The more things change, the more they stay the same

OK, now that the excitement of the recent election has died down (and it certainly didn't take long did it), the government will go about its business. Coalition negotiations will be conducted, compromises will be reached, and in short order we'll have a "new" government that's going to look a whole lot like the "old" government. How did Peter Townsend put it: "Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss".

For the most part, and this is nothing specifically German, I can assure you, most folks are glad. I mean, deep down, the last thing they really want is change. Oh sure, it'd be nice if we all earned more, there were fewer taxes, if the potholes got fixed and my Internet connection actually delivered the claimed megabit rate. And some might even be ecstatic if there were enough childcare places and better healthcare provisions and there wouldn't be so many poor people that we all have to look at. A few, of course, would like to see immigrants treated better and a very small minority would like to see them gone. But none of that represents what we really mean when we use the word "change".

We can stand it, a little bit at a time, but humans just aren't hardwired to like radical and drastic change, be it good or bad. Most of our history has been one of hardly-noticeable change. There have been a few "upheavals", if you will, such as the Agricultural or Industrial Revolutions, and natural catastrophes, be they mini-ice ages or epidemics like the Plague, which have thrown us off balance for longer periods of time. But these are few and far between. It's just our luck, though, that we apparently are living through another. Call it the Technological Revolution, the Information Age, Globalization ... it really doesn't matter ... but what bothers most of us most of all are the significant shifts in our own lives. They induce stress, and they are not getting fewer.

When seen in this light, elections are often a plea by the populace to slow down this pace of change. We don't like it. We don't know how to deal with it. We would prefer not to have to deal with it. What happens in any such shift, though, is that values change. They have to. Shifting from a hunter-gatherer society to an agricultural one places a different emphasis on caretaking, on nurture and on organization. Our stories change as a result. The same is true when we move out of the sedentary mindset of agriculture and machines start dominating our lives. Yes, there are benefits, to be sure, but there are losers as well. What we see when we look back over the long trajectory of human history is that the swings up-and-down (or back-and-forth, if you prefer) are simply getting more forceful, more drastic, and consequently, more destructive. Still, we know, regardless of how we vote, or how we act, we really have little, if any, influence on what will happen to us.

Beneath the surface, I believe there is a thick layer of anxiety that we'd like to bury even deeper, but we can't. We can see that things are changing but not for the better for most of the world's inhabitants. We can see there are very few winners, but a whole lot of losers. We feel ever more threatened by things that we just don't want to know about. Our very values -- what we believe to be good and right and true -- are having trouble holding up to the pressures they are confronted with.

But, it has always been this way in times of change. The more things change, the more they stay the same.