This chapter contains great
thoughts. I assume that in our dotage
we can pretend to have great thoughts.
Why let all of that experience go to waste? What is also assumed is that the ownership of these great
thoughts is not in dispute. Your great
thoughts are yours (and probably wrong) and my great thoughts are mine and show
enormous insight.
I, modestly, propose a concept
that has, hitherto now, an unrecognized significance - which is
"sociological inertia." The
heart of the idea is that society resists change because of the vast investment
of current resources in maintaining status quo. For example, the oil industry employs hundreds of thousands
(millions?) of people. From oil well
riggers to service station owners to top executives. If - overnight - we could replace the oil industry with a
"green" technology all of those people would have their careers and
lives uprooted. Those people would be
very unhappy regardless whether or not such a change would benefit the world or
not. That unhappiness would translate
into political pressure to maintain things as they are. Lobbyists would get hired to influence congress
and money would get spread around. TV ads would appear.
An oil well rigger loses his/her
professional identity and expertise if he/she is expected to install solar
panels. He would turn himself from a
seasoned veteran on the well to a rookie on the roof. The Vice-President of Research at a gigantic oil company knows
all about petroleum products, refining, and the geology of slate but knows nothing (most probably) about semi-conductor response to ultra-violet light. Both,
of course, are going to maintain that an increase in oil production in America
is the way to go.
Similarly, those hard workers involved in the health care
insurance business will resist any alteration because their careers and
knowledge is based on the current system.
They know that a particular insurance company needs triplicates of
everything and doesn’t like staples – just paper clips. Who could guess what evil things a single
payer system would require? It can’t be
good. It matters not that a big change
could vastly improve functionality - it would adversely affect their lives,
thus, in their view, it must be bad.
What ever happened to the
professional horse buggy makers when automobiles were introduced? The transition in that technology took about
the time of a career - 30 years.
So things don't change for the
better not because of the lack of merits of any alteration, but because change
would wipe out the importance and significance of many people’s lives. Thus change within a component of our
infrastructure happens slowly with the time frame of a career.
New things have an easier time of
it. They don’t have to supplant
anything immediately. They sneak up –
as the web is doing to printed media – and take it over. That certainly was not the purpose of the
web in the beginning.
Arguments and discussion about the merits of
change is blowing in the wind - there is too much sociological inertia in
keeping things the way they are.© 2014 Lester C. Welch
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