Sunday 2 January 2011

Things must (indeed) get worse before they get better - nasty implications

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If Charlton's Law is a correct generalization

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2010/07/charltons-law-things-must-always-get.html

then the implications are uncomfortable.

These include the necessity for stepping-back from the maelstrom of current issues in 'the news', for cutting back on media consumption, and then (having got a clearer understanding) to aim at deep underlying long-term improvement rather than momentary tactical advantage.

Which means, to some extent, leaving the baddies to get on with their work with less hindrance - in the short to medium term.

(Not stopping resistance; but acknowledging that this resistance will be more at an individual level, unsystematic and largely unarticulated at the level of current public discourse.)

Unpalatable consequences, worrying, perhaps dangerous.

Yet inevitable, it seems to me.

And of course things may never get better. Then our choices will have made things get worse faster.

So either we waste our time and energy and inadvertently reinforce the trends we deplore at the deepest level (by playing according to 'their' rules).

Or we resist in a principled way, playing by our rules, at the cost of giving freer rein to the forces of darkness.

No choices are good, all choices seem bad: yet choose we must.

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1 comment:

Steve Nicoloso said...

Do the Amish or Hasidim really have it so bad? Then again, do they live their lives in peace and relative prosperity only because they are tolerated (while it lasts) by the dominant liberal culture? This culture was prepared to spark a pointless Revolution, defend the resulting political Union at the cost of 600,000 lives, and finally to wage war literally to the ends of the earth against any reactionary force that might threaten the Revolution. Is toleration of the Amish and Hasidim, while certainly not foreseen, only an accidental consequence, a quirk of the Revolution? Or does this salutary neglect, which when writ large leads inexorably to unrest and anarchy, derive from actual principles for which the dominant culture is yet prepared to fight and die?