Humbug 122022

We’ve almost made it through another year but it is still a question if we will survive election 22 with its count and recount Christmas message of “I WUZ ROBBED.”

This is the season of “Peace on earth and good will toward all ‘persons’” HUMBUG. The real season message is, “hate, deception, profit, corruption, power and war.”  Might doesn’t make right, but it does spin its positive message.  Rational maximization, “What’s good for me is good for the company/government/country/world/the people.”  A good many years ago I told a freshman class that my generation had made a mess of the world but they had an opportunity to learn form our mistakes to make a better world.  Time has passed and those fresh-persons are now running the world.  They did learn, not to solve problems but how to profit from them.  

Back in my day I did a bit of traveling, discovering that despite nationally, race or gender we are a common people.  Some are smart others not so smart, some are good and others are really, really bad.  Ignoring the cultural artificially induced prejudicial perceptions, the good/bad, smart/not so are fairly equally distributed around the globe.  Orientals are noted for taking a long view of world dynamics but the long view is there for all to see.  Look at the 2020s from the perspective of 1820s and 1920s dynamics.

The 1820s were the era of slavery and colonial expansion by countries seeking greatness.   By the 1920s the resulting great powers barely survived an imperial killing war that saw the United States take a seat at the great power table divvying up the spoils.  The problem was that the war had shattered the world order and victory euphoria obscured a coherent vision of a future.  Governments were falling, inflation was rampant and nationalism gave rise to opportunist dictatorships. In 1820 the world was very large and nations had room to blunder but by 1920 the world had become much smaller and interdependent.   The smallest misstep sooner or later reverberated around the world.  Although xenophobic loud mouth politicians deny it, the 2020 world is so small and interdependent that it should be viewed as one world of one people.

The 2020 dynamics are straight out of the past: nationalist hatred, growing inflation, neo-colonialist wars of conquest, governments’ instability and political corruption.  Political self-interest is the greatest Humbug of all, threatening to drag our one people of the one world into global disorder and melt down.  The dynamics of the past are the same, the players have shuffled, rules have changed and the diffusion of technological capabilities may also dry up our blue marble.

There is little time to prevent the decline and fall of earth to the status of another celestial cinder.  It has taken centuries to reach our tripping point and it will take centuries to repair the damage.  If Earth is to survive all human resources must focus on slowing the downward spiral while searching for solutions.   The one people must ban together, pay attention, resist loud rational maximizers and seek real solutions.

We will go along following the loudest false prophets to our doom, now this is our real Bah Humbug.