It's Good to be King
the good old days are overrated
Editors Note
I am a big believer that if you are not changing, you are dying. I am constantly experimenting with my writing and presentation. To have a better flow, I am instituting the use of some headers as I write. The goal will be, most evenings to share my inspiration, introduce the topic, and let the rest of it just flow. Please lend some feedback. I am always willing to adjust the plan.
The Inspiration
Today’s title is inspired by an old friend who I met while living in California. My friend now lives in Texas and has led a storied life. I go out of my way to anonymize people I reference in my posts. Suffice it to say, my friend, who I will refer to as M, was the inspiration for today’s title since he wrote a book with a very similar title. “M” and I agree on many things and also have a lot of things we disagree about. The discussion and the reasoning are what I always enjoy about a conversation with him. M has never shied away from a discussion about an issue nor is he prone to roll over to get along. He remains courteous and gentlemanly and firmly engaged in the world. I believe he is a man for whom facts inform him and opinions engage him, they do not scare him.
The Topic
One of the recurring premises in my writing is the great fortune we all have to be living in this world today. I believe that the last 200 years have introduced more improvement and impact on the life of a human being than the previous 2,000,000 combined in most spheres of life. I believe that my grandchildren will eventually experience more life transformation than all of American history before them. Their lives will require a seatbelt. Rapid change and the embrace of the scientific method now deliver change and quality of life improvements in all aspects.
Velocity Beats Feelings, Misgivings & Nostalgia
I have always been of the school of thinking that viewpoints on issues swing left and right in the country and we mistake the overshoots of policy as significant. I consider even what appears as wild swings to us today to be mere “signal noise”. If a wave is cycling up and down but is tilted skyward (positive slope), the small variation of the up and down is the signal noise. The overall trend is upward and it is not worth fretting about the details.
Stuff like computers and phones get better and better SO FAST that we just take it for granted. It is not just computers as solar cells for power are about 90% cheaper than they were 10 years ago. I wish that food prices would do the same. If energy and computing continue to reinvent themselves as they have been doing for decades, many aspects of our lives will continue to improve as a result. For those with a scientific bent, the pace that things like computers are improving is described pretty well by Moore’s Law. The pace makes this an exciting time to be alive. Our parents did not experience this pace of improvement that we now take for granted. We are now at a time when we might even delay buying something like a new phone because the next version might improve so much. The acceleration of improvement is exciting. Our age is special because we are the first humans ever who can feel the upward trend of progress with the noticeable progression of so many elements of our lives. There has never been a time before quite like this. The optimists overstate the progress and the pessimists fear the progress and yearn for the good old days. In the end, the curve is upward and no level of yelling the sky is falling or fretting nostalgia for the good old days is going to make a difference in the long-term trajectory of destiny.
I believe that life continues to improve in nearly every way. Regardless of the political persuasion at a given time, the extremes will be rounded out and the craziness on the fringes will age out, mature, or slowly come around while never admitting what they formerly asserted. I believe that the greatest challenges will be in managing all of this change both at the individual and state levels.
This means, that in the long-term, regardless of what your circle of friends might surmise or your news source might shout, it is a good long-term bet to believe that the age of the carburetor, the typewriter, the one-room schoolhouse, and the turntable is in decline and is not going to return. These all may be nostalgic-laden ideas and even perhaps fun hobbies, but their days are numbered regardless of the signal noise some may employ. I encourage people to give extra consideration whenever someone tries to explain something in terms of static truths from 50, 100, or 500 years ago. I think that most of that type of argument is a bit silly.
Changes that give me hope
Does this make me an optimist? I am not sure. What is clearer to me is the inevitability of this progress in a world now dominated by the scientific method. I believe partisans and politicians are merely bit-players who can gum up the works and impede progress. The onward climb will overwhelm them and their point-of-view, often framed in fear, will age out and become mere footnotes on the road to progress. In my first job out of University, I had work colleagues who grew up amidst segregated water fountains. In 1967 (almost 200 years since the founding of the “more perfect union”), the Supreme Court finally ruled that laws banning mixed-race marriages were unconstitutional. Today, it is estimated that 35% of families have an instance of interracial marriage in their family.
The pace that attitudes change keeps speeding along. The pace of change alone seems to have brought a larger backlash. This is mostly, in my opinion, due to the limitations of how our brains work. We are pattern-recognition engines. Differences observed or considered are managed differently in our brains. Opinions, once ossified, are difficult to revise in our minds.
I grew up in Western New York and was blessed to be raised by great parents who provided guidance and stability. In our home, if it were not for the financial prowess and management of my mother, our lives would have been much less certain. I was born in the 1960s. I remember hearing about the history of EVEN ALLOWING women to have a bank account. This article provides a reasonable account. It was not until 1971 that the Supreme Court even got around to ruling on such a matter. I am so grateful that my mom was managing the banking in our home. I believe even the most “traditional-values person” has hopefully come around to the merits of this. It is worthwhile to realize this happened IN MY LIFETIME and is not ancient history. I did not provide this reference as political but rather how the common sense of today was not even settled law in my youth.
One of the tragedies of the story above is that women were granted the right to vote in the 1920s (it took us 145 years to get that right). My mother was born in 1928 and lived nearly 45 years before we figured out the bank account nonsense. What makes this the GREATEST TIME EVER to be alive is that transformations are now happening well within the span of a human lifetime. We waited almost two million years for the lightbulb. We waited almost 125 years for an improvement on the incandescent and only ten more years for an even better LED. We waited 75 years for a cassette tape to improve on vinyl. We waited 20 years for the compact disc. We waited 10 years more for no more discs. Our children get transformation every 3-5 years.
Amped up for the future
We are on the cusp of not damning people to the limits of the human lifespan while our world cannot evolve the surroundings within that time frame. It will be a better world when the focus pivots to a technical or social issue and resolution and improvement can move all of us forward. For me, this is genuine progress. Once females were granted the vote, it would have been great if all of the other accompanying battles for equality had come with it. Banking, Title IX equality, and property rights all trudged along kicking and screaming. It will be a BETTER world when the follow-on changes come quickly in succession to the original realization. I would imagine that this will give rise to more desire to “go back to the ways we did things in the old days”. The recent battles over rights and traditions and the greater speed at which we moved to resolution give me hope that once humans get accustomed to the faster pace, we will learn to adapt and not be so angry and adamant about resisting change.
Social policy will bend to these very same demands because human beings realize for the VERY FIRST TIME that change does not have to be measured in eons, centuries, generations, or even decades. In a free society such as ours, we are all kings. There has never been a better time to be a king than right now. We finally arrive at today’s title. What an amazing concept that we can all be kings and queens. Many of us derive meaning by trying to control others which I find to be tragic. Letting others make their choices is merely a king or queen respecting the sovereignty of all the other kings and queens amongst us. The only options open to old royalty were intermarriage or war. These are reasonable similes for our lives. Choose to get to know those you disagree with in lieu of finding a reason to ostracize them. It is possible and recommended to hate the sin and love the sinner. This seems a small price to pay for the serenity of attaining so much power over our OWN lives.
Tonight is not the time just yet, but I think that technology and its effective use will be the cudgel that will speed the evolution of humans to change their views about controversial matters. The key I believe will be to apply the technology in an appeal to our primal senses like sight and sound. Only time will tell if my hopes for its impact will come to pass. I will likely pursue that as a topic in the future. As a preview, the rapid pace of real improvement will become a larger and larger impact on our minds and we know that we are adaptable.
The Best Time Ever to be Alive
The most powerful person on earth (the king of England of 1820) lived in a cold, damp castle and was a prisoner of darkness amidst whale oil lamps, kerosene, and candles. Buckingham Palace was electrified in 1883-1887, only 135 years ago. Heating with wood in hundreds of fireplaces was the answer for generations. If you are a frequent reader, we abandoned our wood-burning fireplace in our home and are thrilled with the upgrade. I was so happy, I wrote about it! The monarch traveled hundreds of miles to get relief from the heat since air conditioning was still 100 years in the future. I am confident that most of us sleep more comfortably in the wintertime today than the king managed 200 years ago. Lest you believe he/she slept comfortably, the innerspring mattress did not even exist until 1870. Mattresses were basically sacks of hay, cotton, or down. The expression hitting the hay referred to beating your mattress before sleep to get the critters and bugs out. It’s good to be king and never more so than today.
Tonight’s song is one I can’t help but feel good when I hear it. Thanks so much for taking the time to read it. Your comments and criticism are always welcome.