CONSTRUCTIVE IRREVERENCE
It could seem to go against the grain to start questioning sacred tenets of our cultural heritage, to break away from
what our ancestors bequeathed to us, but it is necessary, if we
want to have a future that we would like to look forward to.
Consider: In the civilization that today rules the world (having
disposed of other, less "successful", less "productive"
social systems), each generation has been steadily, over the ages,
leaving a future to their posterity that (on the whole, as an
overall trend) has been progressively becoming worse and worse (at least in terms of having a place to live) for
most life on Earth with each passing generation.
Today, as in the most of the past of our exploitive civilization,
the Earth is a pleasant place to live for only a very few humans,
and most of those few humans live at the expense of a vastly
greater number of humans and other forms of life. Life is becoming
progressively more and more difficult for more and more Earthlings,
human and non-human alike. Any crises and conflicts occurring on
Earth are becoming more bloody and more costly in terms of damaged
life and damaged Nature.
All this due to following in the footsteps of the forbears who, in
effect, were teaching their children that the only way ahead into
the future was at others' expense. The other, more benign teachings
professed by any "civilized" culture could only rarely counteract
the raw outcome of human behavior in general. The amount of victims
of this way of life (human and non-human alike) and the expanse of
degraded Nature has been growing almost exponentially with the
progress of civilization. We dutifully note and bewail the damage,
but no substantial changes for the better have been initiated yet.
This is because our decisions and our actions come almost
exclusively from conditioning that we received from our parents,
who should really be disqualified as worthy tutors, because their
most notable achievement in their lives (although individually they
might have been quite likable fellows) was to pass on to their
children an Earth greater in deficiencies than that their parents
had left to them. And it certainly cannot be said that our children
will inherit a Paradise from us! It cannot be even said that our
children will inherit a world, if only a little better, if only a
little improved than the one our parents left to us. On the
contrary.
We, in addition to whatever evils (environmental, or social) our
parents allowed to happen, are running out of water and clean air,
and any wars that will happen will, undoubtedly, surpass any wars
that happened so far. The rich nations are still growing richer,
while the hordes of the Earth's poor have no resources to get
richer from. The gross imbalances that are already evident are
increasing with time. We'll be leaving to our children an Earth
rife with tensions whose eventually inevitable release will not
be happy. We'll be greater than our parents only in the magnitude
of misery that our children will be left with, aided only with
knowledge that they are learning from us. Knowledge that in no way
is any wisdom. A knowledge that is useless for making this place,
the Earth, a happy place. What could be done?
It is obvious that to look for help to knowledge gotten from the
past might be problematic. Most of our actions to improve on the situation is patterned after
experiences from the past, and because any solutions that would
really radically improve this planet's lot are antithetical to the
seemingly indelibly engraved commandment--thou shalt make profit no
matter what the costs might be--no real improvements are really
ever made. Of course, we deny ourselves to see it this way, but do
we really care where and how the stuff we consume is made, at what
real cost? Our conscience doesn't extend beyond the supermarket, in
most cases. And even when we might care on occasions, our having to
"make living" stops us from undertaking of any meaningful actions;
at best we might make a compromise, from time to time, that might
look good, but that essentially is meaningless.
Many people around the globe are contemplating, and actually even
engage in violent actions to improve things, thinking that there is
no other way out of desperation, but history shows that any
violence committed in the name of improving of anybody's fate
paradoxically never really brought any benefits that would justify any of the sufferings that any violence ever caused.
Perhaps a way of truly and fully, of non violently redirecting the
reigning paradigm towards a distinct betterment would be to start
learning not from our past, but instead, from our future. A
future that we would design ourselves, based on what we know to be
true about our Earth and about humanity. This kind of knowledge is
there, it would only require separating it from knowledge that
causes humanity to be forever descending into more suffering. The
task would be to design a future that would be as ideal as
possible. A future where all the components would be as close to
harmony as possible. A future that would be designed by virtually
everyone, not only by politicians (who, on the whole, by the
non-virtue of the current system in use, are inefficient servants of the people they represent, because the system that they are operating within is inefficient itself). A future that
would be good for our children and all the living things on
Earth.
Technologically this would be possible. It might perhaps require to
hook up all the computers in the world into a huge global
supercomputer (this -creating a supercomputer by hooking many PC's
together - is already being done on a smaller scale--look up
"distributed computing"), creating thus a virtual "round table"
that would be used to hone a model of our collective future to
everybody's satisfaction, and then starting implementing steps that
would eventually result in a realization of a future that would not
be an outcome of dutifully following in the footprints of our
progenitors (a process doomed to creating increasing misery on
Earth without a fail), but that would be an outcome of following a
fully informed and deliberately created vision. However - the ways
of implementation are not important. To be willing to design a
satisfactory future as a global collective would be important. The
details of how to achieve such a future would take care of
themselves, once we start knowing what such a future should look
like.
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