We are seeing a new group of books, movies and television shows attempting to bring humanity to another time in the past, or into the future, where humanity can dramatically change the way we live by either having the freedom from the past to progress in a more utilitarian way, or start over from scratch with the benefit of prior knowledge. Both scenarios are post apocalyptic from either war or global catastrophe. Today, we wonder where will the latest and ongoing global protests and political revolutions lead us? To an apocalypse?

I highly doubt it. Technologically humanity has changed quit a bit in the past 200 years, but in terms of human social evolution, everything old is new again.

Global protests have popped up everywhere against authoritarian governments and the wanton greed and avarice of some individuals with the backdrop of a general lack of ethical and moral standards by all. Religious revivalism and rival-ism, liberal labour protests and reactions against corrupt government is everywhere, as is the gloom and doom of the specter of global warming. The global Occupy movement, the Arab Spring and national protests within the EU are the examples from 2011 alone! Upheavals like this usually are the hallmarks of some kind of societal change.

The anti-establishment movement within the United States of the late 1960’s and early 70’s, as an example, brought about the end of the Vietnam war, civil rights being extended to African Americans, and the downfall of Nixon. Eventually the reactionary doors were opened to neo-conservative union busting Reaganomics, which led to the fall of Keynesianism and the rise of the ideals of the New American Century of extreme Republicanism after 9/11 and then to market meltdown and deep recession at the end of the first decade of the new millennium. Much of the same neo-conservative agenda was mirrored in the UK via Thatcherism and and the confused poll driven populist policies of Blair in the UK post 9/11, followed, too, by deep economic recession.

After a decade of preemptive strikes, overt wars, morally irresponsible and ethically questionable economic practices and generally poor and worsening prospects for wealth gain, except for an ever decreasing and select few who are seen as the winners of free competition within deregulated capitalism, a confusing sense of where do we go from here can be seen and felt. The general global economy collapsed when national bubble economies burst one after another. Beginning with bellwethers Ireland then Iceland, the implosion of the US economy in 2008 followed by Greece, Italy, Spain and the intense warnings of the IMF, but slow reaction of the powerful EU countries France and Germany, show the deep global economic cracks that threaten to become abysses.

Throwing good ‘tax’ money after bad in the form of government sponsored bailouts of companies ‘too big to fail’ has not helped. Instead of giving the lower classes the money to bubble-up as FDR did to fight the Great Depression, modern governments during the Great Recession gave huge packets of trickle-down money to failed big business assuming they could keep the economy from failing further. Instead of a private investment bubble, we now see a public debt balloon. Again we see the little guy, the consumer, the paid worker, is the economy rather than the big businesses and their CEOs as economy after economy has struggled to remain profitable and continue to grow. Still the big players look after themselves with more than handsome renumeration, while once again the workers, with reduced social safety nets they worked all their lives for, and chronically underemployed youth are left to rallying in the streets to fight for the living they were promised.

There is no doubt we live in strange times. Moral and ethical values have changed over the past 30 years, perhaps too much in some ways and for some people. But it certainly seems that a general sour dissatisfaction with the extremes of both the political and economic realms has finally come to most citizens taste buds. The almighty dollar, greed as profit, growth as unlimited and a near psychopathic role played by major corporate executives, and their troops, the MBA’s, has brought many regular shift working citizens to much sadness. All of this done, of course, in the name of freedom, democracy and capitalism. These revolutionary terms, in their day, lead many out of poverty, brought about new forms of governance and made choice the order of the day. But like most things, too much of a good thing leads to corruption in one form or another. What was once sweet is now sour as these days the 99% protest against the 1%, the group at the top, the winners of the capitalist competition.

Those that have great drive and ambition to succeed, who win the economic race to fabulous wealth, do so in much the same way as top caliber athletes. No-one remembers silver medallists, nor all the countless preliminary competitors the eventual winner must defeat, and so the drive to be at the top, the winner, leads many to do whatever is necessary. In business this means acquiring more wealth from others, and as monetary wealth itself is finite it must be gained at the expense of others.

A winner must not have pangs of guilt or remorse for making other fellow human beings poorer and lose as the winner becomes wealthier and win. In fact, this anti-social eventuality of unbridled competition must be counter-intuitively made to appear a paragon of virtuous cooperative behavior. It’s the wealthy that invest and hire the poor. Without the drive of the winners, society would slow and become static. It becomes the goal of the wealthy to make every one else poorer and be seen as a success for having done so. All of society benefits from the efforts of winners.

However, as competition for wealth becomes more intense, previously highly regarded moral values and ethical rules, useful in fairly getting to the semi-finals, are bent when in tough against other top notch competitors. Advantages are sought, cheating becomes a common practice and as each new form is discovered and made illegal, other forms are invented.

Our society generally accepts this to be a true fact of human nature and explains it still as social Darwinism. Excuses are made by the wealthier winners that if not for them the economy would not function and the poorer would not have work at all. Such a bizarre notion! If not for the poor the winners wouldn’t be wealthier is perhaps the other way round to look at this. Be that as it may, the winners must possess some degree of psychopathy in order to keep feelings of sympathy and empathy, if they have them at all, at bay from their goal of winning the economic race. And, besides, who wouldn’t want to be a winner?

And there is the rub. It is easy to be a critic. And in todays world it has become easier to be a hypocritical critic. We all slam environmental pollution, yet few of us are prepared to rid ourselves of the car and other fossil fueled machines that make life easier, faster and where we can get more work done per unit of effort. Most are envious of the wealthy, many despise the wealthy, many don’t want to work as hard as the wealthy, but few would pass up being wealthy. The scramble for lotto tickets every week gives that away.

Society is a human construction and so follows the rules people have put in place. Most of these rules have not changed since the days of our earliest civilizations. There is no ‘nature’ other than the human characteristics left to it. The ‘nature of society’ is a misnomer and misuse, if not abuse, of the word ‘nature’. The distinction must be made clear. The characteristics of society and the characteristics of humans in society are far removed from nature. This might explain why things have not changed much in 50 centuries, there are no new ways, no new human characteristics as the struggle between freedom and control and cooperation and individualism sway to and fro through time and we find a new way, again.