I was driving my car on Interstate Highway 94 the other night at the height of a snow storm when another car came zooming by me like a bat out of hell, going way too fast for the icy roads and wild snowpacked crosswinds. It came as no surprise that this enemy driver crashed into the concrete median and spun out of control.
Glad to be alive, I still wonder: what prevents an entire society -- or a whole civilization, if you will -- from spinning out of control?
It's certainly not rational behavior -- if we consistently acted with even a modicum of common sense, we'd all be living in a new Eden.
Yet many of us clearly do want to survive and evidently we must also be hoping to thrive, aiming to fulfill basic human needs and way more than the minimum, maybe "luck into some shit," as the saying goes, along the way.
How dependent are we on negatives to keep things from sliding into total anarchy?
How much are we willing to give up with the idea -- even if we are not fully conscious of it -- that we can still enjoy some individual freedom in exchange for abiding by such things as traffic rules, working with clowns, laws, insurance, taxes, rent/mortgage/regular payments, banks, police, military, construction, politics, media conglomerations, for-profit sports seasons, religious and miscellaneous cultural institutions and various other forms of social control/civil society/social outlets?
Is Iggy Pop essentially correct when he says, "Man is the Village animal, united by the glue of our loathesome qualities"? Or just as creepily on target with: "Just the night for a conquering tribe"?
How thin is the veneer of civilized bahavior? Iraq and Afghanistan have become like the Wild West only with bombs and suicide bombers added into the mix. Are they functional societies? Would they be even semi-functional without large occupying armies in their midst, or would they be more so? Does a country like Iraq require what Thomas Hobbes dubbed "The Leviathan," a strong authoritarian center, does one like Afghanistan require decentralized tribal leadership instead of a unifying government?
Here in the USA, whole sections of the the fabric of our society have been tested many times, most recently after 9/11 with the Great Blackout of 2003 and hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. Society collapsed in places, sometimes for days and sometimes for weeks or months.
But overall, resilence and survival instinct kicked in, apparently. What might cause complete collapse and how long would it last before something new came along? A common question explored in horror and science fiction, which is one of the things besides entertainment that makes them so valuable.
All I know is, I'm glad that asshole driver crashed his own car and not into me.
Today's Rune: Defense.
Today's Birthdays: Chaim Potok and Marian Anderson.
Kudos to Clint Eastwood for being inducted into France's Légion d'honneur by President Jacques Chirac, an honor first created by Napoleon I in 1802.
Here's to the joie de vivre!
2 comments:
Being from New Orleans, I was appalled, and ashamed of the people in the center of New Orleans who started rioting and looting even "before" the levees broke and the water came in. And after, when gang members set up private little fiefdoms within the city and rape gangs wandered the streets, I was disgusted. This is one of the big reasons why I moved out of Greater New Orleans as soon as I could.
Any type of catastrophe magnifies the good and bad in people, with very little room for gray areas.
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