Speaking to a senior nursing manager in regional Australia. Needs more than 3 times as many new RNs every…
Speaking to a senior nursing manager in regional Australia. Needs more than 3 times as many new RNs every year than are available.
Says tree changers settle in the area, often bringing no children and therefore no younger people to help refresh the local workforce. /1
Foresees total collapse in provision within 5 years. Only 20% of the local population is of working age.
There’s an intersection of two dangerous social trends in play here. One is demography, the rapid ageing of the existing population. /2
The other is the cultural model that ageing population have endowed society with.
In a nutshell, we have an ageing population, which refuses to age. Leaving in its wake a culture of adolescence that has replace previous distinct life stages. /3
It’s the second trend that is the much more dangerous threat. We have literally, as a culture, forgotten how to act as adults.
The boomer demographic surge in population coincided with the incubation of a separate adolescent culture through high schools. /4
That combination has completely transformed societies into a single stage of human emotional development. Adolescence, at all ages.
It’s why our elections now are like the Superbowl. Adolescent life uses popularity as currency. Our electoral democracies seem insane now. /5
It’s because popularity, as a selection mechanism for leadership, has been decoupled completely from the empirical requirements of leadership.
Our adolescent culture seized upon the bit it recognised, popularity, and made it an end unto itself. /6
Borderline sociopaths win elections because winning at popularity is what high school rewards. We know nothing else.
It’s absolutely obvious that fixing the practical problems facing societies requires no routing through popularity. It adds nothing to that work. /7
But we refuse to see it. Look at the multiple elections underway around the world right now. We can’t look away, who wins these elections is life and death to us.
It’s irrelevant to fixing a thing. All the winners will do is focus on winning the next elections. /8
It’s a terminal self-referential loop. We don’t see it, we won’t see it. Rock stars well into their 80s are still packing the stadiums. Nobody takes responsibility for anything.
Each age group is now maximising its happiness, living its best life. /9
There’s no specific delegations to each age to perform necessary social functions. Just ‘fun’ maximisation, for all. Like a metastatic utilitarianism.
We have no memory. All of the knowledge and experience we’ve accumulated is ruthlessly suppressed. /10
Populists of other times, like in the mid-20th century, capitalised on massive social disruption to bypass the checks and balances of civilisation.
This time the checks and balances themselves are as populist as the populist leaders. The whole culture is populist. /11
Experts employed to lead critical social responses now go rogue and establish massive social media followings instead, peddling complete nonsense to fire up the likes. /12
Social media is a wrecking ball, replacing media itself, but also administration, government, and every accumulated institutional framework developed over generations of bitter learning.
It’s the key that unlocked and switched off all of our protections. /13
The final piece of the populist hegemony. Because everything is social, including economics and technology. Shifting our social relationships to these platforms handed the keys to everything, to their owners.
It’s difficult to see how we get back, this time. /14
After the world wars the victors came from nations that hadn’t succumbed to populism, so their institutional memories kicked into gear to repair the world.
Social media has replaced those institutional mechanisms now. We’re not seeing the disaster that it is. /15
Nobody did this, no baddies. We always want there to be baddies. That’s our adolescent culture too, like we’re watching Star Wars.
It was the coincidence of those two social trends, of demography, and high schools decoupled from adult life, that created toxic sociality. /16
I don’t know how it ends. It may be our extinction, right now. Catastrophe will break the current social (popularity) hierarchies, but again this time we may not have the institutional reserve to rebuild from the wreckage.
I sincerely hope something offers us a way out. /end