This week, two readers sent the following letters to Future Positive Yahoo Group.
Conversation Lost
C.J.R.Sumner
I have recently found myself staring in the face of an awkward dilemma. It seems I can no longer communicate with the vast majority of people on an effective and progressive level. I have been stripped of all the pleasures of intellectual conversation on stimulating and important topics and left with nothing more than mindless jibba- jabba. I have struggled to uphold the values of talking about the future of humanity, the destruction of our planet, the quest of the individual, scientific frontiers and political reformation. I feel it is of vital importance to humanity for individual intellects to interact in a forum of open-minded, open-ended discussions on subjects relevant to the well-being and longevity of our environments, both external (the planet, society, family), and internal (body, mind, soul).
Despite what I would like, the majority of people I meet have a different opinion altogether. They seem to be convinced that it’s much better to spend all conversations on sports and movies, music, making money, petty adventures of the past week, and putting each other down in a perpetual competition of verbal wit, grotesque humor, and displays of ‘coolness’. But I’m not naive enough to think these people have actually chosen this way over the other. Those who exercise this form of communication usually have something in common, something which plagues much of Western civilization.
The problem is what I like to brashly call “Ignorance of Reality” with a case of “Blinding Knowledge”. In my experience, this situation is most evident in the United States. These people have been brought up being taught to idolize the rich and famous, to focus their energy on making money, and to look out for number one. These are the strategies needed for survival in an extremely competitive, profit oriented economy. Since this is their survival guide, and there is direct reward for being corporately productive, basically identical groups of people are given the job of convincing each other of the necessity and grandeur of their products, whether it be a new car, a new business proposal, a movie or a rock band. Thus, with enough successes of the individuals, the group as a whole becomes convinced of its own lies and misprioritizations.
This leads to a society of misguided, shallow individuals whose top priority is not to miss this week’s episode of “Friends”. Don’t get me wrong, I think sports and music and things are great, but no moderation has yet been introduced. Teenagers around the world are convinced that idolizing a certain boy band or making the sports team is of great importance and helps define who they are. What’s worse is that friends and family usually reinforce those ideas and are themselves trapped in the same web of commercial personalities.
Is this not devastating to human development and progress? I have met many people from around the world. I lived in Germany for about 10 years and traveled around Europe a lot. I’ve lived in the United States about 12 years and currently reside in Gainesville, Florida. I’ve also visited Guatemala, Mexico, Morocco, and Israel. I’ve studied many ancient cultures and am currently working on an Anthropology degree. I’m only now about to turn 22. I’ve seen a lot for the time I’ve had and I’ve met a great deal of people from different cultures and socioeconomic environments. It’s amazing to note the diversity of the human mind, and the shaping of a person’s reality by the environment in which they grow up.
In the years of observing individuals and societies in the places I have lived and traveled, I have come to the conclusion that Western cultures have one of the most deeply, severely distorted grip on the priorities of human existence on earth. What I define as priorities are the well-being of the planet, sustainable economies, political stability, equality and rights, food and housing, the pursuit of happiness, the advancement of technology and solutions for peace on earth. This list can be extended and modified, but the basic idea is that these are topics that deal with love and respect for ourselves, each other, and our non-human environment.
So if people are obsessed with cars and bikinis, and talk only about the lies and dreams they’ve sold each other, then these most vital issues go completely unrecognized. That defines what I mean by “Ignorance of Reality”. What makes matters worse is that people are rewarded for buying into this delusion with immediate and obvious benefits. They become successful, they start making tons of money. They can afford to buy all that nice stuff that they’ve always been told was so desirable. Now they make the mistake that will keep them from ever waking up: they think they know how to play the game. They think they are solely responsible for their successes and that they have triumphed against the pitfalls of the world to become a successful, respected citizen in a society of competitive individuals where everyone has to fight for themselves or go down trying.
In a way they are right, but only from their own narrow perspective. In reality, they’ve played the perfect pawn to the vicious cycle of commercial lies and propaganda fueled by a bloodthirsty drive for profit and self-indulgence. They’ve grown up in a corporate-created culture and now they themselves have a hand in continuing to produce future generations that will one day also present the gluttonous advantages of capitalist, free-market economies to their kids. Where is this all leading to?
This is what I refer to as “Blinding Knowledge”. When you think you know how everything works, you become a slave to the system that you’ve so proudly conquered. You create limits and boundaries for yourself, consequently seeing the rest of the world through a very narrow hole in the wall. This is why I hear so many people insist that the poor “deserve to be poor”. This is why Americans are in complete denial of the fact that their high-consumption life-styles are completely out of the ordinary and horrifically destructive to the environment and foreign economies. Few American soccer moms will admit that starvation in Africa is directly related to American energy and wealth consumption, and even fewer people realize that their everyday patterns of existence need to be changed right now.
This is more than a matter of opinion of what’s important and what’s not. This is not some pointless rant about how I think people should change. This is about giving people the choice of whether or not they truly want to live life the way they do. I see so many people who hate their jobs and hate their spouses. The suicide rate and depression in America are at all-time highs. Teenagers violently protest against the world they’ve been raised in to. Are these the signs of a healthy society, or a society covered in a blanket of false reality, prompting people not to act on the very things that make them so miserable, because that’s “just the way things are” and “life is hard”?
I hope more people can find their way out of this maze of self- delusion.
Ecological and Social Sustainability
Jan Hearthstone
Any of the remedies that either are being currently pursued, or that might still be contemplated, meant to address the many, with time rapidly increasing environmental and social problems of this planet, cannot keep pace with the proliferation of those problems. The only certainty that could be entertained about our collective, global future is, for an informed person, that whatever problems the world might have had in the past, and is facing presently, the future will have those problems also, but multiplied and greatly amplified. Although technical and scientific knowledge is increasing astoundingly, the more so is increasing the world’s misery. The more computers we have (to put it simplistically), the proportionally more homeless, hungry, abjectly poor, and socially dissatisfied there are in the world. And also, thanks to our increasing knowledge, and by observing the trend that modern warfare is following, we can with certainty expect any future armed conflicts to be very much more devastating than any armed conflicts of the past. It is only a tiny fraction of humanity who could expect their future to be better than their past. Incidentally, this tiny fraction of humanity is also the portion of humanity that is responsible for the greatest exploitation of resources both – natural (including very many other than human species) and human.
Very many people feel a great concern about the state of the world, very many people are trying to find a course for meaningful actions, but despite of a growing awareness of the need to do something to save a decent future for this world, the prospects are not improving. This, I feel, might be due to the fact that most actions that are being done in order to “save the world” are based on methods learned from our forbears, methods that might be considered adequate, perhaps, but such that can never result in any significant amelioration of the world’s plight. What I am saying goes against every grain that we have inherited from our ancestors, it might even sound sacrilegious, but, if we look at the record that our ancestors left, we should note that despite teaching the future generations the best they had, their legacy has been increasingly more problemsome and lethal with every generation of our ancestors entering upon the world’s stage. This is undeniable: Warfare gets “improved” with each generation (meaning that weapons can kill more people more effectively), the exploitation of resources gets more sophisticated, the general quality of life worsens. All the foregoing statements are well founded on statistics, whereas any optimism about future happiness there might be anywhere is not so well founded.
I speculate that perhaps a significant betterment, and also healing of all the persistent wrongs from past could be obtained should we stop basing our “remedies” for the world’s ills on our models from the past, and turn instead to an ideal projected into the future. I am not implying that we should resort to relying on the still non-existent time machines (although – would those find much good in the future considering current trends?), but rather that we collectively, globally, and consciously design a future that would accommodate all life on Earth most optimally.
Consider this: Most of life on Earth is planning for the future, most people do. Those plans entail visions of a place to live, nourishment to be procured, and leisure to be experienced. The trouble is that most of these plans are done by individuals for those individuals alone mainly, and that the majority of those plans for future disregards plans for future that others might hold. When it comes to realizing of those plans, it is no wonder that those individual realizations clash more often than not, and because of that most of the plans for future are not possible to bring into being at all. What is needed is to synchronize all the plans for future there might be, match them with all the knowledge we have about the Earth, and about human society, and thus create a model of Life on Earth that would be available for an inspection by virtually anyone on Earth. Naturally enough, such a model could never be really finished. It would keep dynamically adjusting itself to the ongoing input of all concerned, and to the ever-increasing knowledge of the Earth and human society. Creating of such a model would be certainly technically possible – the technology for accomplishing of this exists already and is not complicated – already individual PC’s are being harnessed together for a variety of tasks, and their capacity together is greater than any “supercomputer’s; but it is not the technology that matters as much as the principle. In contrast to any methods of organizing the world’s future known to me, coordinating the future from a grassroot level would have the advantage of not leaving anyone behind; any- and everybody’s future would be based on valid grounds, which cannot be said of most processes that, to lesser or greater extend, control the creation of our collective future currently. Such a model would put anyone’s contemplated future into a right perspective – the model would “teach” any individual what might, and what might not be possible, realistic, and what complications might ensue should such an advice be disregarded. The crises that we are heading into globally is an emergency; any science contributed towards the construction of this model could be the best instance of an applied science – after all – we need adequate knowledge to face any crisis, and should the knowledge humanity possesses already exist for knowledge’s sake only? The model could also serve as a basis of unifying of all scientific knowledge; a feat that would otherwise would be impossible to achieve. Last, but not least – this model of our collective global future would serve as a gigantic “round table”, always in session, ready to deal with any emergencies as they arise.
I would like to point out that although there have been many global models already actualized, all of them were a creation of just a few people, incorporating only certain aspects of possible futures, and most of these models were limited by partisan interests and purposes. If the energy and all the intentions to improve the state of the world of all the myriad of individuals and organizations that professedly strive to better our collective lot, and indeed of anyone at all, were coherently brought together to co-operate together on a realistic global future on the basis of all available knowledge, creating together a realistic goal to strive towards, this combined energy and knowledge might give our global future a viable hope.
During my graduate years I hope to elaborate and substantiate on all the above. I know that already there exist paradigms and ideologies that might provide epistemological grounds for creating of such a model. It will be left to show that our present barbaric Homo sapiens (judged by our own human standards) could yet become a Homo intelligentes. Else – the possible scenarios based on the trends currently observable could result in outcomes that no one could really relate to at all. If we really care about our offspring, we should make sure that we don’t hand them over an Earth that would be if only less perfect than the one we received from our forbears.