Tim O'Reilly has some really interesting musings on the idea of socially taboo behaviours, and the sorts of shifts made by cultures. He writes about reading a book from a century ago, and the way that its prejudices are not just startling, but downright shocking in their blase assumptions about racial inequality.

"It makes me wonder what people a hundred years from now will think of our popular fiction, our popular movies. What do we take for granted that they will find odd, and perhaps even distasteful?"

He points at the growing intolerance for smoking, which began on tv and has permeated most of the developed world, such that smoking is no longer legal in many public spaces. This social taboo has grown up in the past fifty years and it's already very strong. He goes on to ask, "What will people think of our enormous steak dinners and obese portions of food? That's on the cusp of changing. What will they think of our profligate use of fossil fuels and other non-renewable resources?"

I would argue that smaller changes, like the growing prohibition of tobacco, take less time to become widely accepted, whereas broader social change is slower to spread. Smoking was never a basic cultural tenet, while racial hierarchies were. The right to overconsume continues to be an underlying assumption of the laws and behaviours of North Americans. What huge food portions and negligent resource management signify are not just poor health decisions (as tobacco), but a culture of decadence and overconsumption that is bad, not just for its impacts on an individual or single family, but on the entire planet. These tendencies are most visible in pop culture, but also problematic in the way we've approached sociopolitical questions and constructed conceptions of success.

To me the most important thought in the post: "Many of us imagine that our goal is to get things back to the way they were. I believe it's an opportunity to imagine a better future, to build an economy that is more robust and more fair than the Ponzi economy of the last fifty years." What I've been thinking and saying throughout these past months is something I haven't heard many people say: we shouldn't be trying to get back to the crazy way things were before. We need to start new and come up with a better way of dealing with the world. It's not a mortgage crisis, but a crisis in overconsumption and 21st century capitalism.