The World We Have Fashioned Today Is a World of Unintended Consequences

It’s gone to hell, no doubt, but the world we inhabit today is jam-packed with the honest souls of the common man, who universally hopes for no more than to feed and shelter his family in peace. I use ‘man’ in the sense of ‘mankind,’ as women lead the way in the cleanliness of their souls.

If humankind leaves this gorgeous green planet as merely one more brief and failed experiment along Darwin’s theory of evolution, it won’t be for lack of brainpower. It will be because, for all our powers of invention, we are simply too unintentionally stupid.

We continually allow unintended consequences to do us in

And by that, I mean that accurately recognizing the consequences of a planned action is better accomplished by ChatGPT than any of us humans. AI is not encumbered by its human history, because it has none. We, as individuals, are made vulnerable by our childhoods and all the widely variable experiences of our lives, which is what makes us so dear to some and so toxic to others.

That’s the deal of being human. It’s the beauty of it, and yet we’re too bloody dumb to resist the bait.

Think about it

Eisenhower’s great idea about an interstate highway system enabled the destruction of small towns across America. Wal-Mart’s great idea about bringing big-box consumerism to clusters of small towns finished the job. That combination we fashioned with such high hopes drove small-town-young people to the cities for work and allowed private investors to gobble up the land as their abandoned parents died off.

American business’s great idea about international commerce shipped our industrial capabilities off to China, and bled the middle class dry, ending single-wage-earner families and hollowing out our pledge for a better life for each generation.

Boeing’s great idea was to move the strategy of the company away from engineering to maximizing investor profit, and whether it will survive its wounded reputation is anyone’s guess.

And then, of course, there’s war. Lyndon Johnson’s great idea was to prevent the domino-effect spread of communism by intervening in the Vietnamese civil war, a failed war costing 56,000 American dead and an entire generation of walking wounded. George Bush’s great idea was responding to 9-11 by another failed twenty-year war in Afghanistan, the longest and most expensive ever fought by America.

Joe Biden’s great idea was his knee-jerk support of Israel in their retaliatory war in Gaza (and now Lebanon), putting America squarely on the wrong side of world opinion, and who knows where that commitment will lead? The long-term unintended consequence of all those failed great ideas is some $5 trillion down the toilet, a world-wide American reputation for torture during war, and a military-industrial complex that expends 42% of our national budget—gaining not one single dollar of value for the effort.

Harry Truman’s great idea was to replace the WWII Office of Strategic Services (OSS) with something called the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a meddling catastrophe of an organization. The consequence, intended or not, seems unintended, as Truman later said, “I never would have agreed to the formulation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in forty-seven, if I had known it would become the American Gestapo.”

The evidence is everywhere one peeks under the rug

The childhood friend who no longer talks to you, because of what you (thought) was an innocent political opinion. The shaky marriage that results from years of kidding that unintendedly went clear to the bone. The incredible invention of the cel phone that has made the teaching environment toxic and our kids into needy zombies. The internet—god’s gift to stalkers and pile-on haters of every persuasion.

Our Constitution comes to mind, guaranteeing private access to arms in the days of muzzle-loading weapons, creating gun-chaos two hundred years later, when weapons fire at a rate of 2-300 rounds per minute.

My Labrador retriever has more sense than that.

There is no cure or defense

Because we are human. And humans may be smart enough to invent and manufacture the weapons of our own destruction, but never clever enough to avoid the unintended consequences of the military-undustrial-complex. Agricultural chemicals? Don’t get me started.

The best we can do is forgive each other.