I Still Can’t See Through the Fog: Hopes for the New Year
By: D J B
Tags: Future, Truth, Cooperation, Trust, Technology

Photo by JJ Jordan on Unsplash

The new year is coming. We can’t stop that. Even the soon to be ex-president of the US can’t stop it, although he is certainly trying.

Most people agree that 2020 was a memorable year, but that the bad outweighed the good. The year was dominated by the world-wide pandemic, and that will carry over with great intensity into next year. But next year the vaccines will be shot into the arms of millions of people, with it the hope that it will allow us to play together again.

There are a lot of problems facing the world that need to be addressed once we can give each other reassuring hugs. Many of the world’s economies are drowning in debt. Many individuals all over the world are drowning in debt or have completely run out of money. Many businesses have closed. Many jobs that were lost to the pandemic will never come back. They will be replaced by robots, or they are not really necessary anymore.

The earth’s atmosphere is warming. The climate is shifting in ways that we will not be able to stop. Will many of our grandchildren move to Siberia to enjoy the new, temperate climate?

Medicines and medical devices are rapidly defeating many diseases and keeping people alive longer. Yet, many people’s lives are full of stress, anxiety, and uncertainty. Are we designed to live in the world we have created?

Despite many huge and exciting advances, we are still humans. We still over-react emotionally more often than we act rationally. We run from things we don’t understand, and we often don’t listen to the explanations because they don’t fit with what we want to believe.

There are many reasons to think that the new year will be better than the last. All of the troubles of the past year have brought many of the problems into clearer focus. There are enough people who care, and who are clever enough to figure out solutions that can ameliorate, if not solve, our difficulties.

There are two things that I hope for in 2021 that will greatly improve our chances of living in a better world. The first that we have to be build trust in our instituions and sources. We have to do our best to promote the truth and expose lies, distortions and manipulations. This has to be done in all fields: journalism, politics, business, science, and in all forms of social media, from Twitter to TikTok. I understand that finding and agreeing upon “The Truth” is difficult, but there are basic, apparent facts that can be agreed upon. However, people who diberately promote lies should be confronted and discredited, and rejected.

The second change that I hope to see more of in 2021, is for more people to realize how our lives have become unavoidably enmeshed and intertwined. As we have seen from the spread of the virus, what happens in China and Italy affects the rest of the world. Instability in the Middle East and Africa has caused people to die attempting to flee to Europe. Heavy drug use in the US has led to terror, disruption, and death in Central America and Mexico. That has led to having thousands of people marching to the US border begging to be allowed in. When a factory closes the entire community suffers. If you don’t wear a mask I will have to remain inside for months, and I have no idea who you are.

Climate change, refugees, racism, poverty, extreme wealth, drug overdoses, Artificial Intelligence, robots, industrial agriculture, industrial chickens, viruses, vanishing species, islands of plastic trash floating in the oceans, plastic in the snow on top of Mt. Everest, toxins in the water, lead in the water, and so many other problems all overlap. They are all interconnected, and no one can solve them on their own. No city or state, or even country can solve it by itself. We have to develop the new skills of cooperation, coordination, negotiation. We need to find a way to develop more trust in each other, no matter who we are, what we look like, or where we come from.

Those are my hopes for 2021.

Do I predict we will see more of those two necessary skills? Yes, there will be some movement in both of those directions during 2021. We have seen how badly we suffer when we deny the truth and act selfishly.

Will there be enough improvement to make a real difference?

I’ll get back to you in June.