Thread: Where did we go so wrong.

Your youtube algorithm has good consistency. I constantly switch between my schizophrenic range of hobbies and interests that include cycling, woodworking, leather working, photography, jewelry making, watches, art and drawing, knives, stand up comedy, maritime documentaries, submarines, NFSA film archives, economics because that's what I've studied, Joe Rogan podcasts, a couple of Greek news channels because I'm Greek, and of course basketball.

So it's safe to say I've confused the crap out of my algorithm. Then my 8 year old daughter grabbed an ipad I had logged on in earlier, so then I started getting dolls, makeup and Roblox videos. So now the algorithm is probably fully convinced I'm a crazy person and has probably notified the authorities of the apparent need to have me restrained. And now I've watched your videos so I'm sure I'll get some recommendations from the British museum and Christies at some point, which is probably a good thing.

To answer your question I think the skill and flare and intricate designs didn't go anywhere, they're just spread over many more crafts and interests because people have more options.
Completely unexpectedly for example, watchmaking saw a crazy rise in demand in the early 2000's. Film photography and printing is still around, people are paying crazy prices for kits we were basically throwing away 20 years ago. High end jewelry is more intricate than ever, people still make hand stamped and carved leather gun holsters, people get into weird things like recreating Star Wars models, you can basically learn anything you want just from watching videos after work and then you can download some specialised software for it and get lost in it for years. Creative people who enjoy making things are few and far between, I think they always have been. They just have more options than wood right now.

Fascinating!

The only comparable experience I've had was the National Palace Museum in Taipei.

When Chiang Kai Shek left the Chinese mainland with the remainder of the Kuomintang for the island of Formosa (modern Taiwan), they raided the imperial palace in Beijing and other places along the way, no doubt, before departing the mainland. This was both a great tragedy and, simultaneously, an enormous gift to posterity. The collection is so vast only a small percentage of it is on show at any given moment in the National Palace Museum.

Had the collection remained in mainland China, a lot of what has been preserved in modern Taiwan would no doubt have been lost in the numerous upheavals after the Chinese revolution.

Having seen what was preserved, we can only weep for the treasures for that were lost in the Cultural Revolution and the other upheavals that followed Mao and the CCP's victory.

Having said all that; my abiding feeling wandering through the museum was: What took the revolution so long to foment? In my opinion, the dynastic rulers of China had it coming; and for a very, VERY long time!

If you ever have the good fortune to travel through this area, I highly recommend a visit to Taiwan just to see the National Palace Museum. I promise you, it is that good.

Here is a link: National Palace Museum

As for where we went wrong? I honestly don't know that we did. The lives of our direct forbears who were -- for most of us -- not Princes or Barons was not actually that great.

Most of us here would have been at the bottom of the social pecking order at anytime prior to the late twentieth century. The life of the average human in the East and the West is infinitely better than the life of our ancestors. Life in the lower 40th percentile of the social order is still, for the most part, nowhere near as grim as it was in the past.

I will leave others to reflect on how that came about as an exercise for the reader, but for certain; it wasn't just handed over.

Life is certainly not perfect now, nor is it ever likely to be. However, you can only see how far we have come when you look back.

Overall, we are trending in the right direction, despite the best efforts of those that can only look back rather than forward.

Our species' biggest danger in the immediate future is to allow ourselves to be beguiled by stupid people espousing simple answers to the complex issues that confront us. There is no need to name names and we have our own uniquely Australian brand of stupid without having to look abroad...

"For every complex problem, there is a solution which is simple, clean, and wrong" - Henry Louis Mencken. (US literary critic, philosopher and, journalist)