The Tar Pit

The title is obviously missing some quotation marks, I will let the keen reader place them where they are due.

Some years ago, back when I still had friends who "believed in progress", they wouldn't stop bothering me about how this world, this country, this society we live in has gotten better since communism was abolished, or since Romania has joined the EU, or since the smartphone was invented, or whatever arbitrary milestone they would put on the conversation table -- back then, good folks still talked to each other by sitting at the same table. And not only were the milestones arbitrary, but the criteria by which "progress" was measured were themselves taken out of some self-proclaimed journalistic pantsuitistic "study", say, a concoction on how the life expectancy has only increased since the first McDonald's was established on Romanian soil... or whatever.

Time has meanwhile passed, what else would it do? and for some arbitrary reason, I feel like it's my turn to take another cursory look at today's civilized world and all the great progress it's made during the last (arbitrarily-chosen) two decades. I don't wish to quote any studies, I'll just use personal experience as a reference and I'm quite sure most readers, assuming they be human, will understand what I'm talking about. I will admit beforehand that I am one of those "mean guys", or however you call them nowadays, so as a counterbalance to the endless attempts at showing how "progress has made all our lives better", I dare to present to you Five Aspects Which Illustrate How "Progress" Has Made The World A Shittier Place In The Last Two Decades -- although had I slept more on this, I could just as arbitrarily find six, ten or fifty such aspects. Without futher ado, here they are.

Let's start from the top: two decades ago, much like today, the so-called "civilized world" -- which includes, but is not limited to all democratic countries west of the Black Sea -- had a ruling political elite, elected by each state's citizens. And much like today, a majority of this political elite was made out of politruks, i.e. "someone's guy"¹. Anyway, regardless of where they stood, politicians two decades ago knew how to talk to their public, and did so eloquently, even the more incompetent among them. Nowadays that bar has been lowered to the point where so-called elites no longer talk to their folks. This is apparent to me at the very least in the US and in the Romanian space, where the political game has degraded even below that of the old communist days.

The second aspect is but an extension of the first and by far the most damaging among them: as a result of the widespread democratization of everything, meaningful public discourse and debate are not possible anymore. Two decades ago, the average idiot, even though incapable to enumerate the things which he understood and separate them from those which he didn't, would not dare to emit an opinion on each and every thing that exists, even when somehow he held such an opinion. Today, not only opinions are widespread, they are mandatory, and as such each and every euglena must not only hold one, but they must hold "the correct" one, according to whatever system of beliefs are in fashion this week. Perhaps more mind-numbingly, frustratingly offensive than this convergence point is only the one attached to the opposite "correct" opinion.

The third aspect is related to the material and has been beaten to death in the marketing discussions: mass standardization has utterly destroyed most markets. The easiest to observe is perhaps the clothing market, where everything made "for the average human" does not fit any one individual in particular. Unfortunately this problem extends beyond markets: some other examples of the very same problem are academia, music and education.

The fourth aspect is a formulation of the same problem from an entirely different perspective: people have stopped making things for themselves. When I was a kid, I used to go to Mihai's place, where his mom would make a great "ciorba de fasole cu ciolan". We would all sit at the table and discuss how my own mother's recipe from Bucovina was different from his mom's from all the way in Oltenia, down to fine details such as how the bread was cooked in each region according to each one's available means. Paradoxically (or apparently so), differentiation in marketing fuels uniformization in the personal, i.e. depersonalization.

The fifth, glaringly obvious yet so often overlooked aspect pertaining to the cost of both civilization and "civilization", is that life is visibly more expensive now than then. Even if we leave aside the basics, i.e. land and food, those things which various propaganda attempts to picture as "cheaper" have in fact at best stagnated in price². Just take the mobile phones that you like so much: six years ago a flagship phone costed just a little under five hundred euros; while nowadays you'll pay at least a thousand for just about the same if not an inferior product. Otherwise sure, you can pay two hundred for garbage, which makes me wonder how many of you are actually paying attention to the value proposition of what you're buying.

Obviously, the amplification power of technology has played an important part in this process. But by and large it's not "the fault of" technology or marketing or of any of these other things for any of the ills befalling our beloved Western civilization in the last two decades. All it took was a twisted and misunderstood notion of progress: there is such a thing as progress towards stupidity, and as with all things, the outcome is its own reward.

Perhaps I repeat myself. But it most certainly didn't hurt to reiterate through the subject.

Filed under: olds.
RSS 2.0 feed. Comment. Send trackback.