Time for some optimism

The human condition has many aspects but unfortunately they do not fit together into some kind of coherent whole. People claiming otherwise are part of the problem. With that in mind, maybe it is time for some optimism – another aspect of the human jigsaw which never can be finished.

To begin with a topical example - anyone who takes a peek at the mainstream media must wonder if they are all going mad. They probably are – their businesses and careers have no future and the frantic, fraudulent clickbait mania is a symptom of that. Ignore it and we won’t miss much but it will subside and eventually find itself replaced by something better. Not much better perhaps, but better.

In any event, mainstream news is mostly promotion for various pressure groups, commercial interests, all kinds of lobbyists, government departments and the interests of transnational bureaucracies. Cheap copy and paste news items pandering to power brokers, celebrities and the terminally opinionated.

Some people appear to believe it but that is merely a side-effect of human gullibility and a need to feel informed. We are slowly learning to ignore it except as a way to absorb a few minutes of the daily routine – to check what the loons are saying. It’s like junk mail – scan it then bin it.

This isn’t the source of the optimism though, merely a symptom and a clue to what is going on. Mainstream media hysteria tends to obscure this aspect, but ours may be the age of the little people, the ordinary folk who go about their lives making the best of things. The world has a greater and greater tendency to revolve around the facts and features of daily life and less and less tendency to revolve around elite politics. It has less and less tendency to revolve around political leaders and the things they think they are doing.

Gigantic corporations such as Amazon, Volkswagen, Microsoft, Facebook, Nestlé plus numerous others from pharmaceutical giants to supermarket chains to coffee shops, plus huge transnational bureaucracies all rely on colossal numbers of ordinary people going about their daily lives, building, growing, making, fixing, supervising, managing, teaching, persuading, analysing, exploring, eating, drinking, working, buying, selling and just spending money in an unimaginably vast sweep of billions upon billions of activities.

Like some gigantic machine with billions of self-adapting parts, this vastly complex edifice of daily activity must evolve as it chooses to evolve or it will slowly begin to crumble and decay. Everyone who matters knows this in one way or another. People who take to the streets, demonstrate, harangue, chant, burn and smash – they don’t know it but everyone else does. Recent demonstrations are fleabites on a gigantically indifferent reality.

This is why the machine knows that the coronavirus lockdown absolutely must be lifted, why it cannot continue for long, why the disruptive global risk of millions of untimely deaths had to be averted however clumsy the means used to avert it. It had to be averted because the machine has to keep running even if millions of deaths was an impossible outcome. But it will learn and next time things may be different and foolish advice will be docketed as foolish advice.

The machine which has to be kept running is built on the daily lives of billions of people like us with aspirations to be more like us. Whatever hysterical signals sent out by the sinking ship of mainstream media, that it the reality. We and our children are more important than they are, we are the future and they are not. Our daily lives keep the machine humming along, the machine which absolutely must be kept humming along. Unfortunately for the mainstream media they are expendable – we are not.