It seems like another one of the disturbing things about what’s going on is just that we seem to have really imagined ourselves as being taken care of.
We live in this highly protected, highly carefully managed, orderly environment, where we have so many complex systems that are basically outside our personal control, but that we rely on.
I mean, even as I say this I’m hearing the sirens of some emergency vehicles.
Listen to that.
We have an emergency, we call.
We call on the emergency vehicle, and we can expect it to come.
When somebody commits a crime, we expect it to be investigated.
Now of course, it’s not perfect.
We can look at all the ways that our system is failing, and many people are not, you know, benefiting from all these supposed benefits of the system.
You can always look at the failings.
And yet we are still so far above the level of no system.
I mean, because, you know, really, the flaws in the system, the failings, really stand out, but that’s relative to what we imagine to be a perfect system.
So, well, you know, yeah, the system’s not fair towards these people, or the system doesn’t help in this particular area, and this thing takes too long, and this thing’s broken.
But those are all criticisms of how the system is not behaving as it ideally should.
It still all depends on this idea that we are taken care of by a system.
It’s so built into our lives that we operate within this whole system, this whole civilization, this whole architecture, this whole infrastructure of how everything works together in order to have an orderly peaceful society, for the most part.
And we can really take that for granted.
And even when we criticize the failings of it, that just even shows even more how we take it for granted, because “Look at how this is not perfectly taking care of us.” We still assume that we’re being taken care of by the system.
And, you know, it’s a great thing that we have this, because it allows us to get so much more done when we have this kind of apparatus that can take care of emergencies and intervene when certain things, you know, get out of order, you know, respond to crime and violence and all these things.
Not to mention provide us with all the utilities.
I mean, every time we turn on a tap and get clean water coming out, this is absolutely wonderful.
But we’ve become so used to it, we’ve become so used to being taken care of, that when it changes, when something changes, it really is like we’re like babies that don’t know what to do.
We’ve just been abandoned by our parents.
Because we expect to be taken care of.
We don’t know how to take care of ourselves.
And, you know, it sounds like the usual kind of complaining about oh, you know, “This generation’s so soft.
In my day we knew how to defend ourselves, and, you know, could live off the land.” All this kind of thing.
Of course, for the most part, it’s better to have this orderly system that we can live in, so that, you know, each of us doesn’t have to spend our time in self-defence, hunting for food, and this survival mode.
But it does seem like with what’s going on now, we’re kind of getting a little hint that maybe the system is not always going to be there for us.
Maybe we can’t rely entirely on being taken care of.
So that maybe we have to remember that underneath the whole system, underneath this whole built-up construction that’s taking care of things, is a simpler level of this is nature, this is the world, and there’s nothing automatic on top of that.
There’s nothing automatic about having anything more than survival.
So we have it, when we have it, great, but maybe it’s good to remember that none of this is something that we can assume to always be there.
And when it’s threatened, when it seems to not be behaving perfectly, that’s when we can remember what it’s like: what would the world be without this system taking care of us?
#takencareof #thesystem #civilization