Interesting Times
“May you live in interesting times,” so goes an ancient curse, oft attributed to the Chinese.
“Interesting” is one of those versatile words that, depending on your point of view, actually can turn this curse into a blessing. If you find change to be not the least bit interesting, this wish can certainly be a curse. But it’s a blessing if you’re the curious sort, like me, who can’t wait to find out what’s in store around the next bend or with the next sunrise.
There are many things in our contemporary world that are converging to make our times interesting both as a curse and a blessing regardless of your point of view, and I want to talk about three of them.
Technology
The Blessing: You know the usual suspects: computers, the Internet, advancements in medicine, the global telecom wire, fiber, and satellite infrastructure, plus all of the wonderful applications products that are being developed to leverage these hard assets. We live in a technological time where the quantum leap, that rare phenomenon historically happening no more than once in a lifetime, and certainly no more often than once in a generation, is now actually anticipated with any new industry report. We have many wonderful technological blessings, which make our world extremely interesting.
The Curse: Technology is nothing if not leverage. You’ve probably heard me say this before, but one of the most interesting things I have observed over the last few years is how evil is easier to leverage than good. We are all too painfully aware of how the civilized world is cursed when technology is employed as leverage for evil. As long as those who hate are willing and able to leverage technology in order to perpetrate evil acts upon innocent people seeking merely to enjoy life and liberties, and until the technology is developed to neutralize such evil, we will live in interesting times.
Globalization
The Blessing: Thanks in part to what is commonly called globalization, you can go into any retail clothing store in America, or in the industrialized world for that matter, and pick up a high quality garment or other manufactured item, for a relatively low price. Value increases when the quality and/or productivity of the products we buy keep improving, plus we often have more choices, and yet the prices we pay seem not to rise. Globalization has contributed to holding inflation down, and to what my friend, Gary Shilling calls “good deflation,” in his book Deflation.
Yes, technology also contributes significantly to good deflation. But the global marketplace allows companies to avail themselves of the most cost efficient and productive resources anywhere on the planet, creating an interesting environment in which to produce and distribute goods and services.
People and nations that trade together seem to feel compelled to get along. Furthermore, in another example of the slow death of the dominator model and the emergence of the partner model, national leaders are finding that exporting products is a much more powerful lever for building international relationships and coalitions than exporting politics. It’s interesting that when governments allow products and services to flow across borders unimpeded by politics or protectionism, goodwill among nations and people becomes a stowaway on every delivery.
The Curse: One of Mr. Newton’s laws proposes that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If we pay $29.95 for a shirt, well made of high quality fabric, it’s quite possible such a value was created because a company found a way to make that shirt cheaper. In Newtonian terms, the equal and opposite reaction to your fortunate purchase was the loss of an American job that could no longer compete economically in a global marketplace.
America is entering an interesting but painful period where we will have to figure out how to retrain and re-deploy hundreds of thousands of workers cursed by being skilled only in jobs that are no longer found here.
Religion
The Blessing: Billions of people around the world confess a faith in an unseen and higher power. Isn’t it interesting that the big five faiths, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism, which differ so greatly in doctrine, all in their own way espouse love of fellow man, kindness, peace, tolerance, and forgiveness? Through the blessing of technology, the possibility that billions of believers now have the ability to understand just how similar the fundamental tenets of all faiths really are makes for very interesting times to be alive.
The Curse: Incredibly, after thousands of years, people are still dying in Palestine on account of religion. Religion may become the last bastion of the dominator model, because Homo sapiens are cursed with a primordial dominant self-righteous gene that too often trumps the recessive learned lessons of love and all the other good things.
As important as my faith life is to me, I sometimes contemplate these famous John Lennon lyrics, which I have moved around a little bit to suit my theme:
Imagine there’s no heaven
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to live or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
It’s interesting that after thousands of years of teaching love of fellow man, kindness, peace, tolerance, and forgiveness, ANYONE on Earth would have to imagine that living life in peace might be better accomplished in a world without religion.
Write this on a rock... We do indeed live in interesting times. And isn’t it interesting that whether our time on the planet produces more blessings than curses is entirely up to us? And one last quote from John Lennon, “The miracle today is communication. So let’s use it.”
