beach thinking

It's beautiful on the beach.  The sun gets low late in the afternoon, the waves come in, the breeze is gentle.  A two-year old runs in and out of the water for an hour, giggling all the time.

I read my magazine.  I realize that I am either brilliant or trite, and I can't figure out which.  Many of the ideas in the magazine, quoting, of all people, Francis Fukuyama, are things I have written about here.

The reviewer of Fukuyama's new book, Mark Kingwell, who trashes on it, states that politics is largely the push and pull between personal desire and collective action, which is certainly what we are seeing, in it's extreme form, now.

There is also a discussion of "human nature" which includes this idea : "given the perfidy and at best thevery local, short-term rationality of humans, it can be no surprise that we often contrive to create systems that fail everybody and yet remain in place for many decades, if not centuries, until war, invasion, or Maltusian population crisis consigns them too the history book."

YES!

I would like to expand on how I agree with these ideas, and give examples from my practice and my life, that this is the way it is, but we have guests here at the beach, and right now I am helping a good friend go through the matches she has received from some dating web site.

Talk about short-term foolishness as a long-shot stab and long-term pay-off, this is it.