A Global Mental Meltdown & Hope For The Future
The world is a bit messy today. But we've been here before and we always figured it out. There's good reasons to be hopeful.
For many today, the world seems like it’s in a wee bit of a mess. And well, it is. Also, we’re doing a lot better than ever before in human history. As Mark Twain is credited with saying “history doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes.” We are more than likely in a time of rhyme today.
In this rather short and concise article, I’m going to look at why it is all a bit messy but why there’s every reason to have hope for humanity. The role of technology, including Artificial Intelligence and even cryptocurrency!
My lens is from that of a cultural anthropologist and from a digital anthropology stance. Anthropology tries to understand what it means to be human, which means we don’t just look at old bones and ancient societies. There are many subsets of anthropology.
Where We Are Today
Most of it is obvious and in our hyper-connected world and multiple media channels, we’re more aware, globally as a society, of the ills in the world than ever before, mostly all of us at the same time. That in itself, is new in terms of human existence.
Until recent revolutions in information technology and transportation technology, it took a while for news to travel and the world developed in longer time frames. Not so much today.
And this may well be contributing to why we feel so much more stress, at a global scale, than we did before. Acts of warfare can and are being live-streamed anywhere we are. The Vietnam war was the first one to come into living rooms around the world via television. Wars and disasters today are the first to come into our cars as we’re driving along. Or our bathrooms as we’re getting ready for the day.
Where we are today that is different from our past is being so connected, asynchronously. This plays an outsized role as we will see.
So Many Ends of the Worlds That Didn’t End
Human societies have been shifting, changing, evolving, growing, dispersing, collapsing ever since we swaggered out of the trees and figured out getting along was better than not getting along. We’ve been arguing about all that the entire time. We still are. That too, is what we do and arguing can be quite healthy done right.
Hobbes would probably be doing a wee jig in his study right now, gleeful that he was right. I don’t think it’s going to pan out that way. Never has. No reason to think so now.
Humans have been catastrophizing for thousands of years. More recently we ran about thinking that the year 2000 would shut all our computers down and we’d be eating around campfires again. It was a lovely time though, financially, to be a software programmer. Also around that time, many cited the prediction of the Aztec calendar as further proof the world was ending.
Many an anthropologist and archeologist sighed at that. We knew that the Aztec calendar was just predicting the end of a cycle of time. So it is with many such cultural prophesying. Catastrophising is deeply rooted in our cultural thinking. We just do it a lot more in times of significant sociocultural change. Oddly enough, such thinking often helps us through a crisis and how to make life better afterwards. It’s part of our innate design thinking methodology if you will.
Catastrophising is a form of story telling. And storytelling is how we help make sense of the world around us, from our personal to societal realities. Religions are stories, political ideas are stories. Hence we’ve told stories about the end of the world for a very long time.
Just look at all the empires throughout human history, wretched things that they are. Most historians believe the first one was the Akkadians in 2334 BC, so a while ago. It’s hard to put an exact number on how many times we went about stealing other peoples land and messing with their societies, but it’s probably in the hundreds. The Roman, British, Ottoman and Mongol empires have hugely influenced societies to this day, especially the British as the last one. We’re not even able to really say there’s an American empire. The term is tossed around but it doesn’t meet the technical definitions, some might debate this. That’s healthy to do.
Could we see another empire? Perhaps. Most likely not. We don’t really like them. We’re much more aware of the rather nasty things they do to stay in power. Some suggest the end of democracy is upon us. That’s a bit hasty. Our democratic systems in the West are more stable than is often portrayed. That doesn’t mean they’re not under threat, they certainly are. Humans however, have preferred various democratic and socialistic forms of governance more than not.
The Role of Information Technologies in Global Change
Throughout history, revolutionary advances in communications technologies have pretty much always lead to exactly that. Revolutions. Some very violent, like world and civil wars. Some more subtle over a period of years and centuries, changing culture, then being changed again by culture.
Communications technologies, from an anthropology and sociology perspective, have fundamentally changed the fabric of societies. Each one has enabled faster, lower cost spreading of information. Especially stories. The are comparable to the agricultural and industrial revolutions.
Some suggest that Artificial Intelligence is such a revolution. Perhaps. It is still too soon to make any qualified statement either way. If we cut through the current hype of AI, the story is more subtle and complex.
Information technologies, especially those that are digital, have been around since the 1960s (arguably slightly earlier like the 1940s) and rapidly evolving. The internet has now been embedded at a global scale for about a quarter of a century.
Technological revolutions usually take around 40 to 60 years to have a global sociocultural impact. So, we are pretty much on schedule. At least we’re consistent with some things.
Hope for the Future
Digital technologies, especially communications ones, aren’t the sole cause of todays global turmoil. They, like other technologies, play a part. Technologies only have transformative power when human energy is applied to them. Like flipping down your toaster in the morning. It’s not the technology, it’s the how humans use it.
How the world changes, how we transform our societies and change our cultures is from our social behaviours. And through various means and methods, we’ve always figured it out. Even though it can be a bit bumpy.
For most of our species history, when the going got tough, the tough got going. Literally. Like going away. Anywhere other than where we were. Running away was seen as more productive, most of the time, than hanging about bashing each other in the head.
Today, running away is a bit harder. Countries, borders, laws and all that. Perhaps part of the reason many of us are happy to Netflix and chill or zone out on TikTok and Instagram Reels is because we can, if not physically, at least mentally, run away. For a few hours.
But we’ve always found a path forward. We humans are quite remarkable and incredibly adaptive. Since biological evolution was a bit too slow for us, we invented culture as our evolutionary means. Which is also why we invented technology. We’ve used technologies to get into a few pickles, but we’ve also used it to get out of our jams.
We are doing this now with renewable energy technologies. As Artificial Intelligence improves (albeit slower than some might think), it may help us with the limitations of our collective cognitive abilities and help us with climate change and other issues. But it will be us humans, through culture, that figure out our new desired state of being.
The Future Could Be Quiet Fascinating
Not utopia. Or a techtopia. They’re as creepy as a dystopia. While it’s hard to say how much more messy the world will get, we are already in a time of major global sociocultural transformation. Economic models, including capitalism and globalism, are changing. The carbon based economy is also on its way out. Crypto is car wreck for now, but is fundamentally a social argument, it too may survive.
Technology is right now, rather messy, a I recently wrote. But that’s all part of making it work better. While technology is not neutral and always has unintended consequences, we have always improved it. We’re good at that.
We may well figure out how not to have WW3. Or we may already be in WW3 but it’s not like any war we’ve fought before, with hot conflicts in certain spots and the rest being information and economic warfare. We are also rethinking the means of production and how we want to work.
In the coming years and decades, we are likely to see the idea of Universal Basic Income (UBI) become a reality in many parts of the world. We will live longer. Our population is already starting to decline globally. So we will be able to feed ourselves. We are already seeking ways to live more harmoniously with nature, as we did for the majority of our existence.
We are in a time of generational change. The millennials and Gen Z have lived through the follies of the boomers, while Gen X types like me are stuck, rather befuddled, between it all. But Gen X is not a generation that can cause as much change as those coming next.
We are in a period of transition and transformation. It is frightening, overwhelming because it is coming at us faster than at any time before and is also exciting. For some it is tragic too. In a future article I’ll look at what types of sociocultural changes we may see.
But despite the fact while change is inevitable, and we still dislike it, we do love to change our minds. And right now, we are changing our minds.