Look inside an ant or a bee hive. What do you see? There are two things that immediately come to mind – first it appears the creatures are all the same, but if you watch it becomes apparent that pockets of mass specialisation occur within the mass of worker female eunuchs, functional components of what we call a “society” appear. We half believe the metaphor of being a cog in a survival machine, while lamenting the boring mundane role we play, we live.

The economic decline is a pause. What went wrong with the machine? Why did it break? Now let’s construct another excuse for our normal accepted behaviour. The banks and AIG that paid executive bonuses with tax payer money were breaking the natural laws of mutual suffering. They caused the problem in their own books in competition with each other, fully aware in the same way that when we say “society” we submit to the constraints on our lives.

We can not just kick back and enjoy the recession, but we have to think of new ways to function – new patterns of ants form as old ones finish their task and a new mutual shape and function is agreed upon with chemical communication or dance. I have not heard ants sing, so I expect their forms of communication evolved in their own fashion. It is conceivable their communication is a little more sophisticated than we are prepared to credit.

California is coming apart at the seams economically. The blame can be laid in all sorts of places, but it is logical that in times of an shared tidal suck of liquidity the most indebted would have the most difficulty as all their income goes to the most wealthy. The onset of economic malaise (the reduction in asset value, generally) is avoided by governments meticulously at the cost of the social order. We are “regrouped” from the lifetime of preparation as an expert on a specialisation that is no longer required.

If we try and move our economic progress so fast that everyone has to retrain – are we not starting to press at a natural limitation? Are we not better to do that which we love for as long as we want, and progress to be modulated to the rhythm of our lives?

Apparently not. We instead try to cram more into our fragile selves, full of aspiration as the bank approves a lifetime of debt so you can protect your family in a wooden box, and when you are successful and the birds leave the nest, progress defines us by interruptions and upheavals.

War is unnecessary. If Governments learned to flip a coin and live with the consequences (if political hegemony was merely a game of luck) then the world would be a little more equal and progress would slow down. If we increase the frequency of progress, then we increase the demand to retrain everybody. Is that a good thing? Increased challenge is evolutionary, up to a point. Retraining every five years is hard. Every six months is itself counter productive. Returning to Plato, we could simply choose to preserve certain arts and not negate their value, because someone is so good at doing it. The print media industry logically could be completely replaced by mobile phones. But I would be happier if both existed side by side for most of the rest of my lifetime. I accept they won’t but the values of the print media must not be lost in a sonic miasma of advertising. Information is.

There is thus a natural tendency, or a social fabric that we knot ourselves into increasingly duping ourselves into believing it is of value when a vast wave comes in and nothing but the skin we were born with is available as a resource to protect yourself. Then you have to retrain and adjust. If we controlled the effect of those collapses but also allowed progress to exist the social fabric would have to be more elastic.

The very idea that progress itself be modulated may infact therefore be what is actually happening. Secret government research is the stuff of fanciful television, but it is also logical that as well as financial reserves, a nation devises a reserve of military and intellectual development. That an academic class structure exists.

The politicians of the world face the constant problem of over population and consequential climate change. To pretend that the answer is not selective annihilation while sitting on nuclear bombs is irrational. What other function do they serve, exactly? “They keep the peace.” Really, what peace?

Look again at that ant’s nest. Their apparent strong social fabric adjusts to change, but it does not deal with progress. Human culture can. Trade was interesting enough to distract us from war and for years America was winning that game. The challenge will be to see in the recovery a return to human value as opposed to the needs of a market fiction.