Time & Perspective Quote by David Bohm

A physicist of Bohm's caliber doesn’t reach for “world-wide system of linkages” by accident. The phrase carries the cool confidence of systems thinking: networks, feedback loops, interdependence. Then he pivots to the gut-level paradox: despite all these connections, people feel communication collapsing. The tension is the point. Bohm is diagnosing a modern pathology in which linkage is mistaken for understanding.

His intent isn’t to sneer at technology so much as to expose a category error. Communication, in his framing, isn’t the mere transmission of signals; it’s the shared construction of meaning. A society can be perfectly wired and still semantically impoverished. The subtext is quietly accusatory: the breakdown isn’t “out there,” caused by distance or lack of access, but inside the patterns of thought we carry into every exchange. The more densely connected the system becomes, the more brittle it can feel, because every misunderstanding propagates faster, and every disagreement becomes a referendum on identity.

Context matters: Bohm spent much of his later career thinking about dialogue, fragmentation, and how collective assumptions harden into dogma. Coming from a scientist, the warning lands with extra bite. He’s not lamenting a lost golden age of civility; he’s pointing to an unintended consequence of modern complexity. When linkages multiply, so do incentives to simplify, perform, and defend. Communication becomes management: of impressions, of status, of conflict. The result is a world that can’t stop talking and can’t start listening, a networked civilization fluent in connection and starved for coherence.