It’s a great old song, jukebox fave for many decades running, good chance you know it well.
“Good golly Miss Molly
Sure like to ball,
When you’re rockin' and a rollin’
Can’t hear yo’ momma call…”
Even now I’ll turn it up and grin. What’s an open guess is if you know the colloquial meaning of the lyrics. Yup, you guessed it. In America of the nineteen fifties rockin’ and rollin’ was a most literal description of just what it sounds like… good old fashioned enthusiastic get down get after it sex. Barely twenty years later "rock and roll" was a well recognized genre of music. America went through quite a change across those two decades, and the music of the times reflected them all. Here it is fifty years later and there is still debate on the what's and whys.
Changes… and the consequences associated. Some accidental, some deliberate, some destructive and some benign. The focus today is the creation of some tool, some convention, to standardize a realistic risk assessment on what comes out the bottom of the machine. Since most of what will be going in the top to be systematically examined will be things involving some form of change it seems a good time to take note of the concept of "change" as a risk factor.
Very few thing happen instantaneously. There is always a bit of time involved in any change. From a great many directions it is known the two key factors in the stress associated to any given change is the degree of change... and of equal importance how quickly it happened. You can change the orbit of a planet if you do it slowly enough, you can break a jet fighter if you ask it to change directions to quickly.
The study of change is
usually in the domain of physics or engineering, matters of physical reality
where measurements are observed and objective fact. Mass and velocity, enthalpy
and entropy, things of that sort. Societies on the other hand are composed of
people, collections of people where only a portion of the forces impinging on
them can be measured in objective fact.
When you’re working with people the subjective elements of opinion and
emotion play with just as much force as the physical. The only trustworthy fact
to be had is that you'll never have any genuine facts to trust.
In the prior chapter the extremes of humanity’s fate were defined, but how do you quantify a society's overall velocity towards those extremes? How to define the extremes of change? As humanity moves between those extremes what is normal and safe as differing from a potentially destructive haste?
To the best of my (admittedly very limited) knowledge no one has ever attempted to set such a value. I’m not sure if anyone has even seriously attempted to define a unit of measurement. Perhaps someone already has so perhaps someone can educate me in this, but until or unless someone does I’m compelled to try and invent one.
Using the rules of physical reality for a template such units would measure the degree of displacement/deflection in and across an appropriate dimension caused by some observed amount of energy applied to some defined amount of mass. Set an amount of time said force was applied and it becomes possible to approximate the amount of stress involved.
Translated for working social rather than physical this becomes some observed amount of change to life and lifestyle (those being the observable manifestations of the change) and considering how said change might impact the individual inner psyches where live the secret hopes and fears that power both life and the society where that life is lived.
Oh boy, oh joy, and ok: deep breath and take it on one thing at a time. This… is gonna get interesting.
Time is perhaps the easiest definition since there are several long standing terms oft used: a lifespan (from deep scriptural sources set as three score and ten, 70 years), and a more modern but fairly well verified unit called a passage, a term conveniently one tenth of the former which references cycles of an individual’s psychological and physical maturation. A lifespan, 70 years, and a passage within that life of 7 years. As an added perk there are definitions assigned to each “passage” that while not exacting and rigid are, more often than not, good ballpark indicators of how several primal facets will shift within an individual across the passages.
The basic nature of our interlinked social existences makes it a more difficult challenge to define some unit to represent a unit of society equivalent to mass. Shy of totally engineered individuals living in an externally controlled "society" I'd say it is actually impossible. I’ll assert taking modern society for the focus of your thought will require an approach more akin to thinking thermodynamics within a volatile fluid than approaching from the Newtonian perspective of rigid bodies in motion.
It makes a better analogy to compare each individual to a molecule within a fluid system of various such molecules. More than a few of the concepts have easily seen analogies to the behavior of individuals within the various social systems. So which of those concepts are worth pirating to assist in the study of 'tardation, why are they worth stealing, and once stolen how should they be reinterpreted to fit the task at hand?
The concepts I’d pirate are those associated with compression and expansion as seen applied to the pressures and temperatures found in say a steam boiler or an air conditioner. Those concepts more than any seem to encompass what is needed to define the critical properties of a system as volatile as a society where the driving force ( the heat if you will, the enthalpy of the mix) is some mixture of people’s attitudes, their hopes and dreams and fears.
Not only are such concepts an excellent fit to the dynamics of a social system there’s even a chance some of the associated mathematical functions might make the jump as well if an appropriately adjusted scale can be established. It would be full on awesome to have a social version of the perfect gas law, even if deriving the gas constant, the little "r" term in P= VrT, becomes a monster that consumes lives and souls.
From the perspective of discerning the ultimate consequences of 'Tardation there is another value to be considered, and it is a critical factor: the ignition temperature of the whole affair. In any vaporous mass (involving oxygen) where it ignites is the ultimate marker of stress on the material. Where it degrades into different compounds is also a fine marker, just not quite so easily seen, or spectacular when it does. That it isn't so visible does not mean it can be ignored though, not even. It's an open guess what will get formed when the broken bits and pieces finally do cool and condense. You just might wind up with a culture killing psychobiotic of the sort unsavory politicians use trying to sell slavery as the social norm.
Ok, if you've hung in this long it's very likely you're thinking something along the lines of "either get his car keys or start a timer running and substitute black coffee for the bottle of rum, one or the other, just don't leave the situation as it is." Fair enough, I'll (temporarily) surrender the car keys, and share the rum because I want to ramble a bit on where these thoughts lead.
( 6/11/2023) Wow. What was in that bottle of rum? Is this what they drink in Brigadoon? It has been six years, give or take, since the last words hit the drive. Oh, yea. Colorado happened. But that's a different story, although a story that in left handed inside out manner seems strangely related. Anyway, where was I?
Ok, yes, having edited what I'd written before I was thinking on how to structure a social risk matrix to accommodate what resolves to be a sum-of-risks for and from the individuals within that society. I was seeing clouds of vapor, a heavy contained vapor where each molecule is a human being interacting with both the cloud and, inverse squared, with the other molecules in closest proximity. I was watching the pressure waves of information and ideas pass through the cloud creating moving color bands of refraction shifting with opinions and states of mind. (memory reloading) I was seeing a place where the nature of the cloud was really quite a different creature from the nature of the individual(s) involved in forming the cloud.
A fine and fair illusion to illustrate what even the best of the Chaos mathematicians can only approximate. But… pretty works for abstract art, and really doesn't do diddly squat towards the ambition of creating an objective way to measure the potentials and parameters of the 'Tardation assault on civilization. That said it is equally true that when thinking on things that are totally beyond any knowledge or experience the mind will often enough create images that, upon full investigation, really don't do a bad job of representing (in greater or lesser degrees of fidelity) the subject in focus. So exactly what do those moving bands of color represent?
I'm thinking that question is a good place to park this somewhat mongrel chapter to set about refining what the last few years have taught me that might have some bearing on the subject of 'Tardation. I haven't written on the subject for several years now, but strangely the subject hasn't ever really left my thoughts, to many people I know are showing symptoms of the malady.
So… till the next time the subject surfaces? Stay sane, starve a shrink.
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