4713 days and counting…

He slouched down the street, a scowl emblazoned on his face. The slogan on the grubby black T-shirt said it all:

Days since I gave a sh*t:
4713
and counting…

I’ll admit I got a bit annoyed about this – irritated enough to write this blog-post, anyway. Because what he’s really saying is two things:

• he thinks it’s a badge of pride to say that he hasn’t cared about anyone or anything else for around a dozen years – or, in his case, before he first went to primary-school
• although he has no care or respect for anyone else, he still expects – demands – that others must respect and care for him

In short, ‘kiddies’ anarchy’: an asymmetric world of ‘rights’ without responsibilities – the world of the out-of-control two-year-old’s possessive temper-tantrum.

What we seem to live in now is what I sometimes term a paediarchy, ‘rule by, for and behalf of the childish’. A world in which selfishness and immaturity are actively rewarded, and where those who do take responsibility – and someone has to, otherwise the world simply cannot work – are actually punished for doing so. And we then wonder why there’s less and less of an incentive to not be as childish as the self-styled ‘rulers’…

The blunt reality is that there are no rights: all so-called ‘rights’ are a literally deadly delusion that may yet kill us all. In any functioning social context, ‘rights’ are an arbitrary fiction, wide-open to all manner of misuse; in the whole of the purported ‘rights-discourse’, the only thing that is real is the mutual-responsibilities from which those supposed ‘rights’ arise. Which is kind of tricky in this rampant paediarchy, where so many people seem to think that ‘rights’ are real, yet responsibilities always ‘Somebody Else’s Problem’…

As I’ve explained in various posts here, usually under the ‘RBPEA‘ (Really-Big-Picture Enterprise-Architecture) tag, I believe that humanity as a whole has no long-term chance of survival until we expunge entirely the concept of ‘rights’ from every society, and replace it with a viable architecture of responsibility. And we really don’t have much time left now in which to make that happen – perhaps as little as another 4713 days, in fact, given what many of the global indicators are showing us now.

Perhaps one place we could start is by explaining, gently, slowly, carefully, yet insistently, that there is no right to not-care. But after seeing that teenager with his T-shirt today, I realise we still have a long, long way to go before we can even achieve that one small essential step.

Sigh…

Oh well… 🙁