Here we are immersed in the white noise of 24/7 news chatter…real news commingled with fake news. Who has time to suspend the grind of our own lives to tell the difference? So we turn to alternative sources…the internet blogs, more Truth Sayers immersed in relentless rants designed to undermine the last shred of faith we have in any mainstream news source, politician, or public institution. Is there no end to the noise? When did we forget how to talk about our challenges and concerns without yelling past each other?
Time for each of us to take a deep breath and pause for a moment. Repeat the deep breathing until the noise fades away. Now that you have created a moment of calm, allow one question to enter your consciousness:
How do we as a humanity evolve beyond our current dilemma?
I won’t waste time providing the historical detail of the dilemma because this problem is exactly what all the ranting is about…this is why life is now so unfulfilling, even for the fortunate.
The fundamental question is how do we get from here to a more humane place?
I acknowledge the enormity of the problem is paralyzing. The fact that any necessary change will take many years, and likely last beyond our lifetimes, only makes the problem intractable. But for the sake of our progeny and our sanity, we must do something.
Where do we begin? Root causes. The root cause of any problem strips the litany of false leads & convenient scapegoats and reveals how we find ourselves here.
Our problem is pervasive scarcity. Today, countless people are starving while we throw away millions of pounds of food. Millions suffer and die from treatable diseases while thousands of available hospital beds lay empty. Billions of people live a century behind modern knowledge and technology, denying most of them the opportunity to discover their full potential. Virtually every person spends most of their lives toiling away at jobs they would never do but for the need for money.
In a world of resource abundance, how did access to resources become so limited? A system of social organization and economics where access to resources is tied to how much money you have. Since only money guarantees access, each of us is encouraged to accumulate as much money as possible. The result is a world where most of the global wealth is consolidated in very few hands, and half the world’s population is resource deprived.
If scarcity is our problem, the solution is to maximize human productivity by guaranteeing access to all the resources each of us can use to reach and maintain our full potential. The keys here include limiting consumption to what we can use, reducing waste by maximizing the quality of all goods and services, allowing all people full access to the accumulation of human knowledge, and leveraging the use of automation to eliminate the need for mundane, repetitive tasks for human labor.
Is this solution possible? Yes, but only if we reconcile our defining values to the wisdom of our experience. Each of us rely on many people to produce the conditions that sustain us. As a result, our individual well-being is a function of the well-being of every person who contributes to our living conditions.
The farmer who grows our food and the truck driver who delivers it to market…the electrician who wires our home and the mechanic who installs our brake pads…the pilot who flies our plane and the engineers who designed it…the teacher who exposed us to our life’s chosen vocation and the every person who believed in us…Each and every one of these people and many more we may never know, contribute to the conditions that make our lives worth living. And when they are distracted, undernourished, ailing and denied access to the resources they need, we suffer with faulty goods and services that often alter the trajectory of our lives.
Once each of us acknowledge our interdependence on humanity, we realize we all must matter if we want to live in a sustainable, mutually fulfilling society.
How then do we get from here to there?
Helping each person we know to understand we can best advance our self-interest by supporting the well-being of all of us. Changing the dialogue of our public policy discussions from “how does policy affects me?” to “how does policy help us?” Supporting candidates and causes that favor global unity over nationalism and sectarianism. Doing the relentlessly hard work of building an emerging critical mass of values that elevate all of humanity.
This is the task at hand, which offers purpose amidst a cacophony of inhumanity.
Is it in you?
