The biggest issue with the Titanic was that the collective belief held that it couldn’t sink. It was heralded as ‘An Unsinkable Ship’, and this narrative was so deeply believed that the attempts to evacuate the boat largely failed. It isn’t that the Titanic was going to sink any slower or differently if people hadn’t believed in its invulnerability, but the cost in human lives would have been far lower.
The notion that most ideas about reality should be held loosely is a pretty common topic of conversation. The statement: ‘All truths are false. Some are useful.’ hasn’t made it onto a hoodie or shirt yet, but it probably should. Yet despite the fact that this concept is something that most claim to have grasped, it would seem that there are still sacred cows within our culture that nobody is willing to slaughter. Like the fact that the whole system could fail.
Personally, I think that we are on the Titanic, the water is in the hallways, and despite strong attempts by many to get people to quit partying, most believe the boat can’t sink*. Even those who think the boat could go down, don’t see it as a ‘sinking in a few hours’ kind of issue. I hold to this ‘truth’ because I think it a more useful lens for looking at society than believing things can’t fail. However, unlike a lot of the other dooms-dayers who are buying canned food, and trying to convince everyone that they need pallets of ammunition, and acres of land in the woods, I have a different focus: people.
Somewhere in the past couple decades, likely around the time when we started to think of friends as something you had on social media, and that anyone who voted differently than us was the enemy (or questioned/didn’t question vaccines), we also really entrenched the idea that we should survive as individuals. It likely has to do with the fact that we all so ridiculously wealthy, that financially we can actually pretend that we don’t need other people. The notion of pooling resources and skills got left on the wayside as everyone bought their own lawnmower (or bought condos that don’t need lawns).
This is why parents get nanny’s, or as an even wilder approach, just go without. They believe they need to do it on their own. The belief that kids can be raised without a community supporting the parents is likely why the majority of couples (I think 70%+) say their happiness goes down on the whole after having children. Whether it is raising humans, mowing lawns, feeding ourselves, or surviving the zombie apocalypse , everyone is trying to figure out how to do it on their own. Yet the reality is that we actually can’t.
We only got here as a species because we worked together. I mean, we probably wouldn’t have made it past rubbing sticks together for fire had we all been going it alone. We are a bunch of hairless monkeys that can barely manage to wave sharp sticks about without poking out our own eyes. We wouldn’t have survived more than a couple nights against this wild dark eden we call Earth had we not done it as a group. I mean, have you seen a bear? They grow up to 10ft long, weigh 1800lbs, and run fast enough to get pulled over in school zones. Most humans these days couldn’t survive a night in the woods against the rabbits, let alone bears. Humans need tribe.
For me, this is why the facility exists. It is giving humans humans. Community is how we make it through this wild thing called life and actually get to have some fun. This is why I am going to continue to put my energy and resources into sharing meals with friends, building relationships, and encouraging the collective to keep supporting one another. This is why I am trying to claw back my time from screens, and am encouraging people to spend time with people in person. I think this is how we survive. Plus, on the off chance I am wrong, and everything will be just fine for another 50 years, it is actually way more fun than hanging out by myself in the woods sharpening sticks.
*If you want to know why I personally think this, go over to: https://howrichami.givingwhatwecan.org/ and plug in your household income. Then do the simple math of how many people are in the same camp as you. Say you make around 50k Canadian, leaving you in the top 1-2% of the global population: this means that globally there are only 70-160million households that make that much money. Which isn’t many given the fact that we are all so convinced that there are so many wealthy people out there, and that we ourselves aren’t those people. Given the rate of resource consumption on the planet as it is, it seems unlikely this number can actually trend up for everyone else. After that dose of reality, glance at this fun graphic: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/minimum-wage-around-the-world/ and start to get a good idea of just how rich most of us already are. This is why we are in first class cabins on the titanic and actually entirely unaware that half the boat is underwater, and people have been drowning for hours. This is why the band is still playing. Yet international banks are collapsing (google search bank collapse 2023 in case you avoid doom scrolling), food scarcity is increasing, and the cost of basic protein in developed countries has more than doubled in the last calendar year. So yeah, I think that we don’t need to be concerned that our interest rates have gone from an all time historical low, to a point where we are still well below the historical average of 8% (as they are still shockingly lower than they were in 81 when they were almost 19%). Nobody can actually eat zeros and ones, and if we can’t grow food, or are out of water, we have way bigger issues than whether we can continue to afford to live in homes that are the largest on the planet. I think we need to be concerned that this entire system that we are all convinced can’t sink, is already mostly underwater, and the only thing convincing anyone that it isn’t, is that they are likely in the top 5% of global wealth.