Carambolage
By Dan. Filed in overview |
Imagine you are driving along the highway, perhaps a bit above the speed limit. It doesn’t seem too big a deal since everyone is also driving the same speed. Suddenly the car to your right veers in front of you.
You jam on the brake, too late, as you plow into the offending car.
Both cars starts spinning out into the oncoming rush. The car behind you, brakes screeching plows into your side, and just as suddenly, the car behind him adds to the growing pile up.
This is a carambollage. It is a wonderful French word for this kind of a crash; that expresses the idea of a disaster with multiple integrated causes. It is a concept which might be right at home with quantum physics. It is a word I have been using fro a few years to describe the interrelated carnage that we can all see happening around us as multiple crises overlap and accelerate each other. Its just that we don’t have a way of talking about overlapping disasters that allows us to see them with any clarity.
Instead of a careening car crash, most people are experiencing a huge historic “carambollage” of events as a cascade of ”unforeseen” events overwhelm our individual and collective sense of safety and stability. Maybe your personal scenario starts when you loose your job in financial services because of a credit freeze-up started by collapsing housing values. Sitting there fuming in a traffic jam you wonder how you will continue to pay for your gas and heating fuel. The rising prices are made worse by supply disruption connected to Global warming caused hurricane damage on the Gulf coast and possible peak in available oil supplies. As you arrive home, you are greeted by the sight of your son blankly staring at the TV eating a snack plate. This is the same son who has been staring at the TV for 23 years and even though he recently graduated from college he, along with 50% of recent graduates he can’t afford to live anywhere but at home. Your spouse starts screaming that your health insurance is no longer covers basic tests and she has found a lump on her breast. You feel like life is battering you from all angles, and you can’t get a handle on what is really happening.
Kurt Vonnegut has a maxim in his famous book, Cat’s Cradle. “Coincidence is when you weren’t paying attention to the other half of what was happening”. That pretty much explains how most people view the world. We each try to muster the energy to plod along within the demands of our jobs, and our families and perhaps the institutions that encompass those jobs and families. Everything outside that limited universe like politics, economics, environments, population, religion and technology all smack of something coincidental to our lives but not directly important. They are the things that dull wonky people talk about in newspapers or on NPR, but are rarely issues of everyday life. That is, of course, unless they come up and whack us upside the head, which is what is happening right now. Western man (and woman) is getting whacked in ways that are surprising and frightening. Like in that daisy chained car crash, it seems we are entering a time when we will all be surprised at how many of these un-thought issues are bout to blind side us as spin out of control into a set of overlapping crises.
Here is the big challenge. Responding to this confluence of frightening and seemingly unrelated events will require most of us to overturn almost everything we have been taught about how the economic, political and social realities.
For millennia, our sages and prophets have told us that the common and received wisdom is really a collection of self serving lies propagated by a insular consortium of economic, cultural, religious, corporate and political elite. But, since these elite forces also tend to have a hold on our livlihoods and security, we have more often tended to enshrine the prophets while ignoring their messages.
They all view the world from their own positions of privilege, and are so narcissitic that they assume that what they want is what is good for the world. The corporations want increased profits, cultural leaders want more people who think like them, religious leaders assume they are sole custodians of the truth. Most Americans and Western Europeans want to feel comfortable, secure and pampered.
So we have the great collusion. The elites promise comfort and security in return for the broad populace to disengage themselves from real decision making and allow the elites to do what they will. And this collusion worked great as long as people didn’t look to closely to the man behind the curtain. But Toto is pulling away the curtain and the guys behind the curtain are scary and ugly, and we just want to get away. But as of now, we haven’t figured out how.
This blog will therefore be place to notice and discuss the various interpretations and evidence of interrelations between the seemingly fractious and fractured events of our current times. There is no more hoping that things are going to get better soon. There is only knowledge of what has actually gone wrong and earnest effort to build anew with that knowledge.
Tags: concept, possibilities, train wreck