In 1952, I was a senior in college and Dinah Shore was belting out TV commercials for Chevrolet. Harry Truman was in the White House and the idea of a huge oil slick bearing down on New Orleans would have seemed utterly improbable. Nevertheless, there was still a lot to worry about: an unexpected “police action” in Korea had raised the first-ever threat of nuclear war after Russia’s 1949 nuclear test obviated comforting predictions by western scientists that it would take them at least fifteen years. The “loss” of China to Communism, also in 1949, plus revelations that Russia’s nuclear program had been assisted by espionage only added to McCarthyism and the national paranoia it engendered.
What the Chevy commercial did foreshadow was a reality that couldn’t have been anticipated in 1952: that burgeoning technology, cheap energy, and explosive population growth could lead so quickly to today’s related dilemmas of rapid climate change and looming shortages of oil and fresh water.
The process by which such interconnected problems might have evolved is increasingly referred to as Path Dependence, a relatively new term which, although still unfamiliar to most laymen, is the subject of turf battles within academia, particularly the disciplines of Economics, Sociology and History.
When broadly interpreted, the concept becomes very useful for the component-by-component analysis of any directional change. In that context, the greater our planet’s human population, the more likely it is to become trapped in its (our) past and the more difficult change becomes.
To that outline must be added a simple caveat: policy mistakes are made by humans; because our emotions render such admissions difficult, particularly by the agencies responsible for them, correction becomes difficult and is inevitably delayed.
Thus does the uphill struggle to “reform” a failing, destructive drug policy drug based on nearly a century of fear and false assumptions become readily understandable.
