Archive for the ‘dual nature’ Category
Of Moles and Squeegee Men
Filed under: dual nature | Tags: broken windows, George W Bush, law enforcement, media, Obama
Leave a Comment Now that January 20th has come and gone, the Bush League has departed from DC like unruly guests who cleaned out the liquor cabinet and the wine cellar and generally trashed the place. As we start to pick up the pieces and straighten the furniture, a question persists: should we call the cops or should we just pretend it never happened?
Many of the DC regulars want to make pretend and “just get on with things.” As Glenn Greenwald noted:
There are few viewpoints, if there are any, which trigger more fervent agreement across the political and media establishment than the view that George Bush, Dick Cheney and other top officials should not be criminally investigated, let alone prosecuted, for the various laws they have broken over the last eight years.
The reasoning for this “let bygones be bygones” comes in a variety of flavors. The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen argued that the Devil (aka Osama bin Laden) made us forget ourselves and our constitution and begin jailing people without charges and then torturing them:
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” So goes an aphorism that needs to be applied to the current debate over whether those who authorized and used torture should be prosecuted. In the very different country called Sept. 11, 2001, the answer would be a resounding no.
Cohen’s Post colleauge Ruth Marcus, on the other hand, strikes a pragmatic pose
:
I’m coming to the conclusion that what’s most crucial here is ensuring that these mistakes are not repeated. In the end, that may be more important than punishing those who acted wrongly in pursuit of what they thought was right.
Mr. Greenwald is outraged by this attitude because the Justice Department continues to hound the lawyer-mole who first told a New York Times reporter about Bush’s illegal NSA spying program. It certainly seems unfair to persecute an individual for revealing criminal and unconstitutional behavior at the same time pundits and politicians want to give the “evil doers” a free pass.
The New York Times’ Frank Rich also supports investigation and possible prosecution, to regain our country’s honor:
While our new president indeed must move on and address the urgent crises that cannot wait, Bush administration malfeasance can’t be merely forgotten or finessed.
Beyond the whole matter of being a nation of laws and all, Mr. Rich argues we need to address the problems of the past to gain guidance for the future:
But I would add that we need full disclosure of the more prosaic governmental corruption of the Bush years, too, for pragmatic domestic reasons. To make the policy decisions ahead of us in the economic meltdown, we must know what went wrong along the way in the executive and legislative branches alike.
Greenwald and Rich make strong points in favor of actually investigating what happened over the past eight years, and prosecuting those who broke the law. But their points are not the only – or even most – important reasons for investigation and prosecution. To understand what’s at stake here, we need to remember the squeegee men.
Back in March of 1982, The Atlantic magazine featured an article by George Kelling and James Wilson, titled “Broken Windows.” Kelling and Wilson argued that the perception of a social breakdown will lead to the reality of that breakdown:
…at the community level, disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence. Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. (It has always been fun.)
Kelling and Wilson wrote about experiments reported on by Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who arranged to have apparently abandoned vehicles parked on streets in the Bronx, NY and Palo Alto, CA. While the time frames differed, the result was the same: both cars wound up being vandalized and destroyed. Kelling and Wilson wrote:
…vandalism can occur anywhere once communal barriers—the sense of mutual regard and the obligations of civility—are lowered by actions that seem to signal that “no one cares.”
This article eventually led to a then-new approach to community policing in which minor offenses were dealt with thoroughly, with the idea that by discouraging disorderly behavior there would be an increase in social order. The most famous – or notorious, depending on your point of view – case of this was in New York City, where Mayor Rudy Giuliani gained fame for such tactics as cracking down on squeegee men. This approach was eventually credited with a significant decline in the general crime rate in New York City.
It’s common to believe that illegal or anti-social behavior is rooted in individual morality: good people behave in good ways, while bad people behave badly. But that’s not necessarily so. As Kelling and Wilson (and others) have found, individual behavior is often influenced by how that individual sees others behave. If boundaries are pushed and nothing happens to the wrong-doers, then the threshold for anti-social or illegal behavior shifts. If someone vandalizes a car and nothing happens, soon others will follow suit. If one Wall Street firm games the system and nothing happens, you know it’s only a matter of time before others start behaving the same way.
This is really nothing new. Who hasn’t, as a child, tried to do something because “everyone else is doing it”? And who hasn’t had their mother or father reply something to the effect: “If everyone else jumps off a cliff, are you going to jump off a cliff?” While we may tell ourselves that adults act differently, history (and the fashion industry) proves that our behavior frequently reflects that of those around us.
While it might be politically convenient to disregard any possible criminal behavior by members of the Bush administration, “letting bygone be bygones” will send a terrible message to the rest of our citizens – as well as the world. It will be saying “we don’t care” about violations of our constitution, international law, and the fundamental idea of human decency.
Ruth Marcus may wish to disregard the particulars and just ensure “that these mistakes are not repeated.” But by blithely ignoring them, we’re likely to guarantee such behavior will someday return.
What Do Libertarian Farmers Grow?
Filed under: dual nature, emergent | Tags: future, individualism, libertarianism
Leave a Comment Washington Post writer and blogger Joel Achenbach recently wrote a piece called “Inventing the Future” for his alumni publication. It’s about a brainy fellow Princeton alum named Nathan Myhrvold, who according to Achenbach is brilliant in many areas – physics, software design, cooking, photography, etc. In his article, one quote by Myhrvold caught my attention:
“Broadly, overall, the way society works is emergent, and it is built on progress — it generally runs downhill toward something better,” Myhrvold says as we get deep into the philosophical weeds on all this stuff. The world is a better place now than it was 500 years ago, he declares. Driving that improvement is, he believes, technology. He’s an unabashed technophile. And he seems to have a strong libertarian streak.
A taste of that libertarian streak comes out a couple paragraphs later:
Many of the visionaries today talk of building a “sustainable” society, a word that seems to rile Myhrvold. “The most sustainable thing about human society is that we innovate,” he says. Later, he elaborates in an e-mail: “The answer is not to pine for a past golden age when things were better (there was no such place or time), but rather to ask how we can use more technology and innovation.” Change, he thinks, is intrinsic to our nature. The future will be different. Survival will not involve preservation of things as they existed before: It will require their creative destruction and replacement.
OK…first of all, I’d love to see a debate between Mr. Myhrvold (aka Mr. T – as in Technology) and James Kunstler (aka Mr. Doomed – as in “we all are…”). They both sound bright and opinionated, and they share an interest in predicting the future. But one expresses great optimism about technolgy and the future, while the other is generally very pessimistic. It would be a fun debate – in an intellectual “fight club” kind of way.
Beyond that, up to a point I agree with Mr. Myhrvold about society being emergent: the way a society is and the way people behave in it develops from the bottom up. However, I believe this is only a part of the picture.
I suspect Myhrvold’s sense of emergence is at the heart of a lot of libertarian thought: “just get out of the way and let things emerge!” Libertarians apparently assume things exist in some vaguely positive state – sort of a social petri dish filled with a fertile growth medium. Given that neutral state, things will always work out for the best eventually. If and when they don’t – like the current financial crisis – libertarians just write it off as “creative destruction.”
There are indeed cases in which The Old must collapse in order for The New to come to fruition. (After all, that’s one of the main ideas behind this blog and my website,) But as we’ve seen too often recently, destruction can often be a product of stupidity or greed rather than creativity.
What Myhrvold and other libertarians fail to recognize is the other side of the bottom-up nature of emergence. Things don’t just emerge willy nilly out of nothing; they emerge in a context. The environment in which they exist will usually play a huge role in their outcome.
Take farming, for example. What a farmer grows and how successful he or she is in growing it will largely be determined by the context of his or her farm: the climate, the soil, water availability, general nature of the land, etc. Any farmer who tries to grow corn in the mountains of Colombia is likely to have as little success as one trying to grow coffee in Iowa.
Crops are an emergent phenomena; a farmer may plant the seeds, but then nature takes over. However, the farmer’s success depends on him or her being mindful of the context of the farm and the crops that are most likely to thrive in it for a sustainable period of time. In addition, to get the most productive crop the farmer must keep in mind the specific needs – water, nutrition, etc. – of the crop over the course of the growing season. Otherwise, under/over-fertilization or a drought can have a serious effect on the yield of the crop.
In the same way, individuals and businesses exist within the context of human society. That society, in turn, exists within the larger context of the local and global physical environment. We are each a part of the world, not apart from it.
This may be easier to understand if we borrow an idea from modern science. Physics has found that at its most elementary level, matter is simultaneously an individual particle and part of a collective wave. It’s dual-natured.
The same is true of people and businesses: we are not just a solitary individual or a part of the group. We are always both at the same time. It’s just a matter of perception, like watching a crowd doing a “wave” in a packed stadium. You can watch the wave of humanity roll around the stadium or you can watch a person participate by standing up and then sitting down with those around them. But you can never see both at the same time.
The problem with libertarianism is that by always being focused on the individual it is blind to context. It’s all particle and no wave. At that stadium, it would see a person getting up and sitting down; it wouldn’t see the wave that individual was a part of. On Wall Street the focus was only on the success of individuals; there was no thought of the way the behavior of those individuals was damaging the financial system as a whole. No wonder so many “experts” were caught off guard by the inevitable collapse. They literally never saw it coming.
If a person tried to farm with a libertarian’s blindness to context, they’d most likely lose the farm in short order. They would plant whatever they thought would be most profitable, regardless of its suitability for local climate and soil. Once planted, the crop would be at the mercy of the “invisible hand” of nature. Maybe it would rain, maybe it wouldn’t; being averse to “regulatory meddling,” it would be against libertarian ideology to alter the natural course of things by watering.
With a blindness to context and an aversion to “meddling,” there’s only one crop a libertarian would be likely to have by the end of a growing season: weeds.
A Tale of Two Flags
Filed under: dual nature | Tags: America, flag, Obama, Panama
Leave a Comment Sometimes images from a life-altering event can remain fresh even after 45 years. For me every January 9th brings back images from 1964, when I was a 6th grader living in Panama. That was when I saw the effects of my first political experience explode into the world news and leave 25 dead and many more injured.
I was purely a bit player – a crowd extra – in what led up to that day. The fact that I was only 11 years old at the time provided an element of farce to what transpired. One thing I learned from then was how quickly mindless fun and frivolity can turn to tragedy and fear.
Detailed historical accounts of the events of January 9th, 1964 – Martyrs’ Day, as it’s known in Panama – are readily available here, here and here.
In 1963 President Kennedy ordered that all American flags in the Canal Zone be accompanied by Panamanian flags, to acknowledge Panamanian sovereignty over the Canal Zone. This order wasn’t popular with many Americans living in the Zone, who mistakenly felt it was really kind of an American colony. After President Kennedy’s death, the Governor of the Canal Zone decreed that as of January 1st, 1964, American flags would not be flown over schools, post offices, cemeteries, etc., to avoid the aggravation of flying Panamanian flags there as well. It would turn out the Zonians weren’t happy with that order either.
I was living in Panama because my father’s American company had a warehouse there due to the canal. Because my parents didn’t work for either the U.S. military or the Panama Canal Company, they paid a monthly tuition to send me and my sister to the American schools in the Zone. (It was believed easier to get into an American college from the American schools than from those in Panama, due to the American curriculum. This was why numerous Panamanian families who could afford it also sent their children to the Canal Zone schools.)
Shortly after we returned to school from Christmas break that year, I became aware of a growing restiveness among the Zonians: they were unhappy about the absence of the American flags from the usual places. The first demonstrations took place at Balboa High School, clearly visible a few hundred yards across a green from my elementary school. Along with the one on the flag pole, there were soon numerous American flags attached to parts of the school, waving in the tropical breezes.
The sentiment quickly spread and demonstrations broke out around the Canal Zone. One such demonstration took place at Ancon elementary school, the other elementary school on the Pacific side of the Zone. Bizarrely, it was reported the students there occupied the administration office (remember, these were elementary school kids), took a flag and ran it up the school flag pole.
At Balboa elementary school, we weren’t quite that brazen. Or maybe the adults in charge were a little more…adult. But we did have lunchtime demonstrations, running up and down the playground waving flags that had magically arrived for us. (Actually, one of the suppliers was a Panamanian classmate named Ramon, who was a natural leader/instigator.) It was all very exciting and fun. So much fun, in fact, that after school we waved our American flags out of the windows of our school bus as we rode through the streets of Panama City to our homes.
Looking back, that was a clearly dumb and provocative thing to do. But what did we know? We were just kids caught up in the moment.
On the evening of January 9th, things came to a head. Panamanian students marched to Balboa High School, where they wanted to symbolically raise their flag and then take it back down and leave. Americans surrounding the flag pole resisted, a scuffle broke out, and the rest – as they say – is history.
For me, the specific chronology of what happened over the next few days has faded from memory. What remain fresh are fragments of memory. My parents had gone that night with friends to the Ft. Amador officer’s club in the Zone. (As a WWII vet, my father qualified for membership and we went there often.) As news bulletins started breaking on the Canal Zone TV station and we gradually realized something was up, we began to wonder how and where they were. (Not really knowing what was happening, they wound up having to make a very circuitous route to find a safe way back across the Canal Zone border to Panama City – encountering a loaded convoy of armored personnel carriers in their journey. )
As I recall, the next morning my dad drove over to the border near Ancon to check out the destruction from the night before. One of the things he saw (which he later photographed) was at the burned out Pan-American building – apparently destroyed because it had “American” in its name. (The building was owned by a Panamanian.) On the side of the building someone had written in red paint “Johnson-you-kill-Kennedy Yankees Killers Go home Soberania O’ Muerte!” (“Sovereignty or Death!”) It was an interesting statement – Haiku-like – revealing an anger at Americans combined with a hinted sense of loss for the recently killed Kennedy. (Only 7 weeks before, Panamanians had widely mourned Kennedy’s death.) It also reflected a certain Panamanian sense of how leadership succession might take place.
The rioting persisted for about 3 more days. During that time, we were confined to our apartment. NBC Monitor, a weekend radio show, reported Panamanians were going from house to house in Panama, dragging Americans out into the street and lynching them. (This turned out to be false, although we did occasionally see cars cruise down our street decked out with Panamanian flags and filled with angry young men.)
With little else to do (there weren’t computers, iPods, video games, etc. back then, and the news was frightening), my family spent countless hours playing Rummy Royal, a board game my mom had gotten us for Christmas. Looking back, it was a peculiar time of crushing boredom and very real fear. It was awful. After the riots ended, we never wanted to look at that Rummy Royal game again.
History will show that the events of that weekend eventually led to the renegotiation of the Panama Canal treaty and the returning of the canal to Panama. The Zonian belief that they could preserve their illusory American colony from “foreign” interlopers blew up in their faces, eliminating their “homeland” instead.
The events of that time shaped me in a number of ways. How I – all of us, really – had gotten mindlessly swept up in the feelings of the crowd made me very leery of large group activities. Years later, when I attended the occasional anti-Vietnam war demonstration, I was always on my guard to avoid getting swept up in any kind of mob action. In retrospect, the events of January 1964 gave me my first awareness of the way individual and group behaviors can be intertwined.
I also developed a very ambivalent view of flags and flag waving. Make no mistake – growing up for seven years in Panama made me very appreciative of what it meant to be an American. I felt as if I had won a lottery of birth. But looking back, all the passion, death and destruction over flags just seemed like a terrible waste. This wasn’t Iwo Jima, symbolically staking claim to land in the midst of a desperate war against tyranny. This was a bunch of Americans who had been too long away from their true homeland, caught up by a passionate moment into believing they could stake a claim to someone else’s rightful land.
My ambivalence and discomfort with flag-waving remains to this day. The way everyone started displaying flags on their houses after 9/11 made me uneasy. I sensed again a rising tide of nationalism that could become unreasoning and dangerous. Looking back on what our country has done in the world since then, I feel a sense of disappointment and emptiness not unlike what I felt in 1964. Look at all the death and destruction that has been wrought, born from the idea that we might somehow redeem the greatness of America by waving our flag where ever we want.
I don’t want to get preachy here, but I feel this needs to be said. America is not great because we can wave our flag in the face of other nations. Such actions only bring resentment and hatred.
America is great because of our ideals – as represented by our Constitution and Bill of Rights. America is great because even when our leadership differs tremendously on what course our country should take, the succession between leaders takes place through ballots instead of bullets. America is great because at our best, like President Kennedy, we sometimes inspire others with genuine hope and idealism. When we are at our best, many others around the world see us as truly a sweet land of liberty.
Sometimes, a seed of admiration for our idealism shows up in the most unlikely of places – like an angry message painted on the wall of a burned out building.
It’s the peculiar fate of America that even with our military might, we are not geared to lead the world through coercion. We’re not good at it and, deep down, the idea of empire makes us uncomfortable. Perhaps due to our rebellious origin, it’s not in our national DNA. But we are very much geared to lead the world through inspiration.
It is now January, 2009; a new era beckons. It’s time to return to our natural path.
=== Fair use for January 24, 1964 Life Magazine cover ===
The image of the Life magazine cover was taken from Wikipedia. Though this image is subject to copyright, its use is covered by the U.S. fair use laws, and the stricter requirements of Wikipedia’s non-free content policies, because:
# It is a historically significant photo of an historical event
# It is of much lower resolution than the original. Copies made from it will be of very inferior quality.
# The photo is only being used for informational purposes.
# Its inclusion in the article adds significantly to the article because the photo and its historical significance are the object of discussion in the article.
===Photograph of Pan-Am building by Donald M. Higgins===
Slay Riding to Oblivion
Filed under: dual nature, energy/flow | Tags: corporations, democracy, digital, individualism, information, media, technology
Leave a Comment Slate has an article – The Digital Slay-Ride – that discusses the ways modern technology is revolutionizing our lives. As Jack Shafer notes:
Folks giggled at Wired founder Louis Rossetto’s bombastic formulation in 1993 that the “digital revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon” and upsetting the old order. But Rossetto is getting the last laugh. Wherever digital zeros and ones can dislodge analog processes, they either have or are. Call it a digital slay-ride.
I think he is spot-on about how digital processes are changing our lives. But when it comes to identifying problems in the newspaper business, his analysis ignores other major issues besides technology – like greedy owners who are detached from the whole point of their business.
Shafer also seems rather cavalier about the fate of newspapers in general:
Before we get too weepy about lost journalistic jobs and folded publications, let’s ask how often reporters lamented the decline of other industries, products, and services swamped by Rossetto’s digital typhoon.
The thing is, newspapers are not just another industry. Since the very beginning of the US of A, they have been an integral part of our democracy. As Thomas Jefferson once wrote “I would rather live in a country with newspapers and without a government, than in a country with a government but without newspapers.” There might not have even been a United States of America if it wasn’t for newspapers’ ability to spread news about developments throughout the 13 disparate colonies.
The need for newspapers to keep citizens informed continues today. As Chris Hedges notes:
A democracy survives when its citizens have access to trustworthy and impartial sources of information, when it can discern lies from truth. Take this away and a democracy dies. The fusion of news and entertainment, the rise of a class of celebrity journalists on television who define reporting by their access to the famous and the powerful, the retreat by many readers into the ideological ghettos of the Internet and the ruthless drive by corporations to destroy the traditional news business are leaving us deaf, dumb and blind.
For any organization to survive and thrive there must be a healthy balance between the interests of individuals and the interests of the group. Too much individualism, and things fall apart; too much group-think and things become static and unable to respond to changes within and outside the organization.
The key ingredient for ensuring that healthy balance in any organization is the free flow of information that can accurately reflect the way things are. For the United States of America, that information has historically been provided by newspapers. If the decline of newspapers leads to a decline in the dispersion of accurate information about the way things are, the result will be a grave threat to our democracy.
It’s A Wonderful Life
Filed under: chaos, dual nature, interconnected | Tags: America, Butterfly Effect, change, individualism
Leave a Comment Back in 1997 I wrote a piece about the movie It’s A Wonderful Life for my website, offering a Quantum Age perspective on this holiday classic. As one of our holiday traditions in the USA is to catch a rerun of the movie, I figured I’d take this opportunity to offer a rerun of my essay.
It’s one of the all-time favorite holiday movies in the United States. While much of it dwells in a world that is dark and harsh, it delivers a message of hope. And it’s so straightforward in its intention, the name of the movie is also its message: It’s A Wonderful Life.
The main character in the movie is George Bailey, a lifelong resident of Bedford Falls who becomes so despondent about his life he wishes he had never been born. Miraculously, an angel named Clarence appears and grants him his wish. As a result, George sees what life in Bedford Falls would be like if he hadn’t existed.
And what a different life it is! His younger brother is dead because George wasn’t there to save him, and a naval transport and all on board are lost in a WW II battle because his brother didn’t live to save them. George’s wife Mary is a spinster librarian, instead of the mother of their children. And the charming community of Bedford Falls, in which many have realized the American Dream of a home of their own and a happy family life, has been replaced by Pottersville, a tawdry honky tonk town in which evil Mr. Potter owns everything and people are hardened and bitter.
Realizing that, as Clarence says, he really did have a wonderful life, George begs to be able to live again. And thus, to his joy and amazement, he finds himself back in Bedford Falls, reawakened to a life that’s both demanding and rich.
This movie is clearly not a reflection of the traditional Newtonian world view. That perspective, with its paradigms of clockworks and machines, removes the human element entirely from the landscape. In embracing the detachment of objectivity, it makes people’s lives irrelevant. The overriding message people receive is “You’re not important, the world can manage quite fine without you.”
It’s A Wonderful Life offers a very different message: one person’s life can make a huge difference in the world.
Even though it was released in 1946, this movie seems to be very much in tune with the quantum age. For one thing, a basic premise of both this movie and quantum physics is that life revolves around relationships. Nothing happens in a vacuum; everything is intertwined with, and interacts with, everything else.
Indeed, everything we learn about George Bailey is revealed in the context of his relationships with others. Much of the movie consists of scenes of his life in which he deals with family, friends and customers. Through these images we learn who George is, and what qualities of character he possesses. We learn that he’s honest, conscientious and caring. We learn that he is not afraid to speak his mind when confronted with injustice. And we learn that he puts the highest value on his relationships with those around him.
But relationships do not work in only one direction, and It’s A Wonderful Life is not just about George’s relationships with others. It’s also about their relationships with him. While he may have helped others in very many ways, they helped George as well. On George and Mary’s wedding night, his friends Bert and Ernie help turn their leaky and run-down house into a honeymoon suite. And when George’s uncle loses the bank’s deposits and it looks like the world is crashing around him, his friends and relatives come together to save him and the bank.
Contrast that to the solitary and amoral Mr. Potter, who seems to be an incarnation of the objectivist world view. Eternally detached from the world around him, Potter measures everyone and everything he encounters solely on the basis of what they can do for him. There is no feeling in his world; everything is viewed through the cold lenses of objectivity and materialism.
Clearly, relationships are the spring that nourishes George Bailey’s life. But by themselves, relationships would not seem to explain the dramatic changes that take place when his life is, as it were, “erased from the books.” Is it possible that any one individual could have that profound effect on the world around him or her?
Having lived for many years in a rationalist-objectivist world, our inclination is to devalue the impact an average individual can have on the world around him or her. We generally live with an image of the world as an immense machine, grinding inexorably along without any concern for, or input from, mere mortals like ourselves. With such a mindset, we tend to view the story of George Bailey as a charming fairy tale, heartwarming but unrealistic.
But if we view it from the perspective of chaos theory, George’s story becomes much more believable.
That is because according to chaos theory minute variations in initial circumstances can have profound effects on outcomes. The classic example is known as the Butterfly Effect – the idea that the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings in Texas can eventually effect the formation of a hurricane off the coast of Africa. But an awareness of this dynamic can even be found in folklore:
For want of a nail, the shoe was lost;
For want of a shoe, the horse was lost;
For want of a horse, the rider was lost;
For want of a rider, the battle was lost;
For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost!
We experience examples of this everyday. We leave home for work a minute later than usual; we come to an intersection just as a slow driver passes by; we wind up behind this driver for two minutes; they turn down a side street and we soon after come to a traffic light just as it turns red; and things like this continue to happen so that we’re eventually twenty minutes late for work!
While we experience this all of the time, we usually don’t think about it, or consider such dynamics as important. But chaos science has found that this dynamic is present everywhere in the day-to-day world. From a curl of smoke to a massive hurricane, or from an electronic pulse in a computer processor to the world economy, minute variations in initial circumstances can create wildly different outcomes.
In such a world the existence, or lack thereof, of any individual becomes a critical factor in the unfolding of that world. Even further, any variation in the behavior of any individual can have vast and unforeseen repercussions. This is a common theme in modern entertainment. Michael J. Fox goes back in time in Back To The Future, and eventually his current family’s life is radically altered. Characters in Star Trek are frequently reminded of the importance of the Prime Directive, which is to avoid interference with any developing civilization, lest its developemental course be inadvertently altered. Such stories can sound fanciful, but we find them easy to understand intuitively because we experience the same dynamics in our daily lives.
The significance of their message, however, can be unsettling. It’s one thing to view ourselves as insignificant cogs in a vast machine; it’s something quite different to discover we are navigators on an unfamiliar road with no map to guide us. All of a sudden, every choice we make becomes tremendously important.
I believe much of the turmoil people feel in their lives today is a reflection of a dawning recognition of this truth. We are torn today between a well-worn sense of insignificance and futility, and a dawning intuition of great personal responsibility. Common reactions to this intuition are to attempt to resurrect institutions and values from the past in which we can once again lose ourselves, or to attempt to control every minute variable that might have a negative consequence for ourselves, our society, or our planet.
But perhaps we can learn to accept this new awareness, and live our lives like George Bailey: be true to ourselves, consider how we can make our world a better place, and find happiness in the small joys life offers. Perhaps, in living this way, we will come to the same realization that George Bailey came to on a fabled Christmas Eve: it really is a Wonderful Life.
© Dave Higgins, December 1997. All rights reserved.
