One of the widespread complaints of this age is that events are moving too fast to assimilate and understand, and that life and its events move too quickly to control. Most of this is simply hogwash. Even our much vaunted 24 hour news cycles, to give but one example, are largely endless repetition of the same stories and even the same words, hour after hour, until something new happens that can be talked about. We certainly feel hurried, but much of that hurry is artificial. If we had the moral courage to tell people to wait and to spend our time wisely dealing with chronic and recurring problems rather than having to endlessly fight the same fires over and over again, our time might be more productively spent. But having that moral courage has always been difficult, especially in an age that does not seem to value patience and equates deliberateness with laziness.

If we allow ourselves to get trapped by the tyranny of the urgent, there is now way that we can develop the patience or the insight necessary to see the root problems or the repetitive and chronic patterns that underlie the difficulties of our lives and our situation in history. If all we are doing is dealing with endless crises (as seems to be the way of this corrupt world), all we are doing is playing whack-a-mole, and there are always many more moles to whack than we are able to get to with our limited time and energy and resources. But if we took the time to understand the deeper significance of problems, we would see that the moles that keep popping up usually spring from a small set of serious but unresolved problems within people, institutions, and societies. Tackling these deeper issues will prevent many of the moles from popping up in the first place, but it requires discipline to prevent problems in the first place rather than to wait until they cannot be put off any longer.

As human beings we are creatures of habit. In order to conserve time and energy and handle our lives more efficiently, we develop patterns of thought and behavior that allow us to save our energy and focus for takes that are novel, less routine, or simply more enjoyable than the mundane and trivial tasks that fill up so much of our lives. Because our habits are second nature to us, we often fail to examine them when we think about why our lives are the way that they are. All too often we take ourselves as a given, and look for problems in the area outside of our control, whether to absolve ourselves of blame and responsibility or because we are often far more comfortable even in an unpleasant reality that we are familiar with than in dealing with uncertainty and change. We may pay lip service to the need for growth and change, but most often the sort of growth we have in mind is merely a continued elaboration and development of our existing lines of behavior and thought, and not the development of different ones to replace our defective models, or new ones to supplement existing ways of thinking and behavior that are useful in certain circumstances but used far beyond those limits.

Related to our lack of interest in taking responsibility for ourselves and our own ways of thinking and behavior is the tendency we have to desire control over other people and over our environment, seeking power and authority to augment our feelings of security. This is generally a mistake. Rather than solving our own insecurities, attempting to control others places our survival and well-being at grave risk from repercussions from those whose resentment and hostility to being treated as mere pawns on a chessboard by bullies and tyrants will range from ridicule and criticism to sedition and revolution. Seeking to resolve our own fears and insecurities through control of institutions and societies only makes everyone more insecure and only increases the stakes and tensions within such places, making rebellion and conflict inevitable as others seek to take by force what ought to be theirs by right. The self-disciplined and self-controlled have no interest in ruling others in their families, churches, businesses, or nations as tyrannical despots.

And so in our present society we have an urgent need to slow down, to understand what is going on and the deeper roots of our interrelated problems, and to control ourselves rather than seek to control others. The complex problems of our world will not be solved through top-down direction from fallible human beings of incomplete understanding and mixed motives and doubtful character and integrity. Rather, such problems as we face in our contemporary world must be solved from the inside out and from the bottom up, as these problems developed over a long time out of the bad decisions and weak character of billions of people. And until we become better people, our world cannot become a better place. Even if we ourselves only have a small part of the blame, and others had much larger culpability, together our straws have broken the camel’s back, and we have all contributed to the problems of moral, intellectual, cultural, and economic bankruptcy through our decisions or through our lack of involvement in building and maintaining and restoring our social cohesion. The chickens have come home to roost, but unless we take the time to examine the roots of our crises and to examine our own part of the blame, in humility and self-examination, nothing we do is going to be more than a band-aid on the deep wounds of our world. And we deserve better than superficial remedies for our deep-rooted problems.