VertRep

VertRep
Showing posts with label Crisis After Crisis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Crisis After Crisis. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 13, 2021

"Crisis du jour" should not be a way of life.


Just a reminder that just because someone loses their head every time something doesn't make them happy, it's not a "crisis" it's just an immature person having a temper tantrum.

Or, as we used to say, "If every thing is a crisis, nothing is a crisis."

Or perhaps: “When everything is a crisis and a scandal, the end result is that nothing is.”

Interesting article from Foreign Policy by Eliah Bures:

The law of crisis is that crisis-talk fuels itself: Every time a choice is pitched as life-or-death, or an institution is pronounced “in crisis,” panic and partisanship and zero-sum thinking gain ground. Use of crisis mirrors your ideological commitments. If you want to raise the temperature, then breathlessly framing your cause as a crisis will do the trick. Crisis-talk is the gas pedal, not the brakes.

Eric Hoffer in his book, The Temper of Our Time described it as a "time of juveniles."

The significant point is that juvenilization inevitably results in some degree of primitivization. We are up against the great paradox of the twentieth century: namely, that breakneck technological advance has gone hand in hand with a return to tribalism, charismatic leader, medicine men, credulity, and tribal wars. p22.

I leave it you to judge whether Mr. Hoffer was describing our times.

As for me, I'm working on my stoicism.