A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Collapse..

Perusing the opinions of individuals over the last month or so since The Plague started, I have come to realize that the world is probably more doomed than I thought it was.

As I wandering the InterWeb this weekend, I came across an article called It's Time to Build by an author, Marc Andreessen, whom I was not previously not familiar with.  His point, in a nutshell, is that the current economic challenges demonstrates the world economic system's unwillingness or inability to build - to build resilient systems, to build economic buffers, to build things that could build things.

He goes on to give a number of different examples of where we should learn from this and start "building" - but pegs the primary problem as we have allowed our inertia to not want these things done to overpower our desire to get things done.  We have created the situation where the almost immediate response now is that we should not build these things rather than build them - oh, every one and every agency will agree in principle that it needs to be done, but there are always a huge number of reasons we cannot.

Walking through the reaction to this article, there are three types of people:

1) Those that fundamentally agree with the article and can give examples of what should happen, or how they have tried this and succeeded or failed to some degree.

2)  Those who only have glee in the current collapse of the system demonstrating that "they were right", but with little or no input or suggestions on who to rectify the issue (and, of course, working mightily to insult anyone that does).

3)  Those who see the collapse as an indicator that we already built too much and the only solution is to empower governments to have even more authority to "do things" and build things "better" (ignoring, of course, the very really fact that in general governments are often the least effective mechanism in accomplishing anything).

If you review the above, you will note that only one group is really interested in improving the situation.  The second is interested in mocking others and feeling smug in the fact that that they were right.  The third is looking at this to expand the scope of government over a great many things.

Now I am not a builder in the traditional sense of the word, nor are most of the readers of my blog.  We build things in other ways, be they a lifestyle of homesteading, practices of frugality, or individual hand made projects.  But we (I lump myself in here with some pretty accomplished people) are ultimately interested in building something, rather than nothing; of creating value and resolving issues rather than taking joy when others fail; in increasing our individuality and self-reliance rather than relying of any government or organization to do things for us.

Maybe we were always in the minority.  But it seems (now more than ever) that we are in the minority of the minority now.

The only small scrap of hope I retain (other than The Great Living Hope, of course) is that the output of this situation may demonstrate to people - perhaps for the first time - that the mockers never really help and that governments ultimately can only destroy or at best maintain.  They cannot build.

That, it seems, still remains for the builders.