One Score, and Ten Years Ago

Today, I turned 30 years old.

I think you can know you’re getting old when you’re innocently shopping in the grocery store, and you realize that the soft, mellow music playing in the background was a hard, edgy, and daring song from your youth. Somehow, society has a way of incorporating music such that the harsh tones and lyrics of previous eras become muted – sometimes even quaint.

Of course, to some extent we must all be changing right along with society, since it is our society afterall. It’s not always obvious, and, some of us may be more resistant to cultural eddies than others, but surely we are all susceptible. So to a large extent, we may miss the changes occurring in society because of the poverty of our point of view.

The trouble is, how are we to plan for the future, if we can only dimly observe the present? While there is no answer to this, one thing is sure: the bulk of society will not foresee the dangerous paths it treads – for if they were seen as dangerous, other paths would be taken.

So it is that the insightful are always deemed crazy, the radical is redefined as normal, the insane: the new way. Worse, the cautious might be deemed radical. And yet the society as a whole depends on this  “minority report”, whose radical theories may be rechristened self-evident by those who come after us – allowing each one of us to say, “See – I would have been one of the ones who saw it coming!”

And just like shocking music becomes mundane with time, the markets learn to absorb the changing world with disturbing comfort. The familiar evils having been tolerated, tomorrow’s evils are left as unanticipated as they are unfathomable. But one day, the market will completely absorb these previously unknown evils, and it will accept them as the norm.

We are always judging the present by the past, and the past by the present – both unfairly. Rarely can we hope to shift our frame of reference to see our history for what it is and not just what we think it is. How rare then is an insight which leaves us facing the truth of our current age?