new societies could work — not the physical architecture but more the governing structure, economics and how that can only work if supported by consent from people to be ruled and clearly defined political representation in a fair system.

If you notice politicians changing the rules that we previously thought were immutable and seeming to speak for anything other than the population they are supposed to serve, be very cautious with them. We are in a period just preceding change, like milling around waiting for some race to start and the new rules to be known. We would be wise to identify now the people who should not have a hand in making the new rules.