We’ve created a physical, economic, social, and psychological environment for ourselves in which it is possible to have problems much more complicated than we can grapple with using ordinary tools. We have also (or perhaps as part of the same thing) cultivated a cult of the expert, in which ordinary people feel helpless without the advice of someone specially trained in the particular area of skill.
Example 1: Computers have extended our capabilities beyond our wildest dreams, but they have also given us unprecedented ways to get into trouble, from forming imaginary relationships at a distance to identity theft.
Example 2: Television, an astonishing source of information and entertainment, skews our sense of reality and supplies us with an endless stream of uninformed opinions and compulsions to buy things.
Example 3: Multiculturalism, a great blessing in its ability to expand our social experience and broaden our world view, also takes us out of groups in which we occupy defined roles and follow existing social norms, casting doubts on our behavioral expectations and our understanding of the rules that others are following.
Example 4: Relatively few of us, compared with our grandparents’ time, have jobs that involve working with something real—something concrete, physical, comprehensible, and manageable. We have not yet sorted out all the implications of this for our bodies and minds.
Solutions to problems involve effort, insight, sometimes genius, and sometimes tools that have yet to be invented. The arrival of problems does not wait until the solutions exist.