The Fate of Our Species

Today a Facebook friend posted as his update:

"Will humanity ever gain the wisdom to abandon the false belief systems that have become so prevalent in modern society or will we continue to wander along, misguided by collections of ridiculous lies?"

(Thank you, Jerry)

It's an important question, because it gets to the heart of something that a lot of us wonder about in one form or another:

"will humanity ever overcome its own flawed, gullible, (sinful) nature in order to reach that potential that so far only a very few special ones (Christ, Buddha, Krsna, Leonardo da Vinci) have achieved?"

"can us common folk (sinners) hope to be able to be smart enough to think for ourselves instead of being dominated by powerful evil forces (the Devil, reptilian shape-shifters, Illuminati, diseases)?"

"will our species (mankind) always stratify into a few powerful people and a whole lot of powerless people (the meek), or can we hope to change 6.7 billion people to finally all live in an egalitarian way?"

"is there some way that we individuals can immunize ourselves against lies, false belief systems, (the wiles of Satan) etc so that we can live purposeful (righteous) lives?"

"is there any way that a whole lot of us could overcome our basic, flawed (sinful) nature in order to be happy and good (saved)?"

"what is in human DNA that makes us so full of conflict (why did we screw up and fall from Grace)?"

"why have the gods (Ywyh, Allah, Nature, the Laws of Thermodynamics and Evolution) abandoned us to a life of struggle, failure, and hopelessness (why is Adam still being punished)?"

And so on.

I have a quick answer to all these questions: humanity never lost its wisdom. We never fell from Grace.

The answer to all these questions is that we are not flawed, there is nothing wrong with our DNA, the gods never suspended the Laws of Life in the case of the human species. We are not being punished for the sins of our fathers. In fact, there is no external devil, god, Illuminati, filthy germ-world, or other force that is a malicious puppeteer manipulating each of us and waiting for us to let our guard down to pounce upon us. That is all imaginary.

We are good enough, smart enough, and, gosh-darn it, I like humans.

The Universe, and the physical, biological, and social systems within it, simply don't work the way that most of us have been taught to think that they do. Specifically, the Universe does not work by a strict, linear, cause-and-effect process. And not one planet, person, or particle works in isolation and is solely responsible for itself. These ideas are all products of our cultural mythology, from which the fathers of modern science deduced that everything - including our own individual karma and destiny - works on some kind of mechanical clockwork system.

Even our very DNA is seen as some kind of magnificent biomechanical instrument that, having been coded and designed beforehand, determines before our birth whether we'll be one of the lucky few who transcend human wretchedness, or whether we'll have to settle for being one of the vast majority who struggles just to get along.

This belief system developed in the Near East about 10,000 years ago, in an area that is now called Iraq (and the north part of Saudi Arabia). The belief system served to perpetuate a cultural experiment that allowed one particular society to grow and conquer its neighbours every time its population reached a food supply limit. Neighbours were both physically conquered through ruthless warfare, and culturally conquered through "ethnic cleansing" - including missionary work. The culture grew for 10,000 years, ever-expanding east and west across the entire globe until the only cultures untouched by it were a very small number of tiny tribal societies in a few areas of the world too marginal to support the totalitarian agriculture required by this one culture.

As far as belief systems go, it has proved to be very beneficial to helping our culture to grow its population and to take for ourselves the available resources of almost the entire biosphere.

The only thing wrong with this mythology is that it is maladaptive in the face of the converging crises of the 21st Century.

So this is why I'm certain our particular corrupt (global) civilization/culture is in its death throes. That culture just happens - by thousands of years of massive population growth - to be 95% of the people on Earth. Other than that, our way of life is nothing more than another failed social experiment.

For me, the question is, how many of us will make the mind shift to deal with social changes that will inevitably occur as a result of the loss of our most crucial energy supply, and how many of us will just "continue to wander along misguided by collections of ridiculous lies." In other words, how many of us will be part of the many new cultures that are arising, and how many of us will die with the 10,000-year-old zeitgeist?

When I think of the mass species extinctions of geological past, I assume that the governing rules apply to this beginning mass social extinction; since the same natural laws apply to physical, biological and social systems, I suspect that around 90% of the social strategies of society today will become extinct over the next half-century.

Most of them over the next decade.

Whether that means that we'll also have a 90% population reduction is probably up to the good luck of individuals and groups - it is up to us to change our way of life when jobs, political positions, entire institutions such as public education, etc disappear, but it is sheer good luck whether we happen to have had the interest and inclination to have investigated truly sustainable alternatives as the need to use those alternatives confronts us.

Any of us that hasn't got at least the traces of what we need to adapt to a changing world... won't. That's another natural law.

I'm cautiously optimistic. There is a growing movement around the globe, comprising millions of small, grassroots counter-culture action groups. These groups can be seen as everything from vegan communes to GreenPeace to permaculture networks to grandmothers taking back food sovereignty in India. The people involved are putting up nonviolent resistance to the dominant way of life in uncountable ways from giving birth at home to speaking out in support of each of us reaching our full potential.

The Internet has revolutionized this process to the point that the old mythology can be exposed and new ideas can be shared at lightning speed. This is a rapidly-accelerating phenomenon we are part of. It will soon sweep us over so intensely that none will be able to deny it anymore.

I personally believe that the greatest resistance of all, the greatest step any of us can take away from the dying juggernaut of our 10,000-year-old cultural mythology, is to simply believe that every human being on this Earth has within him the full potential of the greatest that have ever lived.

Believing such a thing, we will live it. Living it, we will make it real.