The Best of Times
The New Year always brings out of the woodwork all manner of articles reflecting on the past and the future. The ones I read most closely are those that deal with the here and now. Today I read a Times Op/Ed piece entitled so as to highlight what the writer feels that we are living in the best times that have ever existed, what he called “the best time to be alive.” I like the sound of that as we all like to think that our world and our times are both wonderful. The biggest single reason for that thinking is the fact that we have recently made so much progress on the science and technology fronts. The things that get lots of attention are advances in solar technology, battery technology, green hydrogen and, of course, fusion. Those get so much attention because Climate Change gets so much attention. Add to that the Ukraine situation and the Russian embargo on energy products to the EU and it is fair to say that the need for effective and cleaner sources of energy are extremely high priority. Progress on the biomedical fronts are also cause for optimism, particularly in accelerating areas like gene sequencing of the human genome. I have a niece with two kids who are diagnosed as having Cystic Fibrosis, which is supposedly one of the first possible cures that might come out of CRISPR technology. There are lots of reasons for feeling good about where medical technology is heading.
I’m not clear on the status of all of this modern technology and I have proven to myself over and over again that I am not particularly good at predicting what technology will change the world and what will just soak up lots of time and money trying to get to somewhere meaningful. I actually spent three years running a company that was working in the green hydrogen space. Actually, it started out being in the green ammonia space, ammonia being mostly about hydrogen, but we had to pivot to hydrogen because we were certain that we had that part of the equation locked. Only, when it comes to technology innovation, there is no such thing as a lock. We had spent $40 million finding out how difficult green ammonia was and then another $10 million finding out the exact same thing about green hydrogen. And the worst part was that some of the best technologists and scientists in the world (at least on paper) spent the three years telling me that we were only this (thumb and forefinger 1/16 of an inch apart) far away from greatness.
I am also the guy who thought that Bluetooth was the silliest idea I had ever heard about given that WiFi wasn’t limited to only 30 yards of range. In other words, I am not the guy who should be judging where the world is going technologically because clearly I haven’t got a clue. There are so many examples of this sort of technological idiocy, what we can call the “It’ll never fly, Orville” syndrome that I can’t even recall them all. The incorrect assumption that something won’t work has a name and I have tried to remember and lightly research what that is called, but con’t seem to land on it. What I have discovered is that fallacies and their multiple forms and definitions are so varied that the list of the ways you can be wrong are enormous. I am truly amazed at how many of those lists I have uncovered in just a few minutes and the many, many ways that people have delineated about how wrong any of us can be and for how many different reasons we can be wrong.
I am a big believer that we must all accept our own lack of infallibility. It is a critical part of self-awareness and while it has the downside of creating a degree of harmful lack of self-confidence, that is greatly outweighed by the humility of accepting our need to listen more, talk less and assume even less. This understanding runs so deep within me that when I encounter someone who thinks differently about themselves, I immediately presume that it must be a tactic that they deploy to win whatever game they think they are playing. I watch Donald Trump and his ridiculous attempts to claim to the world that he is perfect and never wrong. They are legendary and oh so very public at this point and yet they continue. They challenge credulity in that one can easily get to a place where you find yourself saying that no amount of narcissism could ever make someone that oblivious to their own ridiculousness. Certainly, they must stare at the ceiling on their own in the middle of the night and realize just how absurd their claims are. They simply must come from a place where he says that he has gotten away with it before and it may work one more time. He probably also believes that it will only happen one more time, ignoring the obvious observation that these things rarely stop happening because untethered behaviors rarely just stop on their own. So, it all becomes quite tactical in the sense that he will try to slide past the truth one more time and be buoyed by those who actually enjoy his ridiculousness, are entertained out of their boredom by his theater of the absurd, and, of course, none of it will ever happen again…really…I promise. As we know, people have, for centuries, defined that very sequence as insanity, so much so that Albert Einstein actually coined the concept as the Quantum Insanity Parable.
The problem with insanity is that it is something that is like beauty in that it is best defined in the eyes of the beholder. If we didn’t understand that before The Matrix, we certainly should now. I remember in my middle school days of the mid-60’s, when the lapel button craze was in full swing, there was a button which said “Reality is a Crutch”. That is a funny thing to say, for sure, and it is intended to make us laugh on the surface because we all know that we have to live in the real world and that to allow ourselves the luxury of wandering outside of its boundaries does not usually end well. When you think about it, man and beast alike decided long ago that ingesting materials (let’s just call them drugs generically, even though the biggest category is clearly alcohol) that detach us from reality, gradually at first, and then totally when breaching the systemic limits. In the days of ignorant bliss (either historically or in terms of youthfulness), as the reality that life is, indeed, a bitch, sets in, the attraction of escapism has a meaningful pull on us. Ignorance may be bliss, but artificially-induced ignorance is also bliss. Insanity is just a very long walk on the ignorance side of life.
So,, where does this all leave us on technology and the times of our lives? We all have a number of things we choose in life. Our paths take us to forks in the road that give us the option to stay real or to trip into fantasy. We also have the ability to choose to be negative (the extreme version of pragmatism) or to be positive (brimming with optimism). And we get to decide about those things both for ourselves and for the world at large. I have no problem with people choosing any of those paths for themselves or for the world, but I have a big problem when people allow their personal choices to wash over onto others and perhaps the entire world. Hitler may have had the right to be a bigot, but he did not have the right to drive others towards bigotry. People have the right to decide that life is precious and begins at conception, but they do not have the right to make that decision for others. Convention tells us that taking one’s own life is illegal, but I’m not sure my philosophy would agree with that. Jim Jones could drink his own Kool-aid, but feeding it to others was wrong.
I would agree with the Times Op/Ed, that these are the best of times. But I would also say that all times are the best of times. Such is my optimistic outlook on life, which is a pathway I choose to follow. Is that my form of insanity, thinking that technology will bail us out of our worldly troubles? I actually think that belief is well-rooted in reality because it has worked over and over again in the history of mankind. But trees don’t grow to the sky and 8 billion people on the planet might finally change that reality. I just choose to believe otherwise and am comfortable in that reality or that insanity.