You can now decide what is your preferred form of civilisation – Pace of Life or Peace of Mind. Pace of life is for sale. If you have enough money you can buy it. Apart from transaction aids it need not involve others. Peace of mind is not for sale. You create it mainly by involving other people. At present I think the two are irreconcilable. Even in Japan, the birthplace of protocol, politicians complain about old habits leaving new ideas untended.
You don’t need a Daily Paradox to tell you that we live in a turbulent world. Underlying the sometimes trivial rivalries and infantile snubs of childish leaders there is a big swell taking place. It is a shift towards everyone’s voice being heard. We have discovered the impact of social media. We want our demands better understood.
The emergence of history’s biggest ever threat to job stability, AI, has compounded the worries about war and weather. Governments recognise that increasing automation means we will have to be paid for breathing sooner or later. In some places they almost are even now. This so goes against the Calvin / Arendt concept of work that it calls for new views of today’s purpose of life. I call that ‘to survive, with embellishments to prove we deserve to’.
Absent from this scene is a politically educated community. Democracies, sometimes deliberately, sometimes accidentally, have failed to teach politics and philosophy to their young. Understandably the demands of food, shelter and medicine have come first. Autocracies have, with some successes, deliberately taught subservience to achieve this. However, when subservient people get richer they either flee to better-defined democracies or revolt. That’s when leadership battles for survival become aggressive.
It is easy to think that some specific areas of the world can withstand the threatening tsunami but the reality is that the invader is not someone else but something else. Common enemies traditionally unite their opponents. Why aren’t we collaborating?
Because we have made competition a bigger issue than cooperation. Objectively this is ridiculous unless we want a world of robots run by a small coterie of superbrains. Logic tells us that such a world would miss the real beauty of humanity as we now see it.
Maybe we could devote a few of our overcrowded hours to thinking about who we want to be. We are at a moment of history when we could profitably do that.
And for the first time since man evolved we have the ability to make it happen.
Good morning
John Bittleston
For some of you there will be an opportunity to express your views in person later today. For those of you who can’t, please do tell us at [email protected].
17 September 2025
