I’ve argued that aging teaches the personal lesson that everything hurts and there’s no cure, but it also reveals a disquieting societal truth: nothing works and nobody is willing or able to fix it.

Our healthcare system is among the worst among the developed countries, for instance. It has managed to pull off the hat trick of being the most expensive while achieving among the worst outcomes while serving only some, not all of the people. If rich doctors, insurers, providers, and pharmaceutical companies are the measure, we win. If the health and well-being of the community, not so much. Is a cure in sight? Fat chance.

Since Reagan embraced supply-side voodoo, alarms have been sounding over the accumulating public debt and a painful reckoning prophesied. A few fitful attempts have been made to address the mess, notably under Clinton, but the alternative to a carnival of spending is an unpleasant lenten austerity. So nothing is done and we remain on the road to bankruptcy, a process Hemingway described as happening in two ways: “gradually and then suddenly.”

In every case the problem is a refusal to face hard facts and take painful steps. Let someone else suffer, compromise, adjust, not me. Thus, on mass murder, some people oppose bans on weapons, others intrusive data bases, others costly counter-measures, others stigmatizing the mentally ill. And so the streets and school hallways will continue to run red with the blood of the innocents.

Immigration? Forget about it. Without compromising, stasis is likely, and the worst of all possible worlds. Those we don’t want to admit willingly will continue to entry the country illegally. Those we should welcome will be barred. Those who ought to be allowed to stay will be deported. And everyone will get to say, “See, I told you so.”

Climate change? Why give up today’s pleasures and profits to avoid tomorrow’s catastrophes? Let somebody else worry about rising seas, shrinking harvests, dying sea life, desertification, proliferating diseases, waves of extinctions. Why worry? Call if fake news and party on.

And if politics is a Sargasso Sea where rotting issues are trapped forever without being able to move forward, the business world is hardly a model of efficiency and adaptation. Once customers bought a product and owned it, but that didn’t guaranteed a perpetual income stream. Now, you subscribe to music, movies, software, television, and pay monthly.

Users of Microsoft are well aware that their business plan has long been a form of ransomware, software that requires constant, costly updates, so you have to buy the same product repeatedly. That might be tolerable if what you bought was both useful and reliable. Instead, their products are so prone to hacking you have to subscribe to a bug-catching service.

And they are far from alone. Bugs, glitches, viruses, worms, and, for all I know, cancers infect all our devices and everywhere we shop. Life online is now spent waiting for a cyber-mugging. Whether we wake and sleep, infection lurks, ceaselessly intent on stealing our data, holding it hostage, pilfering our identities, spying on our every move, hijacking our credit cards, invading our bank accounts, ripping us off. And we are expected to bear the cost in time and money we lose because of the incompetence, greed and carelessness of the tech geniuses whose products and services made us vulnerable.

The list of the largest data breaches of last year alone reads like a “who’s who” of business — Equifax, Uber, Adobe, Anthem, JP Morgan, eBay, Home Depot, Yahoo, Target. Retailers, healthcare companies, banks and credit services, and, of course, the tech companies who ought to be most on guard against such dangers.

The most flagrant case of business dysfunction and dereliction is the self-congratulatory institution that ought to be known as Fakebook. Instead of providing the social network linking all humanity that it advertises, it has given our body politic a social disease.

Rather than police the anarchic mean streets of its cyber realm, Fakebook chose to profit from providing a platform on which the monsters from its users’ ids would be give free rein, and criminal conspirators from a foreign power could contrive to steal an American election. Has Fakebook and its billionaire tech brethren fixed the flaws that allowed this atrocity, or are they resisting reforms that would kill the cash cow.

Now, we are told a rising tide of disgust with our illegitimate president and his enablers in Congress will sweep Republicans out in November, but will that really happen? If it did, would it help? The electoral map is rigged by gerrymandering. The money that decides elections flows from the one percent who just got huge tax breaks, not the 80 percent who pay for them. The incumbents write the laws to deny the vote to those they can’t convince on the campaign trail.

If democracy has been hijacked, who will save us from more of the same? Maybe the Russians will decide they miscalculated and rig the game in favor of a more reliable tool next time. Or maybe Zuckerberg will repent of his sins and use Fakebook to make restitution. He does seem to owe us a president.