If you look at the world from the moon, you see too many people competing for too few resources. If you look at the world from any country, you see the government struggling to maximize that country's share of whatever. If you look at the world from the kitchen table you see people trying to maximize their family's share of whatever. If you look at the world from the individual's point of view, you see him or her trying to maximize the quality of their own lives. Everybody talks a good game, but greed is far too often the principal motivation and "intelligence" is the intellectual cloak that disguises greed as "principal."
Very few individuals anywhere in the world see the whole or anything close to it. Each of us are the product of the sum of our experiences. A poor black person living in an urban slum is a different thing than his or her white neighbor living in a wealthy suburb. An ethnic Russian farmer living in Ukraine is a different thing than his ethnic relative from Siberia that is presently engaged in trying to kill him. Yet, we all share the same cell structure in every single one of our body parts and we all have the same fundamental needs, desires, and feelings. The most amazing thing about us is our need to be different from "them" while simultaneously insisting that we are loyal to "us."
I have been on earth longer than you have and I have figured things out, but you won't hear me because I am critical of us. It has always been so, as long as I can remember. No one has ever listened to me about anything, unless nobody else wanted the job. Please don't misunderstand, I am not bitching about life, I am just trying to explain it. Several times, in my time on earth, I have been asked to do things that nobody else wanted to do. I had a modicum of success and was rewarded with more authority, but I was never ever listened to when I suggested any actions that were not consistent with the basics as outlined above. I am sure that others have tried as well and it is obvious that we have all failed miserably. Greed masked by "intelligence" wins every time.
I ask myself why I am so out of step with my neighbors and conclude that it is because our life experiences have been so radically different. I have actually tried to feed and care for tens of thousands of people that were uprooted from their homes by my government's actions. In one such situation they tried to kill me and in another they named their children after me. Very few of my neighbors have those kinds of experiences in their backgrounds. Most of my neighbors have never been intellectually outside of their place of birth. They are good people all, but they have no idea what life is for most of our fellow humans in this world. Because this situation is not going to change, I conclude that we will continue to destroy ourselves as we are mindlessly doing now.
It is way too bad because, with all of our flaws, the America that our parents and grandparents created was, hands down, the best society that humans have ever created. I find it ironic that our good intentions are such a huge part of the failure of our society. Too many of us feel that we can legislate goodness into our neighbors, failing to understand the limitations of legislation and the inevitability of resistance to it. My current pessimism stems from the fact that I do not see the needed epiphany on the horizon. Instead, I see advances in technology making eventual nuclear war more probable and central control of the individual more likely.
People sometimes actually get mad at me for pointing all of this out and ask me what I would do about it. I explain that I would start by reorienting society away from liberal idealism back toward conservative practicality, but this immediately alienates half of my audience. I lose the other half when I try to explain that we must, repeat must, help all humans live a better life if we are to continue to live one ourselves. Back in the day, I was asked to man an outpost in Viet Nam because my bosses knew that they were going to abandon Viet Nam. It was a backhanded compliment which I saw as duty. I understand that no one is going to ask me to save humanity from ourselves and, at my age, I have little option but to accept the facts of life, but I confess that it galls me no end and proves to me that humans are a stupid breed of animal. The irony is that we call all other animals dumb because they are do not possess our brand of stupidity, but ours is the brand that will kill a lot of us and destroy our current societal structure with absolutely no insurance that the next form of society will be any better.
No comments:
Post a Comment