We could, right now, have nearly all humans healthy, housed, and well educated. We could, right now, maintain nearly everyone in a state of reasonably good exercise, entertainment, interaction, and diet -- while also yielding to older species and keeping our world far less ecologically disturbed. Again and again we (as a whole... I know not every person individually gives assent) decline to do that. Again and again we insist that the weaker humans are defective, and that they must be trodden on rather than helped. Again and again we defer the unavoidable reckoning with our physical and biological environment, stacking the deck higher against our descendants. Over and over we insist that the one thing we cannot change in all of this is human nature. We take human greed, competition, and cruelty as a starting assumption and then try for the best outcomes we can get from there. Surprise, were slowly but very surely failing ourselves and our children. This assumption that human nature cannot change, and that we have no choice but to work around it... Do you hear a quiet but firm voice in your head saying thats the truth and wondering how I could question it? You as well must question it. It may very well be the main central problem at the root of all our others. We desperately need to break that assumption loose. We desperately need to invent, at long last, the previously unknown techniques by which we will permanently upgrade the way we treat each other. Fine words, I know, but what happens in the details? Where does the rubber hit the road? What do we decide to do about the fact that a great many humans presently alive will knowingly continue greed, hatred, over-competition, and cruelty every time you take an eye off them... They will not stop unless incapacitated. Many of them wrap these activities in economic shielding, and benefit from smokescreens built into our current culture that allow them to appear civil and affable while screwing other people over. And these are not limited to one side of the political spectrum, though one side may contain markedly more of them. (our current political distinctions and categories are also woefully inadequate to the task of saving our species.) So what do we do about so many that have got it all wrong? To each his (and her) own has only hastened our downfall. But if we manage intervention incorrectly, inelegantly, we end up with mass killing and even worse. One of the summaries of the so-called 20th Century is that humanity began to awaken to these issues, and fractions of it made poorly conceived and halting moves in utopian directions, waging cultural revolution in ways that were not appropriately guided and left open the possibility-->certainty of oppressive totalitarianism. By the end of the century we mostly threw up our hands and just tried to deal with smaller problems rather than supposed cultural revolutions... while the overall planetary disaster engendered by our species business-as-usual continued to unfold at increasing speed. So, no; I dont know what to do about it. But I do know we face, in this and the next generation, no less than a true existential threat. A threat that trumps every issue we go to the polls for, or discuss over coffee, even all such issues put together. And its true name is: The human inability, so far, to treat each other fairly and generously so that we can stop wasting most of what weve got on friction, strife, and competition. Think about this when you feel good about benefiting from any kind of market -- whether buyers, sellers, bearish or bullish. Think about this when you do better than someone else thanks to cleverness, or quickness, or strength, beauty, connections, family, normalness... In short, when anything about you is allowed to mean that you get a better shake and someone else gets something less. At such times -- thousands of times per day for some of us -- you are making small but significant acts of violence. It may be culturally approved economic violence that no one sees, but it is still violence. With victims. And the sum of all such actions, every day, is why people think humanity cannot escape its own shadow to emerge as a truly long term success. The shortcuts and smart moves which you take to be the successful leading of your life are the very anchor of our oncoming fate. Same goes for me, Im no exception but Im trying to open my eyes and think about this and reduce my impact.
Posted on: Mon, 24 Nov 2014 20:25:48 +0000
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