CHAPTER 6Problems versus Predicaments
John Michael Greer, author and prolific blogger, deep thinker and all‐around good guy, made a very important distinction between two common but critical words: “problems” and “predicaments.”1 His distinction is that problems have solutions and predicaments have outcomes.
A solution to a problem fixes it, returning all to its original (or better) condition. Flat tires get fixed, revenues recover, broken bones mend. Problems can be solved.
Predicaments, on the other hand, do not have solutions. They only have outcomes, and our only option is to manage predicaments as best we can. Predicaments have to be managed.
Given its strict immigration policies, Japan's aging population is a predicament, not a problem. There's nothing short of importing a lot of young people from somewhere that will change that situation.
Forcing a vital species into extinction is a predicament. Creating a lab‐enhanced virus that escapes and becomes endemic is a predicament. Once those things happen, they have happened. Only the outcomes can be managed.
Faced with a predicament, people can develop responses, perhaps even elegant and sophisticated responses, but not solutions. There's nothing that can be solved, only outcomes to be managed. The responses may succeed in tempering the losses, they may utterly fail, or they may fall somewhere in between, but no response can correct or erase a predicament.
Greer framed this distinction in terms of the impact wrought by the ...
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