The Thin Ice of Scale

For my last blog of 2021, I spent a while considering what it might be that has made us so prone to fragility at this time. Why do we find ourselves so ready to blame others for a natural event, and to seek government support for its consequences, rather then deal with it?

I ruled out anything to do with generations or nationalities because in the end, people don’t change much. We are all creatures shaped by the circumstances we find ourselves in and have shown over millennia that we adapt. There never has been, nor I suspect will there ever be, an apathetic generation – just those who find themselves somewhere on the growth and decline cycles of civilisation – either creating, exploiting, enjoying, worrying, complaining and eventually rejecting the consequences of an idea. I come from the worrying generation – I grew up in the Cold War. The generation that followed were brought up in an environment of automatic plenty, fuelled by increasing health and wealth, and it is the latest gene…