As we press relentlessly toward the looming brink of the highest cliff of extinction, how well prepared are we to do what is right in the circumstances we’re creating? Are the goals we continue to pursue, wise ones in these circumstances?
Is it likely that our ancient primitive ancestors possessed sufficient knowledge and wisdom to have created an adequate moral code to guide us through the technological, biological and moral aspects of the now looming crisis? Does our leadership possess real wisdom and capability, or is our ability to survive based mainly on worthless myths and grossly inadequate people? Please think carefully and justify what you say. Get used to the idea that there is no sky-hook to rescue us. While you’re at it, consider whether, through our inflated sense of entitlement, we attempt to live too high on the biosphere hog.
Does our system of selecting leaders encourage the emergence of sociopaths in positions of near absolute power? Do you tend to see in leadership candidates, primarily what you want them to be, rather than what a competent psychological assessment might, and subsequent experience will, prove them to be? If we are serious about having sound democracy, shouldn’t we institute mandatory psychological testing of all candidates, with stringent passing standards?
When you consider our leadership dispassionately, who among them would you entrust to be the sole guardian of the youngest members of your family? While we’re at reform, consider laws to keep opportunistic business and economists well away from political power. Therein is the cause of our many accumulating environmental catastrophes; gnawing at the very foundations of life on Earth.
Have we humans advanced far beyond the mental powers of the corvids (crow family members) in our ability to determine our fate? In fact, no. So we must discount our own hubris from here forward.
If you need a better basis for hope than this, you must get serious about recreating it from the remaining shreds of Earth’s biosphere. Accordingly, reconsider what must henceforth constitute a good preparatory education. It may include biology, psychology and physics, but it’s definitely not going to be contributions from the failed priesthoods of religion and economics.
Think about it. Talk about it. Start living a sustainable moral life. What is a real moral life? That too needs to be rethought. Nothing to do with some invented god. Let’s all grow up for starters.
Norman Mogensen
Oak Bay