The Problem

The thing you have to understand is, well, the Industrial Revolution was a fluke. It centred around the advent of fossil fuel energy, which was not in any way a reflection of the next stage of the evolution of humankind. It's just something we figured out how to do, and ran with in our genius-for-innovation ways.

Jump forward a couple hundred years, and one of those pesky exponential growth equations is being played out in the form of our entertainment media technology. Entertainment media was inevitable for us, you see, because storytelling is the gift of our race. All the power of our diverse cultural expressions derive from the mechanisms by which we affirm our personal identities in society, identities being stories of ourselves. Entertainment media are a natural extension of this, being the same stories about people through which we've learned about ourselves told back and forth for millennia.

But we've reached a tipping point in the last few decades, a sharp upturn in media saturation and availability, spurned by the exponential growth of processor speeds during the same period. There is a generation of young adults right now which has been enculturized with unprecedented intensity, and the results so far have been fairly well captured by any given television newscast reporting on the lines to buy the new whatever. We are the gadget and show generation, the gamers who are inheriting society, and for the most part we just aren't that interested.

Among the consequences of this development, one has recently come to my attention. It seems reasonable to assume that(if there be a flaw, it be here), if the number of young people interested in participating in society(i.e, politically, socially, idk...productively?) were to decrease, but the number of positions of power remained typical for our government, that those seats would be filled disproportionately by persons primarily concerned with wealth and power. Now, I don't meant to suggest that an honest politician has Ever been the norm in our society, but only that by this effect the number of such idealists would be decreased relative to those who only sought such positions for personal advantage. Beyond some certain tipping point, perhaps when the actual leaders among their number had grown too sparse to keep the greater body of good ol boys and their kids from running the show, the leadership body might begin to resemble a room full of bickering children who casually hold breath-holding competitions with the national budget. This effect might be explained as the actions of a predominance of middle-aged born-rich idiots, using their jobs to build retirement or secure other jobs; who knows, perhaps some portion of the absurdity of our foreign policy in recent decades might be explained as well.

What strikes me about this explanation, though it may yet be missing something, is that no overarching malicious or exploitative intent is necessarily included; no conspiracies, no shadow government, no secret plans. Our current crisis in leadership, and the subsequent mismanagement of our country by a necessarily higher proportion of stupid and selfish people, can be captured as an offshoot of the entertainment revolution, itself an unintended consequence of silicon ships and fossil fuels. What we are seeing is just what the human race would inevitably do if it had all the power in the world: watch the biggest TV in the world and eat way too much.

Immersion(2)

What do we do, when we reflect on the past? Is there a multi-sensory video of our experiences we re-watch, like taking a personal trip back in time? In fact, memory experiences derive from the same pattern-recognition structures we use to see faces and use math; particular events aren't directly retrievable, but are rather derived from our knowledge of what should have happened, given what else we believe about reality and our lives. It is quite possible, for example, to observe a law of nature being broken and, not "block out" the experience, but rather have no place in our opinion of How Things Work from which to retrieve it later.

So what do we do, when we reflect on our experiences? As I recall the wind on my face, do I but indulge in an appropriate fantasy for what people tell me I was doing that day? The answer, I think, is: only mostly. This is the process of memory, the mechanism of it, but not its function or purpose, not what it accomplishes. After all, what is the purpose of remembering things? By far the lion's share of species on this planet make due with sensory-response patterns, never bothering with learned behaviours; if you're the kinda spider that doesn't know how to build a web effectively, you just die, you don't get better at it. The behaviours of most animals are physically-coded response-sets to the environmental contexts in which they evolved; only a few select species have evolved the capacity for revising, or at least complicating, these genetic imperatives.

(an aside for the anthropocentric: most animals on this planet are insects, microscopic, or both, and so this is a fair characterization of the living generally. "Few select species," is a relative designation, meant to include only birds, mammals, and reptiles.)

"Revision" is the key concept here, for this is what I believe to be the primary function of remembering, the achievement that keeps it in the gene pool. We remember, indulge in reflection and nostalgia, as a method of revising those very patterns from which we first derive our memories. I stood at the base of a tree, the wind dancing with my hair, and then a drop of white joins in: a bit of cynicism works its way into my outlook on life, or maybe I learn to expect irony, but unless I have very broadly-associated reasons for believing it would never be so, I come away with the understanding that no scene is so idyllic that a bird can't shit on it.

So what to we do, when we remember? We fiddle with our sense of reality, try to resolve it with our experiences as much as possible. If the experience is too strange for our sense of things to handle(wind in my hair, sun on my face, tree starts talking), we simply discount the validity of the experience. I was out there in the first place because of stress, after all; need more sleep, plus the sun was pretty hot that day, probably got to me is all. This isn't quite lying, just a novel application of the same creative process we engage in every waking moment.

This is the comfort of nostalgia, and the attraction of dwelling on misfortune: the former reinforces our sense of a world were pleasant memories are made, and the latter reflects our need to explain something we didn't expect. The sadness that comes of misfortune, then, amounts to the cognitive dissonance of believing in a world that exists relative to your own ego and trying to explain why it would do something so horrible to You, what You did to deserve this.