No doubt you have had the experience of standing outside an elevator and had someone ask you, “Going up?” or conversely, “Going down?” The point of the question, obviously, is to give you an opportunity to get on that particular elevator if it is going the direction in which you wish to go.
It is always important to know which way an elevator is going (and which way you want to go on it), but an even more important question to consider is this: As a society, are we going up or going down?