Humanity at a Crossroads.

I watched a documentary last night around what Noam Chomsky, one of the world’s leading thinkers, had to say about the impending catastrophic decline of civilisation. He gave his reasons for it happening and his suggestions as to the changes we need to make in order to arrest it. The reasons came as a moderate boost to my ego because they were all the same things I’ve been saying for years, but the solutions only left me more pessimistic.

In order to arrest the decline, he said, there needs to be a major universal shift in consciousness among the people of all nations. I agree, but that seems most unlikely to happen. As long as the affairs of the world continue to be ordered by a tiny minority of rich and powerful people and institutions – the bankers, the entrepreneurs, the power hungry politicians, and the self-serving imperative of the corporate world – the majority of humanity will continue to be either conditioned unquestioningly to follow the prescribed road or too isolated and powerless to get it changed.

People, especially in the ‘developed’ world, are manically resistant to change unless it brings greater prospect of lifestyle-oriented consumption. That’s the position we’re conditioned to take now: lifestyle and consumption are the whole foundation for a happy and successful life. A few people realise that this is a trick to keep the rich getting richer while the rest labour on the treadmill, but I’m quite sure they’re too few in number. I used to hope that one day their number would achieve critical mass and the shift would be seismic, but I see no sign of it. And the same is true of the world’s leaders. I don’t see many politicians or potentates whose motivation is to make the world and its human societies genuinely better. Politics are still all about swelling the personal power base and maintaining the status quo. (Look what happened to that benighted genius Nikola Tesla, for example.)

And that’s why I think we’re heading for a cataclysm – maybe tomorrow, maybe next year, maybe in a hundred years, for who knows? Maybe Marx will be proved right when he prophesied that capitalism will one day destroy itself through its own greed. That would produce quite a cataclysm. Or maybe it will be climate change, or a nuclear war, or some other form of economic meltdown.

It is interesting that the mythologies of ancient peoples throughout the world carry a common message: that when humans reach a crossroads and take the wrong road through greed, selfishness, aggression, and disregard for the natural order, something comes along to bring them to their knees. Maybe this is the universal consciousness at work. In any event, I think we’re at a crossroads.