Considering Seneca's advice and avoiding the road to rapid ruin

Good advice can frequently be found in the past and it was a Roman philosopher who knew nought about today’s challenges but to whom we ought to be listening.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, known as Seneca the Younger, talked about how slowly things came into being and yet how quickly they could dissipate.

He said: "It would be some consolation for the feebleness of ourselves and our works if all things should perish as slowly as they come into being; but as it is, increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid."

Here in the Goulburn Valley, we have had our shoulders to the wheel for nearly two centuries creating what was to become one of Australia’s richest food bowls, seeing off many threats and being equal to countless challenges, but a largely unseen and misunderstood difficulty lurks in the shadows.

Seneca the Younger talked of “sluggish growth” and warned of “rapid ruin” and now after near 200 years of growth driven by energy unleashed from fossil fuels, we face the latter.

Interestingly, those who built this fertile place, face a never before encountered nexus with the refuse from the fossil fuels that has accumulated in the atmosphere threatening rapid ruin.

A 10 000 year “Goldilocks” era, highlighted by an Industrial Revolution ignited by the liberation of energy from fossil fuels, opened the door to utopian times which are now quickly becoming dystopian.

Earth, the only planet we have, is more than four billion years old and if reduced to 24 hours, humans have been here for maybe three seconds and so in about a tenth of a second we have trashed the place, in that we are behaving like a bunch of pleasure seekers at an out of control house party.

At this point, it’s probably worth considering the question asked by Italian professor in Physical Chemistry at the University of Florence, Ugo Bardi, who wondered if we have reached the limits of human intelligence?

Now there is a question and the sentiment it implies that will undoubtedly rile many, but considered objectively, the professor has grounds for his argument for even a cursory look around the world illustrates that even the simplest of things, that cost nothing, such as kindness, friendliness, sharing and collaboration are in short supply.

Measured on the aforementioned 24-hour time scale we have only tenths of a second left to make wholesale changes to our lives, shifting from our energy-rich, accumulative, individualistic and ego-driven ways epitomized by our existing market-driven economy.

Modernity, certainly for most Australians, is attractive, but to lean on a political mantra from the early 70s, “It’s time” to challenge the market myths and in putting people before profit, willingly forego some of those promised pleasures and work to build resilience in your community and help slow Seneca’s “rapid ruin”.
 

Our troubled climate demands we 'avert our gaze'

Each of us has a sense of what it is that worsens our wellbeing but, it seems, we can’t look away.

Charles Mackay

It is a frequently witnessed reality: those moments when the life of someone who appears to have it all unravels because they are unable to avert their gaze.

However, the dilemma is not just a concern for individuals as with seemingly no effort it can quickly ratchet from just a few to engulf many becoming what 19^th century author, Charles Mackay, described as “the madness of crowds”.

Mackay wrote, seemingly prophetically with regard human-induced climate change, about the continuing folly of the human race and its institutions, along with the distortions and peculiarities that we abide by and make us less than we could be.

Mackay wrote with intensity in nearly 600 pages about everything from Tulipmania (a period in the 16^th and 17^th centuries when both the rich and not so rich were paying massive sums for tulip bulbs) and alchemy to the Crusades and haunted houses.

The “madness” Mackay wrote about continues today with many similarities, but loaded with, and worsened by, some modern distortions.

Mackay’s ideas are still relevant with some, fortunately a minority, being doubters of the unquestionable evidence of human impact on the stability of earth’s climate.

Charles Mackay's
 "Extraordinary
Popular Delusions
 and the
Madness of Crowds".

Most seem to acknowledge our impact on earth’s ecological wellbeing, but with it comes an even more sinister difficulty with just a few of us able to free ourselves from our consumptive behaviours: a way of living that considering the undeniable evidence is a sort of Mackay-like madness.

The broad well-being of society is presently inextricably linked to the economy and that is another madness from which we need to avert our gaze and consider with an equal passion the integrity, health and well-being of people.

The idea that is profit and growth has long been and intimate part of human affairs, but it is one which has had a royalty-like bizarre respect since the Industrial Revolution some 200 years ago and as that paradigm has enlarged, the quality of life for most has reduced.

Human induced climate change has an impact beyond the control of any one nation and we, certainly the developed nations, need to break the monopoly that the military, industrial and entertainment complexes have on our gaze, look away, take note of what we see and understand that all in the world is not quite as it should be.

The undeniable facts pointing to human induced climate change remind me what the late US Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan said: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts”.

Our gaze, and opinion, reveals its own facts and wrongly, we frequently cling to those illusions.

Always seek quality ahead of quantity in 2012

An earlier conversation urging a preference for quality ahead of quantity probably aroused puzzlement among some.

The drive for quality in modern businesses is overt and almost without fail rewarded monetarily or in a way that enhances the self-esteem of an individual or a group of people.
Business today sees quality and the subsequent recognition and reward for its achievement largely through the prism of customer satisfaction.
That satisfaction, according to the hierarchy of most businesses, certainly the successful ones, is unquestionably about increased sales; about the growth of the company and so more throughput.
Contemporary economics lives within a language code that is confusing to the un-initiated, even to many who speak the language, but stripped of its bewildering fineries, the more throughput a company has, the better the end result, assuming its governance is in order.
In this instance, quality is simply about ensuring the maintenance of an ever increasing throughput, which in a world without restraints is honourable and so worthy of our applause.
However, our world is in reality quite different from the seemingly infinite world in which our ideas of growth and business were conceived.
Beyond the remote original thinker, whose sanity was questioned as was their allegiance to God or the gods, the piecing together, since the Industrial Revolution, of the mercantile world happened largely in ignorance that nature was calling the shots and not, as it was then believed, and still is by many, some mythical supernatural being.
Quality in its modern meaning is about whether your new washing machine lasts two or twenty years or whether or not your car will perform as intended for its expected ten years.
Quality time also means spending an uninterrupted hours with your kids, rather than being divided between them and some portable electronic device or simply being distracted by thoughts that you should really have your shoulder to the wheel and not “wasting” time with your family.
The idea of quality has been so distorted that its real meaning has been disenfranchised and the essence of it being hijacked by our modern industrial world to ensure riches and comfort for a few and servitude for everyone else.
Quality, in its deepest sense and if we are to unravel its mysteries, demands a whole societal re-focus that puts the wellbeing and contentment of people clearly ahead of the manufacture and consumption of “stuff”.
Work is clearly essential to our wellbeing, but it needs to be work about survival and not work building and making stuff that simply depletes the world’s resources and has little to do with, if anything, enriching personal psychological value.
Quality is something that takes time, it is personal and its achievement is hugely satisfying.