Opening: Steve’s Demonstration
Chatting on our front porch as we do in the early mornings, Steve told me about a demonstration he saw. They put one drop of oil on a small pond. It spread to cover the entire body of water.
The physics of it are striking. That one drop of oil spread until it was one molecule of oil thick. Nearly invisible, but absolutely effective at cutting off the exchange between air and water that keeps the ecosystem alive.
In actual fact, a thriving underwater ecosystem would have plants generating oxygen. It would not die instantly, and underwater microclimates might survive. It just depends on how thick the film is, how much sunlight can get through.
Still, the life of the pond would be smothered. Plants would die and rot. The methane would build up, poisoning the water. The increasing damage would spread through the entire pond, and even the healthier areas would be poisoned.
The life in the water would die as oxygen was used up. Suffocation, as oxygen exchange stops.
The Pattern: Accelerating Change Since Industrialization
The pace of change has increased so dramatically since the Industrial Revolution that there’s really no choice but for humans to adapt. This is the latest disruption in centuries of accelerating change. Since industrialization kicked off, humans have been in this state of perpetual adaptation—new technologies, new forms of communication, new ways of organizing society, all coming faster and faster.
We’ve been living in this ecosystem of accelerating change for a few generations already, with each new disruption spreading across the surface like another drop of oil. And somehow we keep adapting, keep finding ways to breathe, even if each new ecosystem is simpler or stranger than the last. If we compare the spreading of a drop of oil to the pace of change humanity is going through, the rate would be the same—fast.
Current Example: Information and Communication
In America today, we have a similar situation. A major ecosystem of shared communication and understanding that enabled our democracy has been smothered.
The challenge I want to focus on here is how the internet’s potential for connection has been undermined. The co-opting of the internet for purely marketing and financial values has created great harm. In order to increase ad revenue or political power, people have been moved into algorithmic silos with completely different worlds. Facts have been lost.
With no shared facts, everyone chooses what to believe based on their algorithmic feed. People operate from completely different assumptions about reality, making genuine dialogue nearly impossible. When basic facts are disputed, every conversation becomes a battle over foundational truths rather than a discussion of solutions.
This creates the perfect conditions for conspiracy theories and extremism to flourish. People retreat into information bubbles that confirm their existing beliefs while demonizing those who disagree. The suffocating effect on genuine dialogue and shared understanding means conversations become exercises in talking past each other.
The result is a fractured society where Americans hold fundamentally opposite visions of what is happening in their country. We struggle to maintain unity as a democracy when we cannot even agree on basic realities. In the most extreme cases, families and friendships break apart, with people choosing to cut off relationships rather than navigate these unbridgeable divides.
What Happens During Suffocation
In the pond, a plant might poke through here and there—if a plant breaks through the oil film—it creates a hole, a point where gas exchange can happen again. And maybe that’s enough to keep the immediate area around it viable.
That initial suffocation may be damaging, but it’s a fact. There are no guarantees that the lotus or whatever will actually make it. Few plants would even be able to reach past the barrier to survive. The lotus has to survive that first wave of oxygen depletion, and there’s no guarantee it’s strong enough or fast enough to break through before the damage becomes irreversible.
The life that survives the initial suffocation will be permanently altered. Even if some plants do break the surface eventually, how much of the ecosystem is already gone by then? The most vulnerable species probably die off first, and some of the relationships and connections between species are severed permanently. This is unavoidable; change is the only constant. Adaptation is key.
For us, human beings, the challenge becomes whether we can develop the skills necessary to deal with this ever-increasing rate of change that we are faced with.
What We Might Be Losing
In the far past, generations of humanity had the same environment with little change. Your life was like your grandparents’ lives. Rules and methods worked for generations at a time.
That pond ecosystem is permanently changed at a root level, even if functional. When you get those breakthrough points and some recovery, you might end up with a much more barren ecosystem. Instead of the rich complexity that was there before, maybe just a few hardy species remain that can tolerate the altered conditions. Alternatively, you might get a complex interdependent ecosystem that is almost unrecognizable from what came before.
Some of those losses might cascade in ways you don’t even see at first. Lose one key species and suddenly three others that depended on it are gone too. The food webs, the symbiotic relationships—once those break down, they don’t necessarily rebuild the same way.
We risk losing generational knowledge that took centuries to develop. Complex interdependent systems—social, cultural, institutional—may break down. The capacity for long-term planning becomes difficult when we’re constantly in reactive mode.
What We Might Be Gaining
Will adaptability itself become our main survival tool? Is adaptability itself the key? Do we as a species need to develop new skills or traits?
The pond that survives is the one that is really good at rapid change itself, rather than any particular way of being. We may be developing enhanced adaptability as a core human trait. New forms of resilience and flexibility emerge from necessity, but they could be the gateway to new achievements.
We have unprecedented access to information and global connection that previous generations could never have imagined. The speed of innovation expands rapidly as we build on each other’s discoveries in real time. Our creative problem-solving capabilities grow alongside this acceleration. Perhaps most significantly, we’re developing new ways of thinking together. We’re creating forms of collective intelligence that can tackle complex problems no individual could solve alone. This collaborative capacity represents a fundamental shift in how human knowledge and creativity can be harnessed.
The collaboration between human creativity and artificial intelligence opens up entirely new possibilities. We can now synthesize and cross-reference information at speeds that seemed impossible just years ago. This extends our capacity for communication and coordination as a species in ways we’re only beginning to understand. The accelerating change that threatens to overwhelm us also provides the very tools we need to navigate it consciously.
Living in Permanent Adaptation
The pace of it all means there’s no going back to some stable state—there probably isn’t one anymore. Just this constant process of disruption and adaptation, disruption and adaptation.
The challenge becomes choosing national values designed to guide our adaptation as we learn to navigate permanent change. We may not be able to erase the oil film entirely, but we can work to break it up and create spaces for vital exchange. The key is identifying what’s essential to preserve and nurture as the ecosystem transforms around us – those core elements that enable life to flourish even under radically changed conditions.
The essential thing is to agree on values and make decisions based on those values, rather than being swept along by whatever forces happen to be strongest at the moment. These values become our navigational tools – the principles that help us choose which changes to embrace and which to resist as we adapt to constant disruption.
Of course, choosing shared national values requires rebuilding the communication systems that accelerating change has fractured. This means strengthening local connections, correcting voter suppression and electoral manipulation, developing new collaboration tools, changing media away from pure propaganda, making balanced information a priority, and addressing economic imbalance to rebuild the middle class. When people have economic security and can trust information sources, they can begin working together on shared values rather than fighting over basic realities.
What might such a value system look like? Consider principles like evidence-based reasoning, democratic legitimacy, human dignity, and intergenerational responsibility. Or values focused on fairness – equal treatment, equal opportunity, and economic integrity. These represent one possible framework for navigating change, though different communities will prioritize different values based on their circumstances and commitments.
The crucial step is the choosing itself – the deliberate decision to let values guide our adaptation rather than simply reacting to whatever change hits us next. When we face new disruptions, we can ask: does this change support or undermine the values we’ve chosen? How do we harness beneficial changes while protecting what matters most? Values-based navigation doesn’t prevent change, but it helps us steer through it with intention rather than being the passive recipient of random forces.
What kind of ecosystem do we want to rebuild? The life that survives and eventually thrives won’t be identical to what was there before. But it will be life, finding ways to flourish under new conditions, creating new forms of complexity that we can’t yet imagine.
**Read More**
For readers interested in exploring values-based decision making in politics:
Are Evidence-Based Decisions Impossible in Politics? by David Moscrop (openDemocracy, 2019)** – Examines the psychological and structural barriers to rational decision-making in politics and offers practical solutions for creating environments that support evidence-based choices.
The Deliberative Democracy Handbook by John Gastil and Peter Levine** – A comprehensive guide to creating effective civic engagement processes that help communities make decisions based on shared values rather than competing interests.
An American Democracy Built for the People (Center for American Progress, 2024)** – Recent analysis of democratic values and practical recommendations for strengthening value-driven governance in contemporary America.
The Daily Public Communication Channel: Restoring Trust, Uniting a Nation – A concrete proposal for implementing values-based dialogue in practice, featuring bipartisan discussion anchored in shared American values to counter polarization and rebuild democratic discourse.
Related Articles:
Digital Manipulation and Democratic Decline – Explores how digital platforms and propaganda create the fractured communication this article describes.
The Distraction Doctrine – Examines how authoritarian tactics exploit the chaos of accelerating change to undermine democratic institutions.
