January 05, 2017

Thinking About the Future

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We have problems. Serious problems. Problems like poverty, hunger, homelessness, wars, immigration, financial systems, corruption, and many more. Something is wrong. A worldview is a way of organizing ourselves, it’s a system, a collection of beliefs about how the world should be. Do most of the people you know believe that we should be hungry? Homeless? Killing one another? Poverty-stricken? I don’t know anyone who believes that that’s the way we should live. So why do we put up with such conditions? Is it because we have never stopped to examine the roots of such a system? Well, it’s time. And what do we find when we get right down to those roots? We find two things. One is the distortion of ownership. Ownership is not bad, in itself. However, it is not good to allow the idea of ownership to pave the way for the bullies, corporations, or nations to take over everything – to claim that the land is theirs, the water is theirs, the money is theirs, and all the power belongs to them. The second thing is the concept that some people are better and more deserving than others. Healthy competition helps to nurture our growth, but not when it results in the belief that some people are more important than others. This paves the way for gross imbalance in a system. We are all valuable in different ways. What if the person who was the best gardener was obliged to feed the most people? What if the group that made the best cellphones had the job of supplying the most people? What if the best artist, writer, or singer was expected to present visionary material to the widest slice of the public? What if the best leader was expected to negotiate only peace and service to others? And what if 6.9 billion people woke up one day to realize they were cold, hungry, thirsty, homeless, cut off from what they needed to survive because of money, and being encouraged to slaughter one another? Would they continue to go along with such a system? Or would they begin to notice that there was something ass-backwards about that system? We are right there! This is the end of an age…the age of industrialism, of coal, oil, and chemistry, of nation states and capitalism, of religion. Industrialism has gone as far as it can go without totally destroying the Earth. Coal, oil, and chemistry have gone as far as they can go in covering up the discovery of free energy. Nations states and capitalism have gone as far as they can go without completely destroying civilization. And religion has gone as far as it can go without completely arresting all human development. What is beyond the end of our age? It’s time to think creatively about the future.