The Speed of Life

When you look at life from a distance, it seems like it’s a giant wheel with everything happening, moving away, and then coming back around again later in a different form or under different circumstances.

Within that giant wheel of life, there’s a horse race happening, as is so eloquently described in the book Revolutionary Wealth by Alvin and Heidi Toffler:

Position 1: in the lead, always moving at breakneck speed (Warp 9 for you trekkies), is business. New innovations are being discovered, created, amended, redesigned, reused, sold and re-sold in every minute of every day all around the globe.

Position 2: in second place, we have civil society with its grassroots’ pro- and anti- stands on just about every issue known to man, and various associations and congregations to further unite, divide, or otherwise create “churn” among the people.

Position 3: in third place, we see the American family. Typical households used to be large and contain many generations under one roof, but we moved to a “nuclear” format when industrial and urban conditions changed. Today, we see all sorts of family arrangements—nuclear, same-sex parents, single mothers or fathers, step families, senior couples, communal arrangements, etc. While most family functions have been outsourced to the government or other entities, the American family is starting to insource more and more functions, such as working and/or shopping from home, home schooling, banking and investing online, and many others.

Position 4: in fourth place, we have work. Labor unions, the definition of work, and work itself have undergone change after change as a result of horses 1, 2, and 3 above, and continue to change along with technological advances and business innovations. We used to work in the fields, then the factories, then corporations, and now some of us work from home or a remote site. Labor unions and work place legislation either haven’t kept up with the changing work world, or have no way to apply themselves to the new settings. The once-regimented and easily-controlled factory-style workplace rarely exists any more, and this #4 horse needs to figure out how to catch up with the rest of the pack, or just leave the race.

There are even slower horses than this, though, as I describe here…

Position 5: In fifth place are agencies, regulation, and bureaucracies (does this shock anyone?). When it’s far easier to start a new bureaucracy than close down an old one (think Homeland Security here), and takes 10 years or more to get approval to build infrastructure or for a new drug, something’s desperately wrong. This horse gets looked in the mouth a lot as a result—probably from subsisting on a steady diet of red tape.

Position 6: the American public school system. Designed during a mass-production factory era, it served the function of turning out MORE mass-production factory workers. While competition continually drives business, technology, and family into faster and faster speeds into uncharted territories, the public school system hasn’t budged an inch from the factory format. The public schools now serve a political purpose as blocks of union votes, institutions of union entrenchment, and monopolies—teachers, even bad ones, get paid whether your child learns or not. Meanwhile, the horses of work, business, and family have run away with the pack while we run around preaching “no child left behind” and do nothing real and effective about it. THIS is what “no child left behind” is REALLY about, not just test scores and nutrition!

And the horses that barely leave the starting gate at all are…

Position 7: This nag is (or rather are) the giant economic institutions such as the UN, the WTO, the IMF, and lots of other acronymed building names that affect economy (not only ours, but others as well). People within these organizations may change, and world economic crises may come and go, but these leviathans never seem to accomplish much in the wake of swirling event currents all around them because of political bickering that produces a negative vote or worse, none at all, due to stalemates.

Position 8: This horse should just be shot in the barn, and its name is political structure. The pace at which issues come up and changes happen is far more than our political structure can handle (or anyone else’s for that matter). One politician in particular says that when ongoing fundraising isn’t being pursued, elected officials have about 2 ½ minutes of uninterrupted time each day on Capitol Hill, and that isn’t sufficient for reading bills, having conversations, doing research, or even consulting with anyone about legislation up for vote. More and more of the job is being shoved off onto staffers (who come to the office with preconceived notions, biases, or prejudices that could sway a Congressman’s vote one way or another very easily). A good question here is this: we elect the Congressman or woman, but who elects their staff, of whom they rely upon for judgment and interpretation? Combine staffers’ activities with those of lobbyists, and you get an elected representative who represents anyone but you.

Then we have people calling their congressman, short-circuiting the system even more—is it any wonder this nag is dead on arrival?

But wait, there’s one more way in the back of the barn that should get a one-way ticket to the glue factory…

Position 9: flea-bitten, shaky, and runny-eyed, it’s the law. This institution moves at glacial speed compared to the frantic pace of business, society as a whole, and the American family. The field of law itself is changing all the time with such specialties as intellectual property law, gay rights, environmental law, an the outlandish-but-coming artificial intelligence law (that has to do with clones, lab-created beings, beings from elsewhere, robot rights and sentient being protection when we finally learn how to make robots “sentient beings,” quickly followed by gay robot rights, robot unions, and all the things we have as humans). Can you just picture our current Supreme Court having to make ultimate legal decisions regarding robots or cavemen re-created in a lab from genetic scratch? We’re on the cutting edge of genetic and robotic innovation, and there’s absolutely no legal structure in place to protect or support what might come from it. Getting these new fields into ESTABLISHED law is something else, however, as politics and religion always seem to find a way into the cracks before innovation does—an example is Microsoft anti-trust proceedings. By the time it got to court, the anti-trust problem would no longer be relevant, and would have long been technologized away.

Now you know why things take so long to get done in this world, in this country, and in this moment. If you look closely enough, you can even learn which horse to bet on, or saddle up for your own ride to prosperity or poverty. You also know which horses to avoid and/or likely to turn up lame when you most need them.