Robbing the Future to Pay for the Present

"Every society creates problems for itself as it develops and expands.  the difference between success and failure is the tilt of the balance between the rate that problems are created and the rate at which natural and human resources can be mobilized to deal with them.

"All such processes rob the future to pay the present; the length of the game must depend on how far the players can enlarge the board and change the rules."

   - Ronald Wright, Time Among the Maya

The ancient Maya didn't look at time the way we in the Western World do today.  They believed in temporal patterns which could not be changed.  Fortune was predetermined in a cyclical way; endings are followed by beginnings.

Of course, we don't buy that - for the most part, we believe we our destiny rests entirely in our own hands.  Funny how we seem perpetually doomed to repeat history, then, isn't it?