Velocity

If you get a chance, you should rent the movie "Speed". Talk about a campy analogy for the current mess that we are living through. I won't give you the details. In that way you can look at it afresh. Also, Sandra Bullock has always been pretty easy on the eyes.

But the movie got me to thinking about velocity. In a way, the speed of our lives is what is killing us. We are using any trick whatsoever to try to cram more into our lives in order to make them more pleasant and meaningful. But in the process, we have merely become slaves to our desires for more velocity in our lives. Like a 80's coke whore, we require more and more to get less and less. We drive around in our internal-combustion cocoons trying to buy happiness with granite counters and golf vacations. Instead, we have spread ourselves hopelessly thin, becoming a nation of dilettantes who brush the surface of their lives, trying to create a image of broad experience, but instead achieving a superficiality surpassed only by few.

The lubricant and fuel for this "need for speed" is oil and the digital revolution. Oil allowed for the rapid communication of goods and humans and thus allowed the advent of globalization. That failed. We are so awash in the accumulated dreck from Chinese factories that poison the environment and oppress their people that one longs for the simple evil of Mordor and Sauron. I don't feel that we are the better for it.

The microchip and the internet allowed for rapid diffusion of ideas that should have died a quiet death (read here: Neoconservatism in all of its many perversions). But mostly it stole from us the luxury of time enough to consider our actions.

The things that we have come to cherish and measure our lives by have now become the tools of a massive destruction. You see, I think that the coming collapse will be good for us as a nation and as a species. A necessary thinning, to be certain, but a golden opportunity to squeeze the new technologies and the old wisdom together to create a better world. We will lose some things, but the depth that we gain will more than make up for the loss.

-end-