Not necessarily a common enemy, but a common cause.
I’ve never seen people come together and work harder than when we were trying to end the Y2K problem. I guess you could call the bug “the enemy”, but it was a little more abstract than that.
Were you in an industry affected or are you just reminiscing on being in society
Because being in society for y2k was utterly meaningless. We did nothing. We did not come together, we did not work hard. A small handful of dweebs noticed the issue and fixed it.
The USA, with its burgeoning 24 hour news cycle and coming off such hits as oj, princess di, and columbine, recognized they could blow that shit up. So then America wasted 40 billion dollars and a shitload of fear mongering when basically every other country spent almost nothing for essentially the same outcome. Because the outcome was contingent on patches to windows and the Linux kernel, which were obviously going to happen long before 1/1/2000 and regardless of the government because it was a glaring bug that was found
I do ultimately agree with your sentiment though. A common enemy is not necessary and we absolutely can be unified around a cause. The space race obviously had Russia as a villain. The new deal is something that on paper could unify but in practice saw conservative opposition and liberal criticism that it didn’t go far enough. I still think it’s possible though, even if an example is a challenge to think up
I was a front line worker during Y2K with 60 software updates across 600 systems from Texas to Guam.
I had to run a color coded Excel sheet to keep it all straight, it was CRAZY.
In my case, because it was the automotive industry, it also all had to be done early because of the '00 model year cars. Like I say, I’ve never seen people work harder.
Even then, there were still problems outside our control:
https://www.capecodtimes.com/story/news/1999/10/13/y2k-brings-back-horseless-carriages/51026660007/
So you were administering systems or something similar? Then sure, I am sure for you and your team it brought you together (and maybe some tension at times). Glad it went well. But society as a whole? Eh
That’s the challenge though. On a micro level it’s easy. I work in mental health and I have similar stories from my days working in hospitals (I do outpatient work now) where our unit staff have banded together for challenges. Covid was like that at the beginning. Then it fell apart because everything became politicized thanks to our dogshit leadership at the time
But finding something that can (for the most part) unite all of society? Even limiting it to just the US that’s a talllllll order. Especially if you also don’t want it to fall apart after a month like the Covid thing
And now people are saying climate change is like the Y2K bug and “it will fix itself” 🙄
Those people don’t even KNOW about the 2038 bug… ;)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
Fortunately(?) it’s unlikely I’ll live to see that one.
Truth.
Though, America got by for a long time with that being Russia, and Nazis…
What happened to that
Whoever fights with monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.
A more applicable version would be Whoever fights with monsters should see to it that they still have something to do in case they succeed.
This is the underlying plot of plenty of movies. The prevailing solution is to find something other than each other to be our unifying enemy.
Conclusion: Hopefully we get attacked by aliens or something.
As an ex-biologist, I think this is just down to a choice of words: as a society, you could see Nature as an enemy.
Man, even as an individual, or even a monocellular organism, you could argue that entropy is your enemy.
If an enemy is a useful concept for maximizing potential within your scope of choice, then be it.
Ironically, we do have a common enemy: The billionaires. Problem is the enemy has managed to brainwash almost half the populace into fighting for them.
