It occurs to me that modern society has led to the perspective that we have immense control of our lives. This was not always true in the past where people could die for many reasons out of their control.
The modern understanding of the word 'tragedy' is that it when someone suffers for something that they could have avoided entirely. That there exists this means of control one's destiny and that it was ignored.
We see this play out on a mass scale with our actions in the pandemic (facemasks and vaccinations) and our absence of risk mitigation against climate change. But we remain utterly perplexed as to why people can't see the tragedy that is happening in slow motion?
Perhaps we aren't aware that a majority of people actually aren't in control of their lives. They live their lives just like people who lived their lives in the first half of the 20th century. They live paycheck to paycheck, not knowing if they've got food on the table tomorrow.
If you live a life without any control of your future, would it matter if you took the vaccine or not? After all, events in the future appear random, and getting infected by Covid appears also as a chance event.
We have to come to grips with the reality that people think very differently because they exist in very different situations. The great divide in current US politics is due to the great divide in how we live our lives. It's a different perspective of what freedoms are available.
The freedoms that the status quo conservatives seek are very different from the freedoms that the progressive liberals seek. One group believes in an idealized perfect world of the present, the other believes that perfection is a continuous process.
The unfortunate reality for all humanity is that the only thing that remains constant is that change happens. We can put our heads in the sand and pretend that it can be avoided, but there are plenty of instances of groups of people who have been left behind as a result.
The point though is that embedding one's heads in the sand is a natural action for those who have a lack of control of this world. Also, note that lack of understanding of this world leads to the feeling of absence of control.
So it should come to nobody's surprise that the exponential growth of technology is leading people to a lesser understanding of this world. That lack of understanding generates a perspective of lack of control of one's destiny.
Thus we are left with a major part of society unable to make decisions to help themselves. We end up with a tragedy at a massive scale.
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