No week goes by for me, and hardly a day, too, without discussion with someone about a big issue. Most often, JHW is my discussion partner, but ‘most often’ doesn’t mean ‘to exception.’ I grew up on discourse, and even today when I talk to friends and some family, the big issues work their way into discussion; oftentimes arousing passionate debate, and even anger. I am a passionate, opinionated man, now; in the past, I have been these things more severely, and also intellectually competitive and unyieldingly righteous. As I’ve matured, I’ve learned the virtue of really engaging and considering alternate views. I characterize my shift in consciousness from my 20s to my 30s as the realization that billions of other people throughout human history had gone through what I would go through, and rather than beat my head against countless walls in a blind struggle to navigate through my life, I would consult the experiences of my elders and see what I could learn what I could learn from them.

By no means do I do this all the time; I certainly remain prone to stubbornness, and I freely admit that there is extraordinary value in coming to understandings oneself. I am now, however, capable of doing something I wasn’t readily capable of doing before: admitting when I’m wrong. Indeed, I do this quite willingly and happily: being wrong provides me with the opportunity to learn and to grow. Changing one’s mind is not a sign of hypocrisy nor of wrongheadedness; it is a sign of something much, much better.

As I continue to reflect on my life and on the world, and discuss the big issues with others, many things have become clear. An unsettling dynamic emerges in our quest for truth: a failure to take into account the fundamental dynamics of human lifetimes. We are, like all things, subject to change – to birth and growth, age and death, growth and decay, expansion and contraction. The me I am today is not the me I was last year, nor even last month: experience has seasoned me, and I have grown. Ideas that seemed absurd to me even a month ago are gaining traction as reasonable and even compelling with me now. Ideas that seemed perfunctory and obvious a year ago I have come to see as limited, counterproductive, and outmoded. My experience has changed me – for good or good or for ill.

We too casually dismiss what was for what is – too readily presume that the failure of one outlook is due to some inherent flaw rather than it’s inapplicability after too long in our lifetimes, after the accumulation of more life experience. Indeed, one outlook can be perfectly valid when you’re 18 and be totally invalid as a 33 year old. Does that make the 18 year old’s outlook untrue, invalid, in the grand scheme of things? Hardly: the 18 year old was doing, thinking, exactly what an 18 year old was supposed to do and think, and if he hadn’t done those deeds and thought those thoughts then, it’s entirely likely that he wouldn’t have grown to do the deeds and think the thoughts he’s doing and thinking now.

No human outlook, no human understanding, and no human expectation is good for all of us all the time. It seems like such an obvious truth, but too often we forget it entirely, or fail to extend it to concepts that it should be extended to.

Big issues that often get raised during these discussions are the types of things we fail to apply this understanding to – I have been and often am just as guilty of this as any of my friends and family. Particularly now, when economics, governance, and political ideology are raised (among many of the big issues), invariably we are drawn to question the ultimate wisdom of certain straining schemes, and judge those modes of governing human social behaviors as inadequate from the get-go. In these discussions turned critiques, we often reflect on the roots of specific movements that brought these modes to dominance – say, Free Market Capitalism – and, with the benefit of hindsight, see how they were flawed from the start, or, alternately, with the conviction of perfect belief, lobby for those modes’ virtues and insist that, with time and under more ideal conditions, they will win out.

These may well be true of Free Market Capitalism – if the economy really were entirely free of federal meddling, the economy may very well correct itself and we all may very well prosper for it, but the economy has not exactly been free of corporate-advanced meddling since the 1950s – but these arguments invariably hinge on this notion of “what’s best for humankind” – the presumption being that one really good system exists to govern one or more aspects of human behavior with everlasting success. Democratic federal governance, socialist economic principals, Christian dogmatic morals, what have you. What is beginning to become astoundingly clear to me is that in the vast scope of human history – recorded or otherwise – we’ve found no perfect mode of social governance. Yet we keep striving to create one – Marx, Friedman, Keynes, founders of communes, politicians, revolutionaries, cult-founders, Oprah Winfrey and her limitless cadre of self-help gurus – you name it. Nobody has the “right” answer. And nobody ever will.

We tell ourselves that this is because “people are different,” and this is true, but most of us have a limited understanding of how people are different. What most of us are really saying when we say, “thats’ because people are different,” is really, “people don’t always like the same things.” The truth is, people come to very different conclusions about their lives at very different times throughout their lives – the Boomers saw that the world of the ’60s needed peace and love to overcome it’s ills, but those same people now advance war and economic policies that can hardly be considered ‘loving’ in the name of securing global prosperity, which we are meant to understand implies ‘peace.’ Have they become corrupted, or do the see the themselves and consequently the world differently as a result of gained experience and age? A population of mixed experiences results in mixed preferences, certainly; any mode of social governance that we impose on a population may be good for that population at a given point in time, but as the population gains experience, that mode of social governance may become increasingly irrelevant, or even damaging, to the society. This is not so much the fault of the system – but it is the fault of the society that advances that system. Not because the society is chosing to advance a ‘bad’ system, but because the society fails to see that it has grown to understand itself differently, and so it is time for a different system.

All things on this planet are subject to inexorable change – and while we tell ourselves that systems such as socialism and democracy and religion are abstractions that transcend natural dynamics and law, they do not. Economies, religions, corporations, sciences, and governments grow and change just as the people who advance them grow and change. Just as people live and die, so, too, do modes of social governance – some die kicking and screaming, just like some of us unfortunately will. Eternal truths, try as humanity has since before the time of the Greeks to ascertain them, simply do not exist – today’s eternal truth doesn’t pass muster tomorrow.

It should also be noted that all idealized modes of social governance fall inevitably fall prey to another simple and ruthlessly effective enemy: complacency. What seems like a wonderful mode of order falls victim – in most cases within just a few years of its founding – to a large number of its constituents becoming complacent with its support and advancement – like the friends of the Little Red Hen, they would rather reap its rewards than do the work of keeping it going. An effective majority comes to tune the system out, take it for granted. Given enough time – and it doesn’t take much – a minority of people comes to understand very well what the system’s parameters are and are not, and that minority discovers abundant opportunity for personal gain by playing against and even changing those parameters. Another class emerges from these conditions as well – a restless class; perhaps they are patriots attempting to defend the purity of the system, or revolutionaries believing that they are advancing a more virtuous system, or artists expressing their reactions to some facet of the system. All three find their genesis in complacency – either adopting it or in reaction to it – and all three undermine the stability of the system. There will never be an exception to this rule.

How are we to govern our various social modes, then, if we have working against our systems changing relevancy due to age and experience on the one hand and systemic decay due to complacency and its reactants on the other? If I could advance any recommendation at all, it would be this:

Understand, humanity, that you can create no perfect system. What is good for most of us today will probably not be so tomorrow – either because we will have changed, or because this system will have fallen victim to abuse, or both. It is a not a failing. We serve ourselves best not by striving to establish one eternally perfect system, but by cultivating a degree of social awareness that recognizes when we have grown, when we have by and large fallen asleep at the wheel, when the system has become abused and irrelevant. Then, we reflect as a community on the failings of that system, endeavor to create not a more perfect union but one that better plays to our society’s current strengths while acknowledging its weaknesses, come to an accord and abide by those new rules, all the while staying abreast of our society and its systems of social governance.

This is, of course, a pipe dream – largely because it ignores certain other attributes of modern human nature: those irrepressible inclinations toward selfishess, closedmindedness, and a stubborn defense of our laziness. Or so it would seem.

We live in a time of great cultural stirrings the world over, and the current modes of social governance – particularly free market capitalism – are drawing increasing scrutiny. These may, indeed, be revolutionary stirrings. Perhaps an opportunity will exist for humankind to reexamine itself over the coming years, create new modes of social governance for itself that will better reflect the needs and experiences of its people. When that time comes, I hope – perhaps futilely – that a new kind of wisdom will prevail, and that we will see that what is needed is not a more perfect system, but a more perfect understanding of the nature of humankind and the nature of its creations, and that from that understanding we will create systems that we are mindful to reexamine, refresh, and replace as needed.