TIME IS AN ARROW?

Time is an arrow! Or is it? In America, for the last at least fifty years, and perhaps much more, productivity has been defined as larger, more and faster. Economics of scale have been the holy grail of all efforts, from the farm to the retail store. Sales of every quarter must exceed the previous quarter, or the CEO’s position is in danger.

This has been encouraged by government leaders who have believed that this was the way to wealth and power. Leaders who believe in this paradigm set policies that encourage “biggerring and fasterring”. We moved people off the land to live in bigger and bigger cities, so farms could get bigger and bigger. The people worked in factories of ever increasing size that were surrounded by the bigger cities.

In this scenario everything is a straight line to progress. In fact, many government leaders literally called themselves progressives and actively pursued these ideas.

There is nothing wrong with this theory of course, except that it doesn’t reflect the real physical world in which nothing is a straight line. The earth is round, the planets orbit in circular motion which gives rise to circular seasons. The day revolvers and morning differs from night. The heartbeat, probably the first sound a human hears, is marked by systole and diastole and the blood flows in repeating cycles. Youth is followed by four periods of time from birth to death and new generations arise periodically.

When man’s concepts of order are not in agreement with nature, it is always nature that wins. It may take a considerable amount of time, but straight lines never continue upward. Eventually the cycles will turn them down, so those progressive ideas will always eventually lead to decline.

This is why a people who loose site of agriculture and the natural cycles of nature, and who begin to put their time and energy into the straight line progression of industry will always reap what they sow. The lineup will become the line down. Those countries that do not grow their own food, will eventually loose site of the wisdom of nature.

This is not some weird concept of nature worship, it is physics. Chemical reactions never proceed in only one direction. They are reversible under proper conditions, or they trigger yet further chemical reactions which changes the circumstances of the first reaction. The environment selects the plant and animal that survives, but the surviving plant and animals change the environment. Physical laws proceed in one direction only so long as the initial state is maintained. Once the physical world has changed to a new physical state, the laws of physics will change directions.

The problem with modern concepts of business, management, and government is that those teaching and executing the policies have lost sight of the fact that life and the world are cycles, requiring periods of rest between periods of growth and different behaviors during different seasons, all in preparation for the next cycle. If we wish to live at peace and with some kind of understanding, we must accept the concept of death. We must embrace the winters as much as the summers. We must alter our behaviors according to the cycles of our world, the times of our lives, and the periods of the universe.