Well, that's not exactly true. We've come to know a good deal since the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution, about how the universe works, what life is and how our natural world came to be, our own biology -- all sorts of important stuff that I and all educated and sane people know very well. Nowadays a lot of people don't want to know the truth, but that's not what I'm talking about.
Specifically, nobody knows enough about human society to predict its future. Every year we get a whole lot of economic forecasts which offer a range of predictions about the stock market, interest rates, GDP, unemployment. Most of them are substantially wrong, and the prognosticator who guessed right this year will be wrong next year.
I don't think anybody foresaw the sudden collapse of the Assad regime in Syria. SecDef Lloyd Austin said he sure didn't, and if anybody should be in a position to know it would be him. Now people are coming up with all sorts of reverse engineering solutions to why it happened, most of which are absurd. I've seen a lot of takes that Israel wiping out Hezbollah deprived Assad of a necessary base of support but that is completely absurd. Hezbollah had virtually no physical presence in Syria and could not possibly have done anything to defend the regime. It is much more plausible that Russia could no longer defend Assad because of the Ukraine war, and that mattered a good deal. But still, nobody saw it coming.
I thought I was being transgressive by refusing to shed a tear for United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, but it turns out my reaction was basically mainstream. However, it also turns out that he was not acting out of personal grievance. He was a rich kid with an Ivy League education who adopted what I consider to be very correct views about the health insurance industry but decided to take a bizarre action in response. Bizarre and apparently feckless as murdering the guy seems to be, it has provoked a massive outpouring of rage against the industry which just might matter in the end, which is to say that much of history is stochastic. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, Hitler surviving his WWI injuries, Comey announcing he'd found a new trove of emails just before the 2016 election, Joe Biden blanking out in the debate . . . there are a googleplex of minor events and accidents that have massively changed the world.
We don't know what's going to happen. We never will. Just do your best to get through it.
2 comments:
Spoken like the stoic, crusty Yankee that you are. I don't disagree. Like my friend Dave Kuehn said,, we could be living in a paradise. If only we had the will to do so.
Even though it was unjustified, it does seem to have brought to attention the whole issue of health management.
At one time I worked for a small, locally owned life insurance company that was one of the first to add a form of health insurance to their other lines. I think it was in the late '40's or early '50's. They were still doing it, and it drove them crazy. Some years they made a lot of money, and some years they lost a lot - uncomfortable for a company used to the predictable life business. The biggest problem was aggregating policies. Annual claims for a small group would vary tremendously, and the rules made it hard to collect everyone into a single group. That is a great argument for establishing a single universal group BTW.
Another factor that is seldom discussed singly: Every year treatments for previously unaddressed conditions appear, and better ones for existing ones do also. These generally increase the cost of coverage, and you seldom hear someone who has a condition saying an improved technique shouldn't be implemented due to its cost. If you want to get more don't bitch if you have to pay more. Duh!
This attitude seems to show up in a lot of places. Lower the cost of housing? Drop the price of gas? Of groceries? The cost of housing reflects the price of the lot and construction costs. Unless you can find someone skimming too much you'll need to put more units on a lot, or find a cheaper way to construct an adequate house - or cut back on the number of bedrooms or bathrooms you can tolerate. The discussion seldom talks about the core mechanisms needed; it seems to imagine some kind of wand to make it magically happen.
When we complain about the price of groceries we never mention the welfare we get by paying the pickers wages none of us would accept for the same work. The only positive I can see with mass deportations is that it will expose this freebie - and a bunch of similar ones.
Post a Comment