I recently wrote the title in an email to a discussion list I participate in. I'm not sure where it came from - whether I read it somewhere or heard someone say it - but I am fairly certain that it is true. Even as I read my own words echoed on the discussion list, I wondered at the truth of them. I could not find a weakness, but I did find abstraction inherently assumed in the statement. It is fair to note what is assumed, in fairness to myself and others.

Expectations are derived from many things. Part of expectations are heuristic - learned things. A child might think that an orange tree can produce bananas - in time, we can hope, that the child will learn the difference. Society does that - though, in all fairness, society is also seemingly committed to the same level of thinking that creates things people perceive as problems. As Albert Einstein once wrote:

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Despite itself, society has managed to progress - but as Ayn Rand notes:

The course of mankind's progress is not a straight, automatic line, but a tortuous struggle, with long detours or relapses into the stagnant night of the irrational. Mankind moves forward by the grace of those human bridges who are able to grasp and transmit, across years or centuries, the achievements that men had reached - and to carry them further.

The bridges of which Ayn Rand writes would seem to coincide with the ratchet mechanism through which society has seen progress - sometimes, the ratchet slides back, but somehow society manages to move beyond any slips. The trouble isn't progress, the trouble is stagnation. { Read more }