Realist: “People are so stupid, they don’t deserve to be saved. They should be left to save themselves and inevitably fail. That’s what life’s harsh realities are all about—its survival of the fittest and if stupid people don’t care to act and learn about their destructive habits, they should die off.”
Positivist: “Actually, that is pessimistic and not true. Together, we can work and make the world worth living in.”
Realist: “No way, people are nut-cases and it will never happen…you’d have to be a nut-case yourself to waste time considering it a possibility.”
Average Joe: “Oh, yeah right…thousands of years of people talking this way and you are going to be the one who actually does it!…do what you’re gonna do but don’t interrupt me when Jeopardy is on, it’s all I have since Barker retired from Price is Right. I got enough to worry about in my own life, I ain’t got time to care about the world.”
Every religious text and most philosophies’ underpinnings constantly discuss a sort of “om-like” mental engagement with the world as the ultimate resolution to the question of how to live. Hell, most people think living, really actually being alive, is a sense that a human being gets when actively engaging in the physical world in such a manner as to which their mind functions keenly in-tune with the pace of their surroundings so that the human may manipulate the world as though nature intended it and even encouraged it.
Since I am probably the most well-suited person to save the world, even though I lack the resources or backing or whatever else wealthy or powerful people have going their way, I do have one thing that few to none of them have. What is it? A keen understanding of the dilemmas of the human condition and the specific problems of modernity, viewed from a lens of someone whose been concerned for a very long time.
Don’t write off what I just said (I heard air leaving your mouth quickly as a phsyical expression of your doubt.) until you read on to understand the background of this topic. I know full well how much laypeople like to discredit people before they even hear a word. However, the dynamics of the happenings in the world affect more than just the meaning of life or what humans do with their time on earth…it has to do with real things in the physical world that actually can destroy the habitats and therefore your bodies. After witnessing the actions of the various groups of people throughout Covid, I actually changed my attitude and decided I don’t want to save the world…I’ve studied and researched the social conditions, physical conditions, philosophical conditions, economic conditions, governmental conditions, envioronmental conditions, etc., my whole life, mostly for the purpose of trying to save humanity through uniting them. My personal life has been hindered immensely in every area of life since the adoption of social media which I foresaw and have plenty of people I was once in relationships with who will testify to my proclamations about the matter. I have fundamentally shifted from an idealist and lover of humanity and believed there was a universal purpose to life and all things, and into a supreme misanthrope.
I can promise you that the real key to fixing the problem—a certain interplay of things, that is undeniably going to lead to a destruction of civilization and leave devastating suffrage of billions of human beings across this planet—is far easier than one would probably fathom when faced with the issue. It is a little bit complicated but can be carried out quite easily. I probably will not share the problem or the solution, but I will share some knowledge to give credibility about the various aspects as I see them so that some level of insight might be gained toward ‘knowing.’
Other’s approaches on how to save the world?
Religious history is entrenched with ideas about the structure of the universe and human life within it’s context. Hinduism, deriving from ancient Sanskrit, considers there to be cyclical periods of human existence, to which we are currently in the Kali Yuga as it is termed: a period of immense chaos. Christians view their Lord, Jesus Christ, as the Savior of mankind by dying for man’s inherent nature to sin (adultery, dishonesty, …), enabling us to be forgiven for such sins so that we may reach heaven. Each acknowledge suffering as inherent in the human condition, at least.
The era of Pre-Enlightenment posed thoughts on the human condition primarily focused on philosophical bases for increasing understanding and using forms of logic to create “rationality.” I refer here to the darker (before positivism) forms of thinking such as Schopenhauer, but not excluding Hegelian logic to the mix. Without these discourses, renouned men of their time, humanity may have never seen the Enlightenment form which arguable gave rise to science—though some other form of more logic-based and rational applications of philosophy would inevitably have occurred in a rapidly increasing society wherein universal laws and some minimal degrees of uniformity (language, currency, educational topics) would be absolutely necessary for the species survival. These philosophers were, unknowingly or not, furthering the idea that humanity is on a time-line and that they should continue to grow, expand, develop. Into what? I hardly doubt anyone knew exactly, but it certainly was a quest out of the dark ages and into something “better.”
Even Schopenhauer, who is considered one of the darkest thinking philosophers in any era in part for considering human existence to be an accident that never should have occurred, believed in the concept of possibility. “Talent hits a target no one else can hit, Genius hits a target no one else can see” he said. His general sense of the human condition was most certainly pessimistic, however, maintaining that life is like a pendulum swinging back and forth between pain and boredom. He probably had a wee bit of what we call depression. It seems to me depression is all-too-common for brilliant and deep thinkers, who find themselves unable to fully exist in the physical world with other “live in the moment” beings who are clueless about how foreseeable the results of their meaningless or stupid actions really are. So he probably lived a fairly lonely life.
The depth of what he gave philosophical thought was not unimportant however. Indeed, he furthered the discussion of articulating what exactly it was inside human beings that makes them tick. His pessimistic view made use of the term will to describe it as the origin of self-motivation, explaining that it was a negative basis
What does any of this have to do with saving the world?
Well, you stupid schmuck, understanding potential motivating factors of human behavior is a critical aspect in the complex formula for doing such thing. Think of it as a variable in an incredibly complex algebraic equation.
Saving the world would certainly require a united front, along a wide variety of tasks. First, however, it must be accurately answered what the world needs saving from. As one should know, the first step to solving any problem is accurately identifying what the problem is. That means, to analyze what are the problems in the world and what ought to be worth saving and how to go about it…perhaps in ways of mystic transcendence or perhaps taking real, tangible action.
Getting into what the problems are facing the world.
We begin by considering the way most people’s minds alter when considering what the world is around them, and how their mind changes when they consider a grandeur idea of saving the entire thing. A common tendency, not that everyone experiences it but that it is common, is to feel overwhelmed at the sheer size of the world and the seemingly uncontrollable fate of all of humanity on this sphere we call Earth. Someone would most likely consider the factors that threaten extinction as highly out of the control of humanity altogether….if not, then at the very least for the realm of expert scientists and global leaders which are so few in a species of nearly 8 billion.
This should highlight one of the roots of the problem. That is, before getting into things like power shortages, fossil fuel and carbon emissions, methane emissions, population growth, stability of diverse societies, economic collapse, etc., we must first address the minds of people. This is one of the only realms that hardly any of the utopian texts of history fully or adequately address.
The values of people are incredibly important as they dictate the minutiae of daily behaviors of people on a subconscious level. The entire history of religions aimed not only to answer complex and existential questions about life but also to assign its adherents ways of living and behaving in manners the creators (human people) deemed ethical and hopefully productive for what they believed would be a better world. Unfortunately, humanity has come so much farther toward understanding the world and the ways of life and reality that has demystified metaphysical beliefs as ways of manifestation, such that religion has served its purpose towards advancing the species but is now like ancient much the way technology for production or communication has advanced. While humanity has certainly lost a lot of its sense of wonder and mystery, questions of God and proper morality has been replaced with thoughts on the future of artificial intelligence, exploring the cosmos, and the belief in self-actualization and personal property rights and privacy within the digital realm.
In other words, new generations care far more about themselves as individuals and only about humanity from the context of everyone being able to live physically healthy and have their own private online identity. It makes one wonder if the direction of the species the dividing into cubicle apartments, passwords etched in retinas, and a strong faith in humanity despite distrust of one another in close physical quarters (i.e. public space). It would be difficult to argue that the massive increase in computer and smart phone usage has not significantly altered face-to-face communication standards…in one way or another.
Aside from the philosophical thinking of nature-enthusiasts, is it not fair to find this potentially problematic for the entire species?
Certainly the divide between proponents and opponents of this issue could create an extensive debate. The average age of opponents would be almost certainly younger than the average age of advocates of a less digital world. New generations haven’t seen anything else, their entire experience is one of online communication, in both new legitimate forms but also more subtle social networking forms. While they would be right to claim that prior generations fears are over-felt, worry-wort-ish, or outlandish, they also have no experience with the pre-digital era. I personally am a cuspling, having first had a nokia phone as a sophomore in high-school, and later a razor, and probably part of the first wave of people to have them, though by no means the only one as I used my phone to text and call friends who, for the most part, had them by the end of my school days. It is certainly very obvious to me that corporate efforts to push for a new “way of life” wherein every member of a family had cell phones was a very hard-pressed and difficult to defend against effort. Basically, I was one of the first people to have a cell phone in a wealthy suburb in my early high school days, and by graduation, nearly everyone had one. That is no accident, it is global business selling a lifestyle so as to make money. Money drives the world, unfortunately, in ways that the accompanying lifestyle is not questioned first, but only after its flaws and faults.
This leads me to question the role of universities like MIT, Stanford, Harvard, or even public universities like Cal-Berkeley who are highly influenced by industry-alums within and around their communities. …TBC