Golly, it’s been a long while since I was writing this kind of thing for an audience beyond myself. I journal infrequently as a means to eject the wonderings and get things down, but as for writing and pushing it out into the world rather quickly… it’s been some time. I miss it, and am rededicating myself to a semi-frequent post here.
I’m wrestling with a rapidly-increasing sense of foreboding about where contemporary society seems to be heading. From all I have read and seen of the early twentieth century, we appear to be repeating a lot of the social and political patterns of the 1920s and 1930s:
- Dividing people into groups of ‘acceptable and worthy’ or not – by religion, economic status, class, and race
- Machismo has been re-placed on a pedestal
- Power is sought by angry and insecure people, who shamelessly lie and deceive in order to win that power
- There is selective disregard of whatever components of the law, convention, faith, and societal norms don’t suit particular objectives
- A fog of despondency is settling on those whose work and dreams extend further than their own benefit
- Derision of people and groups who raise all these points for discussion and consideration.
References to 1930s Europe are appearing more frequently. To the build-up and expansion of fascist leaders and systems like those of Germany and Italy nearly a hundred years ago. To the gradual-but-quickening erosion of law and order. To the blaming of ‘others’ for the problems people feel they have. To the submergence of rationality and critical thinking.
One could contend that if we look at the key events and periods that lead to the second World War, the COVID pandemic might be equivalent to the Great Depression – financial and social hardships, practical and psychological insecurity – tilling the soil for the resentment and viciousness that would fester for a decade before shots were more formally fired, marking the beginning of that period of time we recognise as that war.
History records that Churchill almost-alone was able to foresee what Hitler would become and seek to create. Others would follow over several or more years and a groundswell of pushback, and acknowledgement of what would be required, coalesced. But I fear we may not have those watch-and-see years available to us in this iteration.
We are at a more critical juncture than a century ago: our global interconnectedness and a more immediate butterfly effect; the precipice we stand at of artificial intelligence; the widening canyon between the upper echelon and lower rungs of wealth distribution; the arsenals of entrenched and shared-goal powers; the mistaking of gossip for critical inquiry.
All of these are a handicap on their own, and together they are the heaviest of concrete boots, weighing down healthy evolution.
What the short and medium term hold for us is unknowable and that is worrying. It took global conflict and 60 million deaths before enough collective resolve could banish the ills we find confronting us once more. And as is now apparent, they weren’t decimated but merely diminished.
As are we all by the rapid normalisation of division, pillaging, and the victim mentality of the long-term beneficiaries of entrenched inequity and patriarchy.