We all have experienced it. We all have felt like we could conquer the world because of it, and eventually it makes us all feel like foreigners in our own skin.

The scene goes like this; a parent who feels very confident with technology buys a new fancy gadget and sits at the kitchen table trying to figure it out. Hours go by and they can’t even get it to turn on. Then, their eight year old arrives and picks it up. The eight year old has it figured out, mastered, and becomes bored with it within moments. They put it down and walk away without sharing what they did. The parent then gets up to go find something they do understand in an effort to regain some of their self-esteem.

This is how evolution works and is true with everything that changes rapidly enough that we can see the changes within a single lifespan. Technology, economics, career choices,.. All these things cannot be understood fully by parents because they are looking back at their children’s lives without being capable of seeing and experiencing the world as their children do. Even so, the parents always try to drive their children into engaging the world in a way that only makes sense to the parents. Parents can go to great extremes to control and manipulate the perspective of their children. In the past this was mostly physically and financially abuse. Today, it is mostly passive-aggressive psychological and emotional abuse.

Thinking fractally, extrapolate this perspective to a national level where a generation built a political economy around their perspective of the world and were quite successful because they were seeing the world clearly, as it was at the time. However, they got old, the world changed, and they no longer saw the world in the present, but how they remember that it was. The younger generation saw the world as it currently existed and tried to adapt accordingly. Thus, the older generation reacted by trying to manipulate and control the younger generation into seeing the world in the old way. They eventually go so far as to try to recreate the old world so that they can remain relevant.

But the world has changed and nothing can make time go backwards, so the older generation becomes tyrants without realizing exactly what they are really doing and why everyone resents them.

So, Imagine a parent who did not allow their children to use any technology that the parent was not more competent with. Imagine a parent who did not allow their child to take a class in school because the parent wasn’t good in that subject. This is how our economy is structured today. This is how our political system works.