“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
-”The Second Coming”, by William Butler Yeats, 1919
Over on the “Everything Is BS” blog, David Pinsof writes about the Fermi Paradox i.e. if the galaxy is hypothetically teeming with intelligent life, where are they? Why can’t we detect any sign of aliens, in spite of all our advanced technology?
The most common answer (besides that they never existed in the first place) is that they must’ve been wiped out by some catastrophe, like nuclear Armageddon, a meteor crashing into their planet, a bubonic plague equivalent, or their sun going supernova.
Perhaps, says Pinsof… But maybe the real reason is far less dramatic and sexy. Maybe they are, or were, just…. Well, mediocre.
Maybe these aliens never got into interstellar communication or faster-than-light space travel simply because they couldn’t be bothered.
Maybe they’d rather have been smoking pot, watching sitcom reruns, online shopping, and having conversations about wine. Maybe they just futzed around until their civilizations fell into decay and eventual demise, just like what happened to the Romans.
And maybe, just maybe, continues Pinsof, something similar might now be happening to us.
“Scientific advancement is slowing. Low-hanging fruit are being plucked, as new ideas—and disruptive ideas—are getting harder to find. Economic growth is slowing. Innovative patents are declining. Birth rates are falling. Populations are aging. Debt is rising. Culture is drifting.”
Pinsof calls it “Mediocrity as an existential threat.” Anyone who has ever run a business or an organization knows exactly what this means.
At whatever micro or macros level we’re talking about, “Mediocrity as an existential threat” doesn’t happen because people are stupid, uniformed or lazy.
Mediocrity kicks in when people stop finding meaning, stop having faith.
Why should I bust my ass when the whole system is rigged? Why should I design world-class products for my company, if only the sales and marketing folk get all the credit? Why should I go into debt to go to (insert name of Ivy League institution here), when all it will do is make me even less employable?
The war that Yeats was alluding to in the poem above taught us a painful lesson, one that we never seem to learn:
That when faith dies, culture dies.
The art of leadership is the art of having something worth believing in.
