A tightly held secret in the US right now is that we will have a presidential election in November. The sitting Democratic president will almost certainly be their candidate but the Republicans have to decide on their nominee. Actually, some information about the struggles among the various candidates for the Republican nomination has leaked into the media.
One of the pleasures of looking through old news is reading the speculations and shrill language about what absolutely must happen and what positively must not happen when, after the fact, I can survey what actually did happen and what didn't. Some issues continue to fester, the situation in Syria being the prime one for me.
I notice that much of the same type of alarm language is being used in the up-to-date media today. I used to wonder why more good news wasn't promoted but the editor of Discover magazine made this honest and useful statement:
Journalists tend to love bad news. You do too, which is why we keep delivering it. Which headline would you pay more attention to: "World May End in 2012" or "World Highly Unlikely to End this Year"?
We do it even though we know that gloom and doom is not the whole story. One odd consequence is that when we look at things as they truly are, the results can seem surprising.
The statement appears under the title "The Good Surprise" and goes on the say that Peter Diamandis (thinker and philanthropist) and Steven Kottler (award-winning journalist) took a careful look back, they saw a trend of decades or centuries of more technology more widely available, more freedom and health for more people and more goods and services. This view is explained in their book "Abundance".This is just the conclusion I came to after several years of teaching a course on the future. It is also what Peter Drucker says in his book "Post-Industrial Society". We have setbacks, false starts and disruptions but basically we humans are moving forward, despite being wired to attend to the dangers and news of dangers, which may or may not turn out to be important.
--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
