A lot of my neighbors didn't really believe a hurricane might put their homes under eight feet of water until it actually happened. Most people look at America's impending fiscal collapse that way. They understand why it's possible. They just don't think it will really happen.
You could show people all sorts of maps and analyses that proved they were living in a flood zone, but no such flood had occurred in living memory, and when they stood in those neighborhoods and looked around, they saw solid buildings and peaceful, well-kept grounds.
It was just hard to visualize those fine old neighborhoods under water. I think that's part of the problem. KNOWING something is possible is different than SEEING it with your mind's eye. When it finally happened last year, the images were dissonant, surreal, hard to process.
Some people who are constantly nervous and fearful are simply too good at visualizing, at seeing the worst possibilities. They see the dark future so clearly that they live there part-time. For others, it's hard to believe things could ever really get THAT bad.
Most importantly, people have trouble imagining the point of no return. They think: hey, if things get really bad, we'll just make some changes and fix it. The notion of irresistible inertia, of passing a point at which corrective action becomes impossible, is hard to process.
By definition, the point of no return arrives when you still have options - and as long as you still have options, why worry too much? Why make sacrifices at the altar of the inconceivable? And that kind of thinking is even more pronounced at the mass societal level.
At the national level, you have vested interests fighting furiously for their slices of the collective pie. None of them will be the first to back down because the tottering mountain of public debt is unsustainable. There is no AGGRESSIVE constituency for prudence.
Like we Floridians who stood in our nice developments and could not imagine them underwater, people stand amid the vast government edifices and lobbying skyscrapers of D.C. and cannot imagine the system ever crashing. So much money and power! No way this can ever end.
Sometimes word reaches the halls of power that distant provinces are beginning to crumble under insoluble problems, like border states getting crushed by illegal immigration. That's like hearing some other town closer to the coast got flooded by a hurricane. It's not real HERE.
But then one day disaster DOES arrive, and it comes fast. Decades of comforting illusions are shattered in a matter of hours. You still can't believe what you're seeing. It's too big. Inconceivably huge problems breed indifference and fatalism. /end
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