We are on the wrong road, going in the wrong direction.
I am going out on a limb here and make one of my sweeping generalized statements about the human species. Here it comes: we are royally screwed up by our evolutionary history.
We, as a species, have hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary history behind us that follows its own logic. It’s like an express train with millions of tons of inertia that is unlikely to be affected by anything individual humans can do. Yet, individuals, billions of them, act on it all the time and some of it may add up.
What I have been noticing is the huge discrepancy between the small and the big effects individuals play on the overall direction of our express train we all cling to. Here is the rub: while billions of people, every second of our species’ march toward some not too distant terminus. are making the right decisions, sane and rational in their context, when it comes to big decisions, we, as a species, are hopelessly lost.
What no one has figured our yet, from the beginning of our history, is that we are on the wrong road, going in the wrong direction.
Our obsession with size, speed, power, the demented mantra of bigger, faster, stronger is by definition better, keeps pushing us in the direction of extinction. What no human agency has ever attempted to do was to examine how bigger, stronger, faster actually contributes to overall human happiness. It’s just assumed, as an absolute truth.
All these fables of Shangri La, Utopia, Atlantis, Kazohinia, Ozimord are never taken seriously enough to consider that we, as a specie, would be happier by just living within our evolutionary heritage, instead of attempting to be gods, flying to the sun like Ikarus.
We, as a species, collectively, would be a lot happier if we just lived and let each other live, instead of killing ourselves and each other for the unattainable goal of building the tallest skyscraper. A goal unattainable because no matter how tall we build, anything we can possibly build will forever be only half the size of its double and, sooner or later someone will do that and then the vicious cycle will go on until we will have finally destroyed ourselves.
We, as a species, have hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary history behind us that follows its own logic. It’s like an express train with millions of tons of inertia that is unlikely to be affected by anything individual humans can do. Yet, individuals, billions of them, act on it all the time and some of it may add up.
What I have been noticing is the huge discrepancy between the small and the big effects individuals play on the overall direction of our express train we all cling to. Here is the rub: while billions of people, every second of our species’ march toward some not too distant terminus. are making the right decisions, sane and rational in their context, when it comes to big decisions, we, as a species, are hopelessly lost.
What no one has figured our yet, from the beginning of our history, is that we are on the wrong road, going in the wrong direction.
Our obsession with size, speed, power, the demented mantra of bigger, faster, stronger is by definition better, keeps pushing us in the direction of extinction. What no human agency has ever attempted to do was to examine how bigger, stronger, faster actually contributes to overall human happiness. It’s just assumed, as an absolute truth.
All these fables of Shangri La, Utopia, Atlantis, Kazohinia, Ozimord are never taken seriously enough to consider that we, as a specie, would be happier by just living within our evolutionary heritage, instead of attempting to be gods, flying to the sun like Ikarus.
We, as a species, collectively, would be a lot happier if we just lived and let each other live, instead of killing ourselves and each other for the unattainable goal of building the tallest skyscraper. A goal unattainable because no matter how tall we build, anything we can possibly build will forever be only half the size of its double and, sooner or later someone will do that and then the vicious cycle will go on until we will have finally destroyed ourselves.
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Laura
(new)
Feb 25, 2021 08:02PM
My father always said that human life had been going down hill since the invention of agriculture and I think he is largely correct.
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I am grossed out by greed and consumerism. But another aspect of that is the increasing number of people in America who live very hard, stressful, and unrewarding lives due to constant stress over bills for necessities. SOmething like one fourth of our population is one paycheck from personal disaster. There are a lot of people who are experiencing stress not because they are keeping up with the Joneses but because in spite of their jobs they aren't keeping up at all.
