That's what bugs me most about people who whine about how intractable today's problems are.

If you'd have told someone 20 years ago that Russia and Afghanistan would both be (nominal) capitalist democracies aligned with the US, they'd have referred you to an insane asylum.

Same with destitute (and Communist and Socialist, respectively) China and India being hot-spots of outsourcing and technology-fueled upward mobility.

Or Pakistan being a nuclear power.

Or Germany having economic growth far surpassed by Poland's and Japan's Nikkei index being 1/4 what it was 15 years ago.

The cold war and the threat of MAD definitely influenced my childhood. Do you remember the 1983 TV movie "The Day After"?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085404/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0001WTVUW/104-4662158-4784720?v=glance

From the amazon editorial review: "As a protest vehicle, The Day After is a triumph--its scenes of nuclear devastation remain the most powerful statements against nuclear armament ever depicted. "

I agree. As a 13 year old I found it truly disturbing, particularly when you're led to believe that the world is literally teetering on the brink of the end of life as we knowit.

My wife has expressed similar sentiments. There's something about the threat of nuclear annihilation that really triggers a child's imagination, I guess.

Okay, sneaking into this thread after the latest post in the WTC one, since it reminded me of what I would say.

I got thrown into this whole mess in 1982, so my outlook might be a little skewed; things were already winding down, the cultural influence of the hippies who kept hippying had sunk in enough to suggest that maybe not everything should be taken so seriously, etc. (Or at least, that's what I absorbed; missed out on The Day After, but got subjected to the trickle-down of all the panic into comedy and the comics pages, go figure.)

So, that said, I'll dodge the issue of whether things are more or less intractable -- they're "differently intractable," but I don't exactly have a crystal ball either -- and observe this: the *good thing* about the Cold War was that it forced both sides to cloak their initiatives in terms of benefits to all humanity. Sure, we can boggle at how much steaming bullshit was involved, but at least someone had to spin in provably positive side effects to get the balls rolling.

These days, everything's a free market, and even that level of rationalization seems to have been streamlined out. The current setup doesn't require mass mobilizations of scientists and engineers to wonder what the scientists and engineers on the other side are thinking, and in absence of nebulous ideals, policy and discourse seems guided directly by profit motives, theology, and crass nationalism... Leaving me to feel that, however fucked up things were prior, it's now blatantly *accepted* that everyone's fighting over scraps.

Personally troublesome is the meme that we USians are supposed to take pride in this because it's the way of the world and we might have an acceptable chance of winning. The whole BS of subscribing to social contracts is supposed to raise the quality of life of the group *above* sheer fate/dumb luck/natural selection, while this new world order in general seems to revolve around promoting it and milking the resulting volatility for near-term profit.

That in itself doesn't piss me off so much as the idea that it might be eroding our ability to ever pretend to agree on anything as a species -- right at the moment we acquire all these technologies that make it so much easier to knowingly or accidentally obliterate large chunks of it. Peace, tolerance, civility or the illusion thereof? Nah, screw it, if 'we' don't get in on this opportunity, some new startup ideology will, and so what if it ruins our chances of coming to terms with our oncoming abilities to create Ice-9s, designer plagues or grey goos?

I bet you're already imagining ways to profit from the three of those, too. It's easy, and that's why it's seductive.

If anything, I want to forget that particular fear. I only remembered it because I was reading Douglas Coupland's "Generation X".