What Was At Stake, And Ultimately Lost ... From Within. Are We Seeing The Demise Of CONTEXT NOMADS?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Have you ever come to recognize a people's failure to adapt, and lead themselves?

That observation can be made in more than one current setting.

In fact, it's a widespread & unmet challenge among literally billions of humans.

Here's just one of many, illustrative examples.

Andy:
"Unrelated Bill, but perhaps you will allow me to recommend a wonderful documentary and, in my view, a valuable historical record about the Miners strike in Britain in 1984-85. It’s called

Still the enemy within 

It looks at the strike from the miners’ perspective and that of their wives and crystalizes the battle (literally) between the State and organized workers plus what was at stake, and ultimately lost."

That's from a comment at: While Europe debates a placebo the disaster deepens

What is an observer of these - and many more examples - to conclude?

First, perhaps, that this all ties together rather simply. Our major difficulty is orienting so many people to the nuance of emerging group context. Organizing & re-organizing on this scale poses a novel recruitment task requiring new methods plus learning how best to wield them after they're invented. The herding cats metaphor applies as never before.

Second, that regardless of which & how many details are discussed, these are all rather straightforward failures to organize & re-organize any & all methods ... as context changes. That's certainly one general conclusion.

Our biggest problem seems to be our own, aggregate lethargy, mostly a cognitive lethargy. We're simply getting in our own way. No single challenge we hear people lamenting is in of itself in the least bit daunting. Our ancestors would howl with laughter watching us - once they sorted out the unfamiliar but un-daunting context.

Why? Because, none of our present stories are conceptually different from previous sad endings, such as the self-programmed demise of the Greenland Vikings, not to mention countless other stories of prior human challenges, successes and failures. We've come all this way, and now suddenly billions of homo sapiens can no longer execute staging, linking & sequencing of more group agility? That really is comical, as well as tragic.

Humans used to be good at change. In the past several hundred thousand years, we spread all over the entire globe in multiple waves - incredibly quickly - as NOMADS.  And along the way we quite incidentally diversified any & all of our methods AT WILL, as we became many different cultures, and even formed and recombined different subspecies!

Any ancient nomad could do this! Before breakfast. Without breaking a sweat.

Go anywhere and be anything ... in 2 generations. That's what we've always done. Call it the "Traveling Entrepreneur Task."

In fact our kids ... when we leave them alone ... can still do this with ease.

So what happened to too many of our present adults, in so many different settings? We're no longer geographic nomads, but since other aspects of context keep changing, we always were - and remain - Context Nomads.

Why are too many of our adults just sitting down and refusing to keep changing, even as the rest of the human troop (including their own descendants) go on exploring the next context?

Our primate ancestors came out of Africa and went everywhere. Now we honor them by refusing to keep going, by exiting the past & present ... and exploring new dimensions of cultural reorganization and evolution?

For shame.

Sayonara, old folks sitting down on the path. You're history. Do your descendants a favor, and quit urging them to hunker down with you, and abandon Nomadism.

No rapidly changing methods, no survival.

It's a wonderful, always changing world. Our aggregate options are expanding exponentially. And it's a shame that so many people can't find joy in simply exploring it AND all it's changes.