For a historian, the passage of time is a sacred thing. It is a thread that weaves all humanity together into this baffling tapestry we call the present. Like walking a trail in a complete wilderness, one must take careful note of ones path so as to avoid walking in circles and also to insure that you can retrace your steps if you go the wrong way. I would never presume to say humanity is lost, but I would argue that we are not taking very careful note of the trail we tread. Here are some things that I think are worthy of contemplation.
1) The decision to alter our world has lead to the majority of land (and also the oceans) of earth being affected by human activity to varying degrees. This has lead to an exponential increase in population roughly corresponding to how much of the earth we have devastated to create what we want. If we don't come to some sort of consensus on how many humans is desirable and how many is disastrous it is very probable that we will kill every ecosystem on the planet after a few dozen more trips around the Sun. Considering we don't yet know how to produce something complex as a functioning ecosystem, destroying the ones we have is a rather dubious decision that at the very least we should be conscious of making.
2) The prevalence of doublethink as a fundamental aspect of social structures and thought is a development that not only deserves disciplined discussion, but also introspective analysis. "To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them both to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then to promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself- that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed." I can't speak to life in the poorer portions of planet earth, but I can say with as much certainty as any human can say anything that doublethink is a fundamental part of life in America and Europe. The ability of America to claim it is preserving peace by waging war, or maintain international order by violating international law, speaks to the truth of this. Consider how every crises in Capitalism seems to spring miraculously from nowhere, even though the exact same thing has been happening for hundreds of years now. The maze of madness that is the modern financial system is a dungeon of doublethink that is so cavernous and crazy we only accept it because it is almost impossible to understand it. We should think deeply on this turn in the trail before we forget the way we came.
3) What sort of a planet and people do we want? Honestly asking this question and then acting accordingly seems like the best hope for us humans. If we can start a dialogue based solely on answering this one question, I think we would find that we all have a workable similarity in our answer. Sure some want injustice, ignorance and intolerance, but they don't have to openly admit it because people seem to be pathetically passive as long as they are fed and entertained. If this simple question became the basis of political discourse I think it is conceivable that we could quickly transcend mountains of bullshit that has confused our course for centuries. Some might say its absurd to hope that we can change what is dubbed 'human nature'. That claim would require that you completely disregard all of history and the phenomenal changes that have transpired in human society therein. Perhaps if we tried we could make people that not only learn how to live without destroying biodiversity, but also break the ages old rule of oligarchies.
These three ponder points are what have been bouncing around in my brain this first week of 2013. What once was a trail is now a road and thus seems to tell us where to go. All I hope is that whatever fate is in store for us we at least measure our steps, be conscious of the trail we take and all the ones we do not.
1) The decision to alter our world has lead to the majority of land (and also the oceans) of earth being affected by human activity to varying degrees. This has lead to an exponential increase in population roughly corresponding to how much of the earth we have devastated to create what we want. If we don't come to some sort of consensus on how many humans is desirable and how many is disastrous it is very probable that we will kill every ecosystem on the planet after a few dozen more trips around the Sun. Considering we don't yet know how to produce something complex as a functioning ecosystem, destroying the ones we have is a rather dubious decision that at the very least we should be conscious of making.
2) The prevalence of doublethink as a fundamental aspect of social structures and thought is a development that not only deserves disciplined discussion, but also introspective analysis. "To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them both to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then to promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself- that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed." I can't speak to life in the poorer portions of planet earth, but I can say with as much certainty as any human can say anything that doublethink is a fundamental part of life in America and Europe. The ability of America to claim it is preserving peace by waging war, or maintain international order by violating international law, speaks to the truth of this. Consider how every crises in Capitalism seems to spring miraculously from nowhere, even though the exact same thing has been happening for hundreds of years now. The maze of madness that is the modern financial system is a dungeon of doublethink that is so cavernous and crazy we only accept it because it is almost impossible to understand it. We should think deeply on this turn in the trail before we forget the way we came.
3) What sort of a planet and people do we want? Honestly asking this question and then acting accordingly seems like the best hope for us humans. If we can start a dialogue based solely on answering this one question, I think we would find that we all have a workable similarity in our answer. Sure some want injustice, ignorance and intolerance, but they don't have to openly admit it because people seem to be pathetically passive as long as they are fed and entertained. If this simple question became the basis of political discourse I think it is conceivable that we could quickly transcend mountains of bullshit that has confused our course for centuries. Some might say its absurd to hope that we can change what is dubbed 'human nature'. That claim would require that you completely disregard all of history and the phenomenal changes that have transpired in human society therein. Perhaps if we tried we could make people that not only learn how to live without destroying biodiversity, but also break the ages old rule of oligarchies.
These three ponder points are what have been bouncing around in my brain this first week of 2013. What once was a trail is now a road and thus seems to tell us where to go. All I hope is that whatever fate is in store for us we at least measure our steps, be conscious of the trail we take and all the ones we do not.
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