How the future looks from Naples

Now that everyone knows almost everything we are once again finding we don't know enough to know the nothing we must know in order to know in a way that might move us toward a new order.

We come to believe the present's in pretty bad shape but learn it's less worse than it was, and that we're no worse off for having it.

Of the six different state systems--princely, kingly, territorial, imperial, national, market--we have lived through since 1500, the one we're living through now is no better than the one we lived through then.

At a time when our expectations have become ravenous, it appears we need to be satisfied with much less.

Everything we need has already been made, but we live in fear that less and less is being made of it.

A new order could emerge from the old order or the old order could mutate and become the new order, in the way the glory of Greece became the glory of Rome. Though at first it will appear monstrous, fraught with bloodshed, skullduggery, and religious extremism, things will calm down to the degree that coffee can be drunk and sweet pastries consumed al fresco at the Gran Cafe Gambrinus.

In either case the next leader will come from nowhere.