“Time is the Greatest Innovator” — Francis Bacon

Thinking a lot about time… Part III of the book, “Revolutionary Wealth,” by Alvin and Heidi Toffler, which I am reading now, is titled, “Rearranging Time.” Chapter 5, the first of this section, is titled, “The Clash of Speeds.”

This quote from Francis Bacon, usually only includes the last part, “time is the greatest innovator.” However, the part before the semi-colon actually matters, too. As I try to discern Bacon’s thinking, I am left with the idea that if we are unwilling to “apply new remedies,” in other words, we keep trying to fix an age-old problem without new approaches, that new evils will occur. I’m guessing those evils are both the problem itself not getting better, and because it doesn’t get “solved,” it starts to create new evils that would not have been possible but for the underlying problem still continuing without “remedy.”

As an entrepreneur, Bacon’s thinking speaks to me not just with respect to time itself (something which will appear in a separate Medium post) but applying remedies. After law school, I realized that to effect change could take a lot of time, either legislatively or through court cases. Precedent changes very slowly for a reason. The Supreme Court is the slowest of our three branches of government for a reason. Slow can create stability and predictability. Having come from Apple and the world of high-tech, though, I was used to moving a bit faster.

In the case of Toffler’s book and this particular section on time, though, Alvin and Heidi are talking about how parts of our society are speeding up (think Amazon deliveries in two hours), while others remain slower (think government bureaucracies). This excerpt captures the essence of this problem, “Feudal institutions everywhere obstructed industrial advance. In the same way, today’s industrial-age bureaucracies are slowing the move toward a more advanced, knowledge-based system for creating wealth.” For a book from 2006, it is disheartening that this quote feels so current!!