Paul Collits has written an excellent diagnosis of the so-called modern world. Here’s how it starts:
Once upon a time, there was a place for everything and everything was in its place. Let’s call this time the 1950s. We had the Tridentine Latin Mass. Eisenhower was in the White House. Churchill made a comeback. Men and women were, well, men and women. The Soviets were the main (only?) bad guys. The enemy was communism. Dress was modest. We had control of our private lives. Our lives were, well, private. Newspapers (perhaps) told the truth.
We had the ‘long boom’. Just about everyone had a job.
There were lots of hideous things that hadn’t even been thought of: the European Union, Bill Gates, wokery, postmodernism, the endlessly revised ‘modern’ Novus Ordo Mass, reality TV, the modern university, human-resources departments, pretend democracy, politicised police, surveillance capitalism, homosexuality-infested British [and American — K.] television drama and lifestyle shows. Make up your own list. Nostalgia has manifold merits.
And then he goes full-bore attack dog on modernism.
The change obsession was born in the 1960s, and there has since been permanent revolution; we have simply found ever new ways of making it worse. This whole farandole neatly covers my lifetime. There is even a word for our current world. Inevitably it is an acronym. And almost inevitably it comes from the US military and has become a business-studies cliché. We now live in VUCA world:
VUCA stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity and is used to help teams and organisations better prepare for, and manage the risks associated with, uncertain situations. VUCA has now been reimagined as leadership with ‘vision, understanding, clarity, agility’. There you go.
Websites like the one linked above, which disputes the military origins of the term, suggest to me the emergence of a VUCA cult in the business world and perhaps beyond that. After all, we are all required to ‘celebrate diversity’ and ‘affirm’ every bizarre sexuality dreamt up, adopt every new version of Windows, get the app, wave our smartphones at machines, kill cash, love antipopes, take lethal injectables, and the rest.
Not only are we told to accept all this as the new way of life; we are enjoined to embrace it. Get with the programme. No room here for William F Buckley Jr’s counterstrategy of standing athwart history and yelling ‘Stop!’
All the things listed here connote ‘disruption’. And, of course, ‘diversity’. For business, this is the new reality, accepted at face value, something to be reckoned with. Nassim Nicholas Taleb (why use just two names when you have three?) of ‘black swans’ fame, has written a book, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder (2012), on how to profit from the new VUCA order of things. In such a world, the abnormal becomes normal. JD Vance is deemed ‘creepy’ and ‘weird’. Not so Tim Walz (though what’s emerging on ‘Touchdown Tim’ in the alt-media if true, isn’t pretty).
A question for conspiracy researchers should be whether the creation of a VUCA cult and the urging of all of us to just deal with it have been deliberate. Whether the normalisation of the weird and unpredictable is a strategy of confusion that stands alongside censorship, silencing of dissent, memory-holing, doublespeak, ridiculing conservatism, abandonment of both history study and the teaching of critical skills. It is a real question. If it quacks like a deliberate strategy, it probably is a deliberate strategy. See also replacement theory.
Time to turn back the clock, methinks. Or load up the helicopters, metaphorically speaking of course.
Before you get all nostalgic for the 50’s just remind yourself what it was like back then. There was no A/C. Summers were hot and winters were cold. Winter clothes that were at least somewhat effective were big and bulky. and summer clothes were hot and sticky ( and there were no bikinis ). Airplanes had propellers and tickets were expensive. ( and planes regularly fell out of the sky ). TV’s were small black and white and poor resolution when you could get reception and less than 25% of homes had one. Everything was closed on Sunday because everyone was at church.
Be careful what you wish for…….
There were bikinis in the 50s. Not having a television might be a benefit to society as people turn to creative hobbies, reading, social clubs, sports or other activities. Everything closed on a Sunday would be a nice change to spend time with family and friends. Other than segregation the 50s simply do not sound all that bad
Nostalgic for the 50’s? How about the 30’s, when Shewart invented the basics of statistical process control* with the basic idea of improving processes by reducing VARIABILITY? This whole VUCA anal smoke injection is a byproduct of an institutional bias against reliability and maintenance (dare we call it sustainability?) and in favor of “shiny new things,” most of which are half-baked, poorly conceived “innovations,” stupid shxt like just-in-time logistics (how’d that work during the WuFlulishness?) or rainwater collection roofs (the leaking tank is ruining the foundation of my local library). Exercising a bit of caution about the Next New Thing would give the VUCA gang the kick in the ass they so richly deserve.