REFER TO GREY: Contemplations by Robert Greigos © 2007-2024

“Gridlock” is the current term across journalistic media, meaning all sides refusing to compromise. The issues are numerous, from Brexit in the UK, to immigration in the US, to the right of return and statehood for Palestinians, to income inequality across the globe, to failure to address the causes of climate change and environmental degradation, to the “correctness” of religious belief. As a species, on myriads of issues, on countless fronts across the globe, we are at war with ourselves. Wherever we look, whichever channel we tune into, whatever time of day, there is no end to it, not even within the seemingly peaceful wilds of nature, wherein echoes and echoes of intense insistent rhetoric and disturbing images haunt our troubled minds.

“I need a drink,” some will say. “We need bigger guns,” others are saying. And, along every sideline, too often within the line of fire, children burst into tears out of fear and frustration, while bewildered affected wildlife flee, before falling and fading into extinction.

True, yes, most certainly, there is need for a leader of both vision and charity, a leader capable of addressing distressed emotion with calm reasoning that illuminates an achievable path toward safe healthful opportunity. Life, politics, and economics need not be a zero-sum game where for every “winner”, inevitably, there are scores and scores of “losers”. A true leader will show us a path forward where everybody wins, where there are no losers, where no one is left behind, where compromise benefits everyone and the environment, where only our own ignorance, fear, and prejudice limit our own personal progress.

Where, where is such a leader? Surely, our need has never been more clear and pressing.

“Bah, humbug”, you say? Wishful thinking? Doesn’t fit the facts, the survival of the fittest facts? The we are not all born equal facts? The we don’t all have equal talents and abilities facts? The we are not all afforded the same opportunities and encouragement facts? The parasites exist and are right now gnawing at us from every direction facts?

Ah, yes, but the facts also are that complex systems are all made up of unequal parts of widely differing shapes, talents, and designs, very few of which are indispensable to the workings, survival, and adaptability of those same systems as a whole. In fact, prune too many supposedly superfluous parts, “losers” if you will, and you very likely cripple and doom systems once believed to be stable. Nurtured diversity is the engine that fuels adaptive innovation. Adaptive innovation is the only guarantee that complex systems have a chance of surviving dynamic environments. Cripple systems we depend on and we all end up losers.

And yes, parasitic corruption is another way of crippling complex systems. But again, nurtured diversity fueling adaptive innovation is the only insurance we may ever have of limiting the deleterious effects of parasitic corruption. Such innovation may even include the reconstitution of huge overly complex systems into smaller more independent systems. A distributed power grid, for instance, instead of a more rigid highly integrated power grid. A less centrally administrated public school system, perhaps. Fewer market dominating banks and corporations, and tighter regulations on the accumulation of individual wealth wouldn’t hurt, either. Corruption sucks the life from complex systems. Corruption makes losers of us all.

No, most definitely, we need a leader, perhaps many leaders, who can calm our distressed emotions and reason us away from faulty, self-defeating beliefs toward empowering insight. If spring is a cue for you, inspiration from our creator that something inside you might, at least in part, be that leader, or one of those leaders we all need, then please, please, take that cue and act upon it, if only in the smallest of ways to calm and reassure your own troubled agitated heart, mind, and spirit.

If there is hope, surely spring can inspire us to find it, and act to coax it into some form of realization.

May spring always offer that kind of inspiration for you.