The End is Near!

Human Development

The End is Near!

This may sound like some prophecy from a Biblical figure or from some Greek tragedy.  But whether it is based on the sinful nature of human beings or the Greek equivalent of hubris (humans thinking they have the powers of the Gods), it is about forgetting the limitations of being human and the humbling requirements that are necessary to repair that oversight.

A World of Power and Control

Behind our rush to manipulate and control the world and other people we have given our individual responsibilities over to leaders who have often had the desire to make the world over according to some ideology, or some religious vision.  All of these visions turned out to be a type of arrogance; thinking that intelligence alone, or human control and manipulation, or science, or technology, or economics can solve the problems that we face as humans.  Thus, the competition of ideologies, of religions, of economic systems has led to confrontation, conflict and wars.  In the process we have displaced the very basis of the human spirit, our concern for human life and life in general.  We have lost any sense of cooperative communities, of sharing, of realizing we all live on the same planet and that we have a mutual responsibility to provide the necessary support to sustain our human lives.

In our drive to get control we have chosen to play hardball in the game of human life.  In our rush for control and dominance, we have left the most human qualities in the dust, often seeing them only as an indication of vulnerability and weakness.  And so, we have lost our balance with the planet and with each other.  We are now to the place in which only the harshest of manipulative tactics are seen as still effective.

The rules and laws drop away, to be replaced by “in your face” acts of power and arrogance.  So, we have more nations turning to autocratic leaders who are willing to dominate nature and punish recalcitrant citizens and even neighbors to establish their version of righteousness.

Some of this occurs behind the scenes.  But much is in full view of a world.  We see apartheid.  We see racism.  We see economic manipulation.  We see military influence.  We see poverty and starvation.  We see ethnic cleansing.  We see genocide.  We see nations and populations being weaponized with the easy availability of international arms sales.  Not only that, but the gaps of income inequality also increase with a growing world population.  A world in which human wealth determines who gets to live a comfortable life, or who gets to live at all.

Meanwhile, there are those who can put up walls and legal barriers to prevent the immigration of those who are trying to survive this world we have created with our arrogance.  And even within our borders we discriminate between those who we see as important and those we do not, mostly in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, or even lifestyle.  We begin to separate the elect (the saved) from the damned (the doomed) as though it is somehow acceptable, or even preordained.

And we continue to abuse the planet to feed our economics of mass production and mass consumption.

The Necessary Correction

But underneath all of this we, as individuals, realize this is all unsustainable and that there must be some other direction to pursue.  Of course there is, and we all know it in our heart of hearts.  We still practice it with our close friends and families.  We practice it with our pets.  We practice it when we garden.  We practice it when we go into nature to renew ourselves. We practice it when we donate our time or resources to help those in need.  We practice it when we call out abuse and inhumanity in our midst.  Those most human of all instincts cannot be extinguished, no matter how many distractions are provided, or how hard our leadership tries to tell us not to attend to those yearnings for a more humanized world.

Where would we be without those humanizing impulses?

Where are we headed without them?  Will it be a place where human concerns have vanished.  Will it be a place in which force and control trump human rights and the underpinnings of humanity only to be replace by a technically dehumanized and humanly disempowered world.

Within the Biblical teachings, there will be a day of judgement.  Within the Greek pantheon there is this Goddess, Nemesis, and in eastern religions there is the law of Karma.  As you sow, so shall you reap.  There will be a reckoning.  We as human beings will get our comeuppance.  Well, that time is here.  We have blatant genocide in full view of the world with the full complicity of what we had thought was the result of the most human part of world civilization.

The imbalance is so dramatic that we can no longer ignore it.  It is time to take action to make the important change back to decisions that support life and humanity, basically, that support the planet and the web of life.  The price we are paying now goes far beyond any dollars and cents calculations and must be calculated by the price we are paying with the very soul of humanity. This is about the visceral survival of a human race that must not lose its humanity and therefore its spiritual center, it’s very raison d’etre.

Shifting from that old system based on commodities and consumption at the cost of the planet and our spiritual centers, may, of necessity seem wrenching, but it is necessary to stop the evolutionary process that will destroy us and damage the planet even further.  We need to create an evolutionary discontinuity to drastically change the current direction to one that is rational and sustainable and find the path for our journey back to a sustainable sanity.

This requires the individual re-empowerment of our most human centers

Without that kind of shift, the end is truly very near.

---