A Room with a View in a House of Cards

There’s no mystery behind our economic, social, environmental, and personal crises. When  you build a house of cards you can be certain that it will always fall sooner or later. To avert disaster we must accept this one fact of life, and take it into account in our every action.

All living creatures behave in a manner that shapes the world about them to better suit their survival needs. Beavers build dams, termites build mounds, birds build nests,  and so on with all life. With the exception of human beings, these shaping behaviors are a product of evolution, in which the limits of each genetically determined variety of behavior is tested in practice. If a behavior does not work, its practitioners do not prosper and they and their potential progeny disappear form the face of the planet.

Human behavior is subject to this same dictum with one all important exception. Human behavior embodies the powers of imagination in which future possibilities are envisioned and acted upon. It is the human imagination and the actions that follow, that have allowed humanity to outpace evolution and shape the world with unbridled enthusiasm and limitless belief in its own powers. But belief in the power of imagination is not the same as the actual power of imagination.

Imagine that the world is made of cards. Like all other creatures, we set to work building a house of cards that will be serve our needs. The first tier of our construction is stable enough. We dwell within in relative comfort. We tidy up  and do routine maintenance. When an unusually strong wind blows ill and a portion of our house collapses, we study, we learn, and we build better with relative ease.

Being imaginative creatures, not limited by genetically determined behavior, it dawns on us to that our single level dwelling, having worked quite well, might be even better were it to be enlarged with a second tier. Using the principles we created from building our ground floor, we add a second story. And when we find that our second story is unstable, we reinforce our first story to support the second. With a bit of tweaking here and there, we end up with a room with a view.

Over the course of time we become ever more confident of our ideas and methods for building and we continue adding levels to our edifice, which rises higher and higher above its foundation. We contrive ever more effective reinforcements to our foundation and lower tiers. We elaborate our edifice to include special purpose rooms and stairs and elevators and condo apartments and business establishments and so on and on and on, creating ever-increasing complexity and rising so high that we can no longer see the ground down below.

There comes a day when our edifice becomes so complex that no one can possibly understand how the cards making up our edifice are interconnected. buttressed, and reinforced. We assign scientists and specialists with the job of attempting to master aspects and intricacies of our house, but the edifice as a whole has become beyond our ken. Only the philosophers among us continue to fuss over the foundations of our construction, but their obsession does not help us with the job of building yet another room with a view. Now accustomed to luxury, we worship and reward our ambitious and imaginative entrepreneurs, who always find ways to build our edifice still higher. This is the “busy” in our busi-ness.

What strikes me as most strange, is that anyone who has spent a long evening idly building a house of cards, knows with absolute certainty that at some point, the house of cards must fall.

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