"Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you."
- Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
As much as we would like to think that we play a role as an integral part of the world in which we live, this is at least partly a self deception. It is more accurate to say that we each create the world in which we live.
There are happy people who live in the barrios around Rio de Janeiro, while perpetually unhappy people pace the penthouse suites of New York City. Indian ascetics with no possessions, homes or steady incomes feel their lives are fulfilled while devoted religious fanatics can't figure out why the world is so hellish.
Even people who spend every day together don't know each other as well as they they they do.
The reason is that we are not one single entity that was born, lives and dies as might be prepresented by the lifespan of a doll. We are unbelievably complex beings that are patched together as if with plasticine. Each day many new pieces are added, some with different colours, other with textures that are not the same as those they are newly attached to.
Add free will to that. Further, add our ability to plan our own future then shape our own destiny by working to implement our plan. We can become who we want to be.
No one should ever tell you that will be easy. Two people with exactly the same life plan could never implement it in identical ways. Implementing a life plan requires us to adapt to life circumstances.
The ability to adapt to new or unexpected conditions is a feature of humans which has allowed us to be so successful at spreading over the planet and to reproduce so rapidly in some places. However, adapting is not something that we take to naturally or easily. That requires change, which is anathema to most people.
"Oh, yes," we say, "change is inevitable. Just don't make it happen to me." Change is very hard. Some can't do it. They fall by the wayside. Look at the species of animals and plants who are unable to adapt to global warming so are going extinct for examples.
We have many people in our world who are extremely afraid of change. They are passionately, obsessively afraid of it. They will fight wars to avoid it. They will commit suicide for some ostensibly honourable cause to avoid it. They will join fundamentalist religions in the hope of being protected from it.
They will go extinct.
Whether you view "progress" as positive or negative, it means change. If we do not adapt to it and work within new parameters as they change, we will be among the extinct.
War and suicide will only assist with the natural process of extinction. They should be anachronisms. We cannot build anything on destruction.
Bill Allin
'Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems,' striving to make the future look as realistic as it really will be.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
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Comments: 17
For example, how many mothers in past decades strongly urged their children to become doctors or lawyers? Now, no one in their right mind would want a child to become either, or to marry one. Not if they knew what kinds of lives these people must lead.
And also how many parents ignored their children and teens and didn't care what they became or worse, told them that they'd never amount to anything - take two people and one will be happy and in their life, successful and the other will be unhappy and live a miserable life. Everyone is different.
What affects one so adversly, won't do the same at all to another. Thanks for the article, Bill ;)
Marilyn
Having studied human behaviour for decades, I continue to be overwhelmed by the complexity of each individual.
Amen, Marsha.
I have no idea of what you mean be outmoded philosophies, unless you mean lifestyles, in which case I would agree. I strongly support the hope you have for the future. With more people like you around, I believe we will get there.
Change is the hardest thing for us humans to accept - even down on the level of eating and lifestyle changes, never mind on the more cosmic scale that you are talking about.
There is something in human nature that pulls us towards being led and wanting someone else to tell us what to think and what to do and what to believe in... We are not, as a race, individual thinkers. There are those among us who can see beyond the tip of their noses, but they are few and far apart and some of them, unfortunately, begin to lead others down paths of destruction. Remember Jim Jones?
How did he get all those people to commit mass suicide and kill their own children? How did those women allow Warren Jeffs to dictate their lives to them?
We give up our power and I think, pessimistically, we tend to follow those who tell us what to do and when to do it.
I wish I could be as positive as you that the "free thinkers" will survive. I'm not.
2 = 1+1 = 3-1 and so on. The arithmetic is simple and as as old as human society. When we don't teach children what they need, everyone suffers, though in varying ways.
Social animals, by nature, have few leaders. All social species need followers. However, ants, for example, will all die without a proper leader (queen). We don't need to die or go crazy if we lack direction in our lives for short periods, provided that we have been taught what to do in unusual or crisis situations. That means, once again, teaching children.
You have no reason to think pessemistically if you know enough. If you read 'Turning It Around' your whole world will look different to you. It's not inspirational, but factual. It contains material that you won't find anywhere else.
Why not anywhere else? I don't know. In parts, it exists in many academic papers. In total, nowhere else. I took the time to think it through and to assemble it all for everyone to read. It's easy to read.
Free thinkers have always and will always have a tough time being heard. Few of them have ever gained much of a reputation until after their deaths. Socrates, for example, was considered to be a curmudgeon who finally was asked to poison himself to put his political leaders out of their misery.
Not so long ago people didn't lock their doors, times changed and now we have alarms on our cars, homes and personal alrarms for our children. Bill I do believe that you will understand what I am trying to say.
I didn't mean that everyone will be equal or the same in the future, of course, just that their peculiar form of social behaviour will disappear (likely in favour of something more modern for their time).
Good thoughts, Candy.
But surely part of evolution, of change, of surviving as a race, is to take non-working systems and heal them. If nobody participates, nothing will ever be fixed.
Or perhaps I've missed or misunderstood your point. I've been known to do that.
Please check my web site at http://billallin.com to see how it could happen. The plan, including implementation, is in the book there.
Those who have found true peace within have little interest in trying to persuade others. Only those who have not found it fight constantly to win others to their points of view. It's a one-sided fight going the wrong way.
As I have said many times before, if we don't teach what we want people to know, they will go the way the hot air pushes them.
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