In adolescence, you believe you’re going to live forever. It’s only later in life, when aging becomes marked by aches and pains, and bodies begin to break down, that one truly starts to understand the fragility of things.
As consumers and users in an industrial marketplace, we appreciate durability, products that both work well and last. I still wear a sweater brought to me from Norway by my grandmother in the late 1960s, still warm and in good condition.
But most of us also have the disappointing experience of broken things, much enjoyed devices and gadgets that suddenly no longer function as intended, perhaps not at all.
As a youngster growing up in a prairie town, I loved hockey. We played in children’s leagues on community rinks, on ponds, on streets, using big snowballs for goal posts. At that time, you could buy a wooden stick, reinforced with black tape, for about $2, and it would usually last you all season. On an allowance of a dollar a week, a broken stick was a tragedy!
As the manufacturing engines of our expanding societies took off, breaking things became a feature of business planning, not a bug. If society is producing more toasters than we need, the only way we’ll buy more is if the old ones break. Planned obsolescence became standard procedure. Production expanded apace, along with our landfills.
As economies expanded, so did the government arrangements for managing national systems as a whole.
Stable societies operate through constitutional systems that are only slowly modified through establishment of precedents and new legislation. Legal change is much slower than are changes in social attitudes, but the nature of extensive consideration and reconsideration that goes into laws protects society’s systems from crashing.
Rapid, uncontrolled novelty is always a risk. Banks’ adoption of sub-prime mortgages, along with an array of derivative transactional gimmicks almost destroyed the financial systems of numerous countries. The novel COVID pandemic spread rapidly and challenged national medical systems, killing nearly 60,000 Canadians and over a million Americans. But systems managed to cope (barely), leaving behind broken families and lost fortunes.
When Mark Zuckerberg established Facebook, helping initiate the early 21st century digital transformation, he adopted the motto “move fast and break things” for his business. Arguably, it’s a motto that applies to many of the new businesses that have since emerged based on the widely varied application of digital technology.
Aside from the legitimate concerns and criticisms about data theft, and deliberate spreading of disinformation causing every horror from personal victimization to genocide, the new assaults on society’s political machinery are destroying centuries-old legal structures in the name of efficiency, dismantling needed government agencies and programs at high speed.
If Americans imagined the government needed breaking (much as Zuckerberg promoted), just wait. U.S. Republicans are welcoming every kind of graft, corruption, discrimination, and despoliation of citizens’ common national endowments of resources and capital. What will replace the U.S. government now? Social media? Thieves and rascals, to be sure.
We don’t need the proposed semi-fascist replacements for proper constitutional governments, and it’s ironic that today’s rapid changes are propelled by sentiments for a past whose “perfections” are little more than fantasies covering old-fashioned theft.
In the U.S., government is fast being broken.
Here we can move fast if we have to, but let’s not break Canada.
