You're familiar with the term inflection point. No? Ah, well, the term inflection point comes from math. It's the point on a graph where the curvature changes, leading to a condition where it will never follow its original path again. Or something to that effect. I know you know how I feel about math. People say, "Do the math" and I say "No" I may go on to add, "If I could do the math, I would have done the math." Math. So you know, every time I say or type the word math, I spit. Like I just got some disgusting taste I had to get out of my mouth.
I would regale you with information about mathematical inflection points, but I'm not here to talk about math. No, no, today's topic is the one related to the extinction of mankind. Somewhere along the way, there was the mother of all inflection points. Like the coronavirus, it was invisible. And it'saffects are similarly obfuscated, due to their ultra-slow motion of their progress. The fact is, there's still I lot that could go wrong due to this pandemic. A couple of perfectly timed sabotage, perhaps a perfect storm of huge natural disasters, and the population is ground down. Broken. Limping into the future with prospects that lookin increasingly bad.
Personally, I would prefer the asteroid apocalypse to what's coming. Yesterday I saw a reference to the evocative imagery of the frog in a pot of boiling water. That's about where civilization is today. The heat has been turned up, and there does not appear to be any way us frogs to clamber out of that phucking pot, thank you very much.
I would say that humans have the advantage over frogs in this situation due to raw brainpower—except that does not appear to be true. The decisions we make suggest we are foolin' ourselves. I'd rather be an unaware frog with no illusions about control than an aware homo sapiens with pervasive delusions pf grandeur.
My opinion is that the pandemic is just a love tap. Yeah, yeah, say what you want. People are going to survive the pandemic—but there's no escaping the deadly environment we are cooking up for our frog selves. The ability to ignore what's coming is really what baffles me, whether it's a virus or a bomb or a ten-degree change in temperature. The human capacity to reinterpret, fabricate, spin. We'll deny and compartmentalize all the way to slaughter.
Now…it's a possibility (but not conceivable, at least in my pea brain) that humans could use the pandemic to learn and start immediately to address reality, not the fun house in their mind. Can people think collectively? Are people entitled to their beliefs? A bunch of whack jobs from England and Europe pulled a geographic to find the freedom for that proposition. That every man had the right to maximum freedom. At least from their government.
Given the profound effect they have on our lives and the lives of others, I think the freedom to believe is an authorization that does not serve mankind well.
For one thing, it's too easy to subvert. Humans are vulnerable to programming! Especially when we start self-programming. When we decide to convert the evidence at hand into delusions and perversions it's impossible to stabilize system failures. We have the freedom to believe the world is flat, but who's that gonna serve? Huh? Aside from the overall degradation of the truth, there are hazards to that trajectory (if you'll pardon the expression). Ask Mike "Mad Mike" Hughes. Oh wait, you can't, 'cause he killed himself in a rocket of his own design and construction trying to prove the world is flat. Oops.
Take that example…do some math on it…and still you don't begin to get your arms around the scale of human self-delusion. A belief system that steers us toward disaster. It appears that we cannot, after all, handle the truth.
Which leads us inexorably toward a different kind of inflection point. In the late 90's, some hotshot at Intel took the term and applied it to the business world. In this equation the inflection point is that spot where a company can no longer produce according to demand and the future is an incremental surrender to death. Beyond business references, inflection point has also become popular to describe personal moments of profound change.
Here's the key understanding about an inflection point: Business as usual is not an option.
Think about that for just a minute. That word business sweeps up a lot of human activity. We may not be a lot of things, but we for damn sure we are phucking busy. At work we're part of a business, but we supply our lives through businesses and in one way or another, everything can be regarded as 'business". So when we say our processes, our systems, mental and otherwise, are no longer an option…you mean a magnitude of change most brains can't comprehend.
For real!
People cannot conceive of the circumstance of throwing everything, and I mean everything, up in the air. They’ve spent a lifetime acquiring all their Stuff. Why in the world would they give that up?
I'll tell you why. Because the pandemic is going to take it all away from you! You'll be lucky to have a pot to piss in.
You'll have to forgive me—I’m not trying to spoil your day. I'm actually an optimistic person—when conditions allow. What I see, what concerns me enough at this point to run my mouth about the future, is utter devastation. All over the planet. What the reality is is we are not at inflection point.
We've encountered an inflection tsunami.
We are in the perfect storm.
There is terrible strife ahead and if governments ignore the truth, people will continue to die. For years. There are no sliver linings to the pandemic—but there is a possibility. To come together. To put aside our own beliefs and prejudices and devise a way to go forward where all people are valued and generosity is the standard currency.
This inflection point will give us the opportunity to walk around in lots of different people's moccasins. I entreat everyone who sees this particular collection of words to see reality for what it is, reprogram yourself if you have to and tune out the noise and bluster of your ego.
Because this is it people. The message is transform yourself! Learn from the pandemic. Be a survivor.
'Cause the alternative is a ticket on the E ride they're callin' The Sixth Extinction.