How Can We Prosper Together?
The end to suffering and the answers to our problems can never come from the all too common 20th century (and prior, of course) battleground of adversarial political groups. Larger issues and realities must first be understood and resolved in order for the political process to serve the common good and provide global remedies.
Our problems are complex, severe, and compounded by the fact that we add in excess of 1,500,000 people to our population weekly. When we see and experience great injustice, suffering, inequity, and violence daily, we want desperately to solve such problems. But how? How can we reduce ignorance and suffering and expand knowledge and justice? How can we prosper together? Where do we begin?
Albert Einstein observed that we can’t solve our problems from the same level of thinking from which they originated. What level of thinking are we at? What level must we get to? How do we get there?
Journalist Edward R. Morrow once said, “The obscure we see eventually, the completely apparent takes a little longer.” Mark Twain, commenting about life, said similarly, “What tedious training day after day, year after year, never ending to learn common sense.”
As we grow older, we learn that common sense is not that common. It has been said that common sense to an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom. But wisdom about what? Wisdom about the architecture of life.
Many of us are troubled by much of what we observe and experience in life. Increasing numbers of us seek meaning and purpose in an often impersonal, materialistic, and adversarial world. We share a growing conviction that reconciliation among people, nations, races, and diverse political, economic, and religious ideologies is unattainable and maybe even impossible. It is perplexing and disturbing.
In a world dominated by fear and greed, we exploit each other and ravage our environment. In our passion to consume and accumulate, we are increasingly competitive, confrontational, and self-centered. We take our pleasures but do not replenish. We deplete and exhaust the land, abuse our bodies, and violate our spirit. We create unsustainable imbalances.
We experience and exhibit contradictions that cause confusion and anxiety. We are capable of infinite compassion and the cruelest brutalities. We create extraordinary beauty and unimaginable horror. We are sustained by the fruits of our labor while we destroy the environment from which we derive our bounty. We celebrate our uniqueness, deny others theirs, and profess our superiority.
We’ve been graced with abundance yet many are in great need. We have been given every freedom, yet to many freedom is denied. Many of us who have every need fulfilled create insatiable wants. We have every means to resolve our problems, yet they persist.
We exhibit a vengeance for getting ahead but sense we are somehow falling behind in some intangible way. Times of London columnist Bernard Levin writes of countries that are “full of people who have all the material comforts they desire, yet lead lives of quiet desperation, understanding nothing but the fact that there is a hole inside of them and that however much food and drink they pour into it, however many cars and television sets they stuff it with . . . it aches.”
“We spend more, but have less; we buy more, but enjoy it less. We have bigger houses and smaller families; more conveniences, but less time; we have more degrees, but less sense; more knowledge, but less judgment; more experts, but more problems; more medicine, but less wellness. We’ve added years to life, not life to years.” Anonymous
Filed under: global remedies, prosperity
