sociology – life with interest

The future and the past, told to us in stories since we were children, have merged here and now, in the present. The past: tales of plagues and great suffering, great depressions. The future: artificial intelligence taking away jobs, the wealthy only further consolidating their wealth, while everyone else aggressively treads water and slowly–or quickly–sinks.

A “great depression” hit me yesterday–and not an economic one. One far greater than the typical extisentialist dread. Because meaninglessness doesn’t hold a candle to the curse of humanity: our survivalist and tribe mentality, rooted in our biology, traps us in a constant state of moving backwards when we should be moving forward. Often it’s like we’re on a train, looking out the window, when another passes quickly the other way, and it seems like we’re moving forwards, but actually we’re still drifting to a stop, or at standstill.

Living with a mind that likes to solve problems by putting together different variations of multiple ideas or experiences, the depression comes when I acknowledge that solving for humanity’s achilles heel is much like trying to divide zero by zero. Don’t get me wrong–there are many beautiful, caring individuals who are today risking their lives to help others. There are beautiful parts to humanity as well. But as far as the general sense of progress towards a greater existence, it simply feels as if we’re constantly on that train, moving backwards without noticing.

It may not behoove me in my mental state to watch near-term speculative science fiction, but my husband’s childlike enthusiasm for a Fx series called Devs (and his semi-joking threat to part ways with me if I don’t watch it) led me to watching episode one, and by the end, I was hooked. Its writing is clumsy at times–poignant points are made a bit too perfunctory–but the overall concept is well worth exploring. Inspired by the double slit experiment, the show explores the dark side of quantum mechanics, in giving humans the power to recreate the past and see into the future. It primarily asks us to question the absoluteness of free will, and it seems the physics of it are close enough to possibly possible that it lets ones imagination run free–and/or not free at all (as all our actions and thoughts are on a “tram line,” as the lead character so brilliantly played by Nick Offerman (yes, that Nick Offerman) tells us.) And the show itself is smartly set sometime between now and the next few years, with a might-as-well-be present day San Francisco as its backdrop. It could certainly be present time, with the quantum mechanics work occurring in a lab somewhere on some tech campus, without anyone knowing what was being discovered that could overnight throw our society and way of existing on its head.

Much like Coronavirus has.

There will always be unavoidable threats that face us. A giant meteor could veer a little too close to our solar system and continue its way into our atmosphere and land at such force that civilization is virtually wiped out. An alien species could attack us. The sun could (will) eventually die, as every star does. We derive comfort from progress, our great human “innovation,” yet if there is anything this crisis has–should tech us–it is that we are practically defenseless against these greater threats. The greater the threat, the more incogitable the threat. Instead of moving forward, we’re buried, suffocated, by fake news and conspiracy theorists who vehemently hate science and seek to destroy true progress for the sake of their own comfort thinking they know everything because they read an article somewhere that told them so.

I have little faith in society and thus not the most faith in democracy. I’m not sure the ideal way of managing a massive collective of people, but democracy (and especially whatever version of it we have in America that isn’t actually democracy at all), is fundamentally flawed, as it trusts that the people in a society actually know what’s best for them. It also, at least in the case of American democracy, enables the wealthy to manipulate and gain influence quickly.

Yesterday, Bernie dropped out. I’m not sure his way would, long-term, solve everything. But certainly a system which focuses on making sure every one of its citizens has access to healthcare and a high education is a start. People don’t want to believe that, though, because they’re afraid of being forced to do anything, even if it is in their best interest.

In the conversations and debates I have with friends who are centrists, I find a battle against the belief that progress is good. I sit here, locked in my 800 square foot apartment, wondering why we blindly trust that progress is a good thing. It can be. Certainly vaccines have saved many from horrible illness and death. Our electric cars will reduce emissions and at least minimally slow climate change. But much “progress” is actually regress. Our advancements… do not always advance us.

Even for the positive progress and innovation in the world, why must this type of progress only come from the desire to be wealthy and/or powerful?

I like nice things. I do. I enjoy gourmet meals and wearing overpriced jeans that fit just right and traveling the world in relative comfort. I also like the security that comes with money. No, not money–but wealth. Not “super wealth,” but enough wealth to not have to worry. Wealth that grows enough that you don’t have to think about it wealth. I’m certainly privileged to even imagine a world where that is possible, and lucky to have fallen into a career that, unlike all the things I thought I’d be doing when I was in college, actually pays a livable wage and then some. But, then I wonder, is this world where striving for security–striving for not having to worry about being unable to pay healthcare bills and put a roof over my family’s heads–is a world that shows us any progress at all.

Or are we all really just shifting slowly backwards on that train, lost in the great illusion of progress as “pro?”

Children played in the street, unfazed by the sounds of shelling nearby. Parents ready to grab their children at any moment and run fast to temporary shelter to attempt to save their lives for another day. Toddlers and infants freeze to death in the night.

That is not our dystopia. It is the story of civilian families in Syria, caught between a sealed Turkish border and shelling on all sides, in a war far filled with horrors far beyond our imaginations as we grow anxious over our 2%-8% chance of dying from a destructive virus that looks a bit like a Ferrero Rocher candy as illustrated.

It’s hard to say it helps to put things into perspective as those who are incubated, strapped down, without the allowance of family to provide comfort, and fortunate enough to have their own ventilator, feeling as if they’re drowning for days upon days, may actually prefer to be freezing to death in a war-torn country. The world is a sadist and certainly has no shortage of creative ideas for how to torture her inhabitants. To be fair, we torture her back and ensure equal agony on all sides.

It is perplexing how, given life is already so difficult with its illnesses and the mortal fate that we all share, we still manage to make everything so awful. It isn’t that hard to live a good life and doesn’t require a great deal of anything outside of healthy food, fresh air, safety and health, warmth, friends and family, and a roof over our heads. As a society we’re in such a race to innovate and make things better but what is better? If we rush to innovate to make things better and we’re creating technologies that optimize all of our work so that we no longer have jobs, and at the same time end up in a situation for one easily spread virus can take down our society literally overnight, are we actually making any progress forward?

This pandemic isn’t even that bad. Not to make light of the suffering of those who are made extremely ill by the virus, or the horrors dying alone gasping for breath. But it looks as though through all the deaths and after effects of surviving moderate and severe cases of the illness, we still as a society will exist, pretty much as we had prior to our 2020 plague. We’ll mourn the loss of loved ones, and in a worst case scenario that my pessimistic mind says will likely play out, 75% of us will experience the illness, and all of us will know someone who died from it. We’ll mourn collectively, we’ll scream out our tears, we’ll say our thanks to the healthcare workers on the frontline some who too gave their lives in this battle, unprepared and ill equipped. Then, one day, sooner or later, it will all be back to normal. And it will be up to us to not forget and to invest in battling such pandemics because they will return, likely in our lifetimes. If not a pandemic, then surely climate change, class warfare, and other challenges we face will take us down without much better planning and just a tinge of social architecting.

What if we took all of our collective intelligence and put this towards saving ourselves? There is only so much saving we can do. Wars will still be fought. Children will still freeze because sociopaths rule the world and, in many cases, hide behind religion and other myths which fuel the madness that makes it ok for death of the innocent to ever be ok.

Those partying on the beaches of Florida or the streets of Bourbon fail to see that they are shelling our nation right now, but the behavior of our masses is less horrific to me than how we as an advanced society have allowed ourselves to get here. To the point where nurses are begging for protective gear to be donated. Where people coughing and feverish cannot get a test to see if they have been exposed to the virus because protocols still ask if they’ve been to a foreign country with the illness when the illness is right here in our own backyards. And front yards. Where hospital administrators are telling our healthcare workers to reuse masks and where we do not have enough ventilators to save those who will need to be saved in a pandemic situation which has been modeled out and understood for years yet ignored by our government in inaction that can be defined as nothing short of criminal.

We will get through this. And, as the history books tell us, even the longest wars fought eventually come to an end. With our lives of maybe 100 years, if we’re lucky, time tells us stories differently than they are written. But there is no reason for any of this suffering. These self-inflicted wounds and slices that cut through the heart of the bare minimum things we need to just live our lives. Our dystopia is of our own making. As continue down this path I see the smoke billowing across our future, the dust settling on another failure of using all the brainpower and computing power we have to get ahead of the otherwise inevitable destruction that will toss all humanity so deep into a gaping pit with walls slippery and unclimbable, Mother Nature leaving us there, laughing at our once and many times avertible annihilation.

This is our dystopia.

Tag: sociology

Lockdown Day 24: Devs, Plagues, and Capitalism

Cheers to Our New Dystopia.