Wandering Home From Somewhere
I was walking home from somewhere a couple of weeks ago I passed by this old stripmall. All of the businesses in this old stripmall had gone out of business at least a year ago so the place is essentially vacant.
There was just one ginormous tree in the parking lot. They had a couple of bulldozers and there were trying to knock over this tree. A small crowd had gathered. It was kind of interesting because every time they started pushing on the tree you could sort of feel the shockwaves going through the earth.
Everybody was watching with a kind of hopeful anticipation that they could see the tree get pushed over by these bulldozers. Finally the tree popped. There was a huge sound. We could feel the shake through the earth. The tree was uprooted.
Nobody Saw It
Something happened and I don’t think anybody saw it because most of us were focusing on the lower trunk part of the tree. But something happened with one of the branches. There was some kind of a slingshot effect, I’m not really sure. It happened so quickly. This branch went sailing through the air and landed on the hood of this guy’s car.
The car was not an abandoned car. You could tell by the way it had been maintained. The branches kind of crashed through this car’s window. Then this old man next to me kind of chuckled and shook his head. He said that’s how it always happens. I said what you mean?
I thought he was gonna say something about unanticipated consequences but then he started talking about how everything changes quickly, but only after a lot of pressure has been built up before and how this pressure that is built up before is almost always something that nobody can see.
The Straw That Breaks The Camel’s Back
He said this tree was knocked over very much like the one straw breaks the camel’s back. The camel’s standing there and all the straws are being loaded on the camel’s back and you don’t really see all the pressure that is being built up on the camel’s spine. You don’t see all the pressure that is building in between his vertebrae.
Then finally all it takes is one last straw to make everything come crashing down. He said that happens more often than not. When it happens we don’t realize it because all we see is that one final snap that makes everything change. We don’t realize that there’s been pressure building up the entire time.
He said the most significant occurrence of this happened over 5 million years ago. He explained that all of what we call Western society originates in the Mediterranean basin. First from the Greeks and then the Romans and then later in Europe.
Creation Of The Mediterranean Sea
Once upon a time the Mediterranean Sea didn’t exist all. It was was a very large empty basin of dry land. Then there was an earthquake 5.4 million years ago and what we call the Straits of Gibraltar suddenly cracked open and the Atlantic Ocean filled up the Mediterranean Sea in a very short amount of time.
According to archaeologists the Mediterranean Sea, the entire Mediterranean Sea, if you can imagine it in your mind, was filling up at a rate of 10 m per day. That means the entire mass of land that’s underneath the Mediterranean Sea went from one day to having nothing to the next day to being under 10 m of water.
Which meant that everything that was alive was suddenly dead. That happened and filled up in a couple of years and then all of the life later sprung up around the Mediterranean Sea, which later became Greece and Rome. That one shift, that one crack in the earth, that one earthquake that cracked the Strait of Gibraltar and made the path available for the water to flow from the Atlantic Ocean into the newly created Mediterranean Sea.
Slow Buildup And POP!
That had been building for who knows how many millions of years. That pressure that existed between the tectonic plates was slowly getting stronger and stronger and stronger until it finally cracked.
He said everything is like that. You have a theory of evolution called punctuated equilibrium. You have these long plateaus and then there’s a huge burst of evolutionary change. That huge burst is based on a lot of pressure that is been slowly building.
It’s very similar to what Hemingway said about going bankrupt. It happens slowly and then all at once. This old guy was explaining why this is exactly what happened to all of the malls and a lot of the strip malls that are out of business now. For 50 years, after World War II, everything was going fine.
Healthy Retail And POOF!
In reality there was a lot of pressure building under the surface and now all of a sudden a lot of these malls are going out of business just like Hemingway said. All at once.
If you look back through the history of human civilizations, every single society that has existed has always collapsed. They almost always collapse due to economic reasons.
Just like that tree stump, the pressure builds and builds and builds until it finally snaps. When it finally snaps it’s just like Hemingway said. Slowly at first and then all at once.
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