Things must (indeed) get worse before they get better - nasty implications

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If Charlton's Law is a correct generalization

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2010/07/charltons-law-things-must-always-get.html

then the implications are uncomfortable.

These include the necessity for stepping-back from the maelstrom of current issues in 'the news', for cutting back on media consumption, and then (having got a clearer understanding) to aim at deep underlying long-term improvement rather than momentary tactical advantage.

Which means, to some extent, leaving the baddies to get on with their work with less hindrance - in the short to medium term.

(Not stopping resistance; but acknowledging that this resistance will be more at an individual level, unsystematic and largely unarticulated at the level of current public discourse.)

Unpalatable consequences, worrying, perhaps dangerous.

Yet inevitable, it seems to me.

And of course things may never get better. Then our choices will have made things get worse faster.

So either we waste our time and energy and inadvertently reinforce the trends we deplore at the deepest level (by playing according to 'their' rules).

Or we resist in a principled way, playing by our rules, at the cost of giving freer rein to the forces of darkness.

No choices are good, all choices seem bad: yet choose we must.

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