An Insane Human World Article 1
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3 Mins
We ought to listen to Einstein and change the way we think about the human condition if there's any chance of returning to a sane and sustainable world that existed prior to the Agricultural Revolution. We can endlessly get lost in the complexity of sustainable development, but the key to transformation is simplicity itself. All we really need to do in order to turn away from social and environmental disaster is to change the way we think about, and act in the world. Again we can thank Einstein for the quote: “The very definition of insanity is do the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result.”
Of course, Einstein was not the first to recognise the power of our thinking to either contain or unleash our potential. More than 2,500 years ago, the Buddha said that: "With our thoughts we make the world." This is why personal transformation and the raising of our own awareness and consciousness are critical if we are to have any hope of creating a society truly based on sustainable principles.
Someone was once asked: What was the most disturbing thing that they had learned about people in their years of dealing with them through the media? The response was chilling in its ramifications: "The worst thing, and I see it over and over, is how easily people can be led by any kind of authority figure, or even the most minimal kinds of authority. A picture is forming of a deliberately contrived society of televised conformity, literate and creative inadequacy, and social unrest and decadence. It is apparent that the media is in charge of propagating these conditions, and the media is in general controlled by what? The answer: capitalistic, competitive economics.
The former U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt once said: "Nothing in politics ever happens by accident; if it happens, you can bet it was planned!" And he was in a position to know. There is much evidence to support the notion that wars are fomented and fought to redistribute these balances of financial power behind the scenes and that millions of people have lost their lives in these wars and conflicts. They are merely games of "International Relations" played by those whose power and position gives them the ability to shape our reality to some nefarious end.
It seems highly possible from the evidence that a positive transformation of human behaviour isn't going to happen through this, or that, great awakening, socio-economic reforms, or a spontaneous desire among the peoples of the world to work together. But it's quite possible that, in the long run, the psychopathic program of suffering will lose out because misery is not a stable strategy. In a state of increasing misery, victims will seek to escape it; and this seeking will ultimately lead them to inquire into the true state of their misery, and that may lead to a society of concerned people who will have the collective capacity to bring about an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling and socially just human presence throughout the world.
Sadly, in the human world insanity seems to be in charge, and all too often the criminally insane rule and the rest of us, or the vast majority of us either do not know, do not care, or are distracted and somehow brainwashed into acquiescence. Indeed, as Carl Bernstein said: “We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface, but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird, the ignorant and coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.”
The blame doesn’t rest solely on the shoulders of the many selfish people who seem to be running the show. They are only doing what we allow them to do. From top to bottom our society has too often hopped on the crazy train. The lack of national morality, sense of civic duty, inter-generational responsibility, and wilful ignorance regarding sensible social and economic policies has led us to a dangerous tipping point. In the meantime according to the American author H. L. Mencken: “Staying sane in a society gone mad is not easy. Millions of people believe themselves to be sane, but they have really just adapted to an insane society, so they appear sane within the warped paradigm of that insane society. The truly sane appear to be insane in an insane society. It’s enough to drive a sane person crazy.”