You always have to keep evolving. You're always trying to improve. If you're at a standstill, you're falling behind.
Then, with lots of people doing that without ever looking over their shoulders to see how they were affecting anybody else, it couldn't work, and it didn't work, and it just came to a standstill.
Listen, global warming is a real problem, but it' s not the end of the world. A 30-centimetre sea level rise is just not going to bring the world to a standstill, just like it didn't over the last 150 years.
In 1999, I was running my first tech start-up and learning the Unreal Engine, the tool that would define my career as a game developer, when news of Columbine ground all work to a standstill.
I had to lower my hands, I had to work my hips a different way. I also had to stride to get the power. I'd always been a standstill hitter and had to generate power from my upper body. Basically, I had to change everything I was doing. It was really difficult.
While all other sciences have advanced, that of government is at a standstill - little better understood, little better practiced now than three or four thousand years ago.