Sunday, June 14, 2009
The saddest thing about the destruction of life is the immensity of the struggle that has created our world. Imagine working your whole life to build something beautiful, complicated, with the potential to be enjoyed by everything in existence – only to have it torn down before your very eyes by a child you loved. We humans are the culmination of billions of years of challenges and adaptation; the very things we celebrate today in sport and business. Ironically, our celebration of the champions of business gives accolades to the very people who are destroying our natural environment and us. It’s as though life has been cheering on who it thought was acting in its best interests (and for what seems like an eternity, life was correct), but now, its hero has turned on it. We do not see or cannot comprehend the history of our surroundings, and thus cannot give them, or we, the respect deserved. This massive movement, river of life, has birthed a bastard child that wants its inheritance now and is willing to kill its parents for it.
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I think we just don't know what we are living for anymore, beyond our immediate friends and family and some abstract idea of a wider national or global community. We are collectively working harder, are more aware and more connected then ever before in history by a huge margin but we have lost a sense of purpose I think and, perhaps what is worse, lost the drive to find that purpose. We have a million distractions everyday that are obstacles to real introspection and without taking the time to think about these things we continue to work for the bigger TV, the nicer house, the next vacation, without thinking about something bigger than ourselves. The world has so much potential but we have defined the purpose of what we put the vast majority of our energy into so narrowly - material progress, scientific advancement, some charity, etc.
I think as time goes on capitalism will shrink in importance as part of our socio-economic system, the market will be a TOOL that we use but it will no longer serve as the ENDPOINT of our socio-economic system. Markets are valueless and blind - they lead to more or less random outcomes and not true progress in a holistic sense. Hopefully we will continue to uncover the flaws in out current order and find new systems that are deeper and more sustainable and have real human values built into them as ultimate goals. We need to focus on defining the future we want and not blindly trusting in 'progress' anymore, there are so many problems with that word as we define it and it is really the new God.
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