It takes one to grow one.
The tank really feels empty. I think it’s because Annette tried to tell me what the picture of sweet old age is like. This brought to me what I have learned and realized about the character of the human animal as a whole from a fairly informed view of its anthropology as a species.
This is outside of the idealism of those who continue to feel-think themselves as the important singularity of life on earth.
This image of just another life form raises the issue of its continuance on a more pragmatic basis. The life we envision through—the eyes of personal illusions exuding from its neural behavior—vs objective, impersonal observation, is exactly the difference between the emotional self interest that is driving it’s mind images, and that objective, rational observation that excludes ones desired human visions of itself.
For those who want social justice for themselves in an idealized relationship with all without the pain and inconvenience of the actual experience with each other’s organic limitations, will continue in frustration and disappointment. Stirring conflict and exacerbating a continuously intensifying quarrel over control and expectation is leading us to what is now a collapse of the collective dialogue of unsympathetic dysfunction of the current system of governing. It is by nature of a misfit in meaning, and in the behavior of many, causing the need for control to rise as a response to the incoherence of those who don’t want to, or can’t conform to, the frame of expectations currently defined by power and control.
One should pay more attention to the life/death cycle of human cultures of both the present and the past.
Success could be taken as a warning because it creates complacency, self indulgence and exclusivity in a polarity of “us” and “them”. This is not an asset in the demand of integration of humanity into a global community, which is already happening . . . ready or not.
The success of a culture can be measured by physically weighing its population and seeing what percentage are overweight—measuring the state of health, both mental and physical—due to self indulgent eating and living.
There are other aspects of habits of desire and success becoming the foundation of expectations of lifestyle.
One of many is affluence, which allows individuals to separate or divorce their sensitivity to the needs of others in a hierarchy of self importance and exclusive living. General financial success enables a separate class of others to individualize and live separately from direct participation in community life, and I dare say, life itself.
There is a pattern from the past that demonstrates this cycle in the nature of community and its expansions into larger and larger groups that require complex and coherent functions needed to sustain themselves in order to grow.
They eventually reach a kind of old age state where they are unwilling and unable to meet the challenges of the changes that are needed to sustain its people and the environment necessary to provide and dispose of waste in a balance of nature. This is because there is no longer virgin territory or populations to conquer, expand and exploit. The stresses on natural resources creates conflict in possession. Conflicts arise when the values of justice and meaning are subverted for exclusive self serving reasons, and then what follows is the dehumanizing of those not living within the frame, or dependent on their own culture and its habits and beliefs—another force in polarizing the contentiousness of “Us” and “Them”. Only the “Them” are dehumanized and all that they are is invalidated.
In the good old days war was the tool of expansion, bringing a crossover of values and beliefs, death, submission and assimilation, that is now impractical and out of the world of reason. Our time may well be the end of all human civilizations.
The whole world is needing an objective and rational consideration of how to provide and manage the needs of everyone living on the planet, including planet Earth itself. The question of human rights, what the entitlements of all humans are as individuals—responsible community participants in a functioning community of rational beings—sits in the middle of this cosmic muddle. One wonders how this challenge can be met without rational knowledge at the core of tribal leadership.