As so often happens, in a distant village, a troubled twenty-something sought counsel and guidance from an elderly guru that lived on a mountain at the end of a steep torturous trail.
As the young adult, struggling for breath, approached the master, he asked, “Why do you guys always live in such difficult places? Can’t you be a hermit close to a road even? How do you even get food up here?”
The elderly man’s wise countenance clouded, un-guru-like. “What is it with you punks these days? You all want to climb Mount Everest as some vanity project, but come here for advice and complain about the trail?”
“Well, I don’t want to climb Mount Everest. Just want the advice.”
“Ah it’s ok, it’s almost lunch time. Did you bring any food? You’re not wrong about that part.”
“No. Was I supposed to? I’m new to this.”
The old man sighed. “‘I’ve gotta talk to the monks. They’ve got this all figured out. Anyway. How may I help you?”
“I’m feeling lost, and I need guidance.”
“You have come to the right place. Many arrive this way, and leave with inner peace.”
“Great to hear. Ok. Could you explain modern politics for me?”
“Get the hell off my mountain.”
“Oh, it’s your mountain now.”
The elder picked up a rock and cocked his arm, but then slowly lowered it and let the rock fall to the ground.
“It’s a turn of phrase, kiddo; look around, do you see any neighbours? Excluding mountain goats? Having said that, I may have been quick to judge your request. From what I gather things are a little crazy out there, presently.”
“Tell me about it.”
“It can all be paralyzing. But there are ways to make it better. Come sit here on the ground with me.”
“Do you have something I can sit on? It’s kind of rocky and pretty cold.”
The elder this time launched the rock with surprising velocity and accuracy, a direct hit to the shin. They youngster howled, hopping on one foot, then quickly sat down as he’d been beckoned to.
“Did you enjoy your first lesson?” the elder asked, biting into an apple that had appeared from his robes.
“What, to throw rocks at people? I thought you guys were all peace and love.”
“Not when we’re hungry. There are of course other ways to get the point across, but I don’t have all day. But anyway, the lesson was that there will is pain in politics, particularly if you try to understand..”
“Looks to me like you have all day. What else do you do around here?” the youngster asked, peeking over the master’s shoulder at the interior of a bare-bones hut.
The old man sighed. “Before I explain the first lesson, which I’m wondering if you learned from at all despite that lump, a good first step is to avoid being a smart-ass. You may even consider that a basic rule for life. Get that for a tattoo. I don’t get it when people get some clever tattoo on the back of their neck or something, can you explain that to me?”
“Now I’m answering the questions? What is this? Oh wait…was that a test?”
The elderly man smiled. “It was. Humility is the antidote to smart-assing. You did not pass, but caught yourself, the first sign of awareness. In politics, if you are a smart-ass, life will often toss you a perfect pitch on which to unleash a home run of sarcasm, and the key to politics is to not take it.”
“So that’s the first lesson? Not much of a lesson.”
The old man kicked him on the shin’s lump, eliciting another howl.
“I’m going to have to add lessons in patience, and it should be obvious to you that we’re going backwards. Now listen.
“The first lesson is that pain is involved in politics of a sort that you may not be used to, quite different than that derived from a rock. In politics, you will encounter people that will see the world in ways that you cannot comprehend. Suppose you see a drug-addled bum on the street. One type of person will become enraged at the affront to the safety and peace of ordinary citizens, and yell “Get a job!” Another will see the same bum and be filled with compassion. Your pain will be that you will most likely be in one of these camps, and you will have to try to understand the world from the viewpoint of the other.”
“That doesn’t sound all that painful.”
“Are you sure? Have you seen post election meltdowns?”
The youngster grimaced. “Oh man, it is wild.”
“It is indeed. And if you are old enough to remember, you will recall that it was exactly like that the previous election. The one that went the other way.”
“So is that it? Every election will bring this deluge of misery?”
“Pretty much. And it’s getting worse. But remember also that it will bring just as much joy, to the other side.”
“How can that be? In perpetuity? Isn’t there a happy place where it works for everyone?”
“Not really. That’s the painful part, to realize that is permanent, to a degree.
“Imagine starting a business, that it is really successful, and you hire a thousand people and become rich beyond your wildest dreams. Is that good or bad?”
“Well it sounds pretty good to me.”
“And yet many adults, who will get to vote just as you do, will see it as a problem for two reasons: one, that there is now even more inequality in income, and two, that you got rich off the backs of workers. And they will think that no matter what you do with your business short of giving it all away.”
“Well maybe they should. Give it all away. The super rich people. Or most of it.”
“They could. But that wouldn’t solve the problem. Imagine you took all the world’s wealth and divided it equally amongst all citizens. Let’s say everyone becomes a millionaire overnight. What do you think each person’s bank account will look like in six months? Will they all still be millionaires?”
“I doubt it. Some will blow it.”
“Exactly. And ‘blow it’ has all sorts of meanings, not necessarily good or bad. Some will invest it and grow it and save for a rainy day, and some will spend a lot of it to experience life to the full in the short time we are on this planet. Is that a bad thing? To want to experience all one can on this short time we have on the globe? Or maybe they blow it on meth. Not so good, that one, but still, backstories are helpful. Anyway the point is, as long as there are poor people and rich people, some will see that as a fundamental issue to be solved. Some countries get closer than others. But the challenge will always remain, and will be more of a challenge the more free a society is. And you can debate the value of a free society til the cows come home, because for whatever complicated reason, people inherently view the subject differently.”
“The source of all the political strife?”
“Sort of. The hardest parts come when trying to be a responsible citizen and using the tools you have to push your vision of what a good society is. It becomes personal. And the longer one side of the political spectrum remains in power, the more entrenched their ideas become, the more entrenched their structures become. If those structures work for everyone, then yippee, everyone goes home happy. But that is nearly impossible. And in the meantime, friction builds to the point of enragement, which brings more polarization…
“So then you have what happened here recently. The polarization became so great that it awakened the average person who said “Enough”, and voted for a major housecleaning. And this is a big deal. The old establishment views the new one as a monster, for dismantling their comfort zone. Whereas the new monster feels supercharged.”
“It is ugly out there.”
“It is. And we should hope for cool heads, from both sides. It’s a mess. Consider that voters kind of threw out not just establishment views, but the entire political divide of Left vs. Right has been kind of thrown into a blender. Everything is muddled. Hard core war hawks were welcomed to the traditional ant-war party. Many from the old ant-war party fled to the party was known for war-like attitudes. The old party that was legendary for being beholden to corporate interests turned its back on corporate interests, and the other party did the opposite. It is a realignment that no one really understands, fully.
“On top of that, always remember: No one likes to admit they were wrong, and no one likes to lose their job. Particularly if that job made them look important, and if losing makes them look bad.
“A truly wise person recently said: ’There are… a lot of Americans today who feel they cannot identify where they are on the map of reality.’ That sums it up well. But it also points to the future. Perhaps today will be the last day I throw rocks at you…the younger generation is going to find a way to understand and fix what has been slowly going off the rails for a long time.
“It sounds super-critical to say ‘things have been going off the rails’, because that implies people have just become bad. But that is not necessarily the case. It is that they have kept going long after they’d reached the end of their map, and their only reference point were the past, and they kept on doing things they way they had, sometimes purely to maintain the existing structure. It’s known, it provides employment, it provides a system of familiarity. Secretive government groups and sub-organizations, a media culture that was built around a certain structure of information flow…anyone anchored within ‘the system’ is too much borne of it to see other alternatives.
“It doesn’t mean they were inherently evil, an after-the-fact analysis might make them look pretty bad, but life is always infinitely more challenging when you’re in the drivers seat, making a decision with the information you have, compared to someone down the road who backfills the situational analysis with knowledge of not just far more than what the decision maker knew, but also all the outcomes. Decision makers must try to solve the problems they see in front of them, with the tools they have, and with past experience as their guide.
“Young people, as you know, have it different. You have a better reason than other generations to think you know it all, because you have infinitely more information. It doesn’t mean you do know it all, but you have an opportunity. Fifty years ago, a government could do whatever it wanted, pretty much, and cover it up, because not everyone had a camera in their pocket, the internet didn’t exist, the news flow was easy to control…there was just no visibility into anything that governments didn’t want you to see, and they only wanted you to see what looks good. Now, you can follow, say flightradar24 and see every plane in the air, everywhere.”
“What? You live in a stone hut with as far as I can tell no plumbing. How on earth do you know that?”
“I might live on a rock but that doesn’t mean I live under one. Suffice it to say that it’s pretty hard to dole out wisdom without, you know, being aware of life as it is. Sun Tzu might have been one hundred percent right, but that doesn’t mean he is useful in explaining the internet.
“So anyway now everyone sees everything, pretty much, and everyone can hear not just every opinion but the support or criticism of it. It’s an entirely new way of being. And you know how you watch old people like myself try to open an app? Painful isn’t it? Well just imagine how the old folks will get on with AI, compared to your generation. Out of this chaos will come opportunity, and as master of this new tool, you might find a great path forward. You’re not nearly as dumb as everyone says.”
“…thanks?”
“You’re welcome. But having said that, politics does not advance like most other fields as knowledge gets added. Materials science too us from axes to rockets, with each increment ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’. Same for medicine. Same for many other fields. But politics faces a wall, that people inherently view the world differently, and that’s what you need to understand, which was your first question. Some people pretend the wall doesn’t exist, and that yelling louder is the answer. Most people see the wall and say “You’re all giving me a f__ing headache” and they go back to their worlds.
But those people in the middle are the key. They will not pay attention when things are going well enough, because that is human nature. We aren’t grateful for warm buildings or air conditioning or full supermarkets or every other great thing that is there reliably every day. But once one of those is threatened…look out. The vast middle is the ballast that will keep crazies from taking democracies to truly dangerous places. But bringing the pendulum back is a big deal. Just look at the angst on TikTok. Er…I mean, I can just imagine. That’s what it’s called right? Anyway I’m leaving, I’m hungry. That apple didn’t do anything. Hopefully have some things to mull over in respect to your question.”
“Why should I listen to you though? So what makes you so smart?”
“Not a bad question, if rudely put, and it’s up to you if you wasted your time crawling all the way up here. But to be a bit more clear, you’re asking the wrong question. It’s not a matter of smartness, or who you should listen to. Absorb as much as you can, from all over the place. Some of it will drive you crazy, because you will be in one of those camps whether you like it or not. But hear as much of it as you can, try to walk a mile in their shoes. You might decide to go shout on the internet, everyone loves a community. Well, not me. As you can see. Good luck. Bring food next time. And if I see another mushroom I’ll lose it.”
Five years old, and the future painted within is turning out pretty much exactly as expected (ok, I missed the nuclear renaissance, sue me). Might start a new one but in the meantime…pick up The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity – the world of energy, in tolerable bites. Available at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com.
Read more insightful analysis from Terry Etam here, or email Terry here.