WORLD EVILS

One of my more...satirical articles.

Confusing chaos. Multitudes of options swirling around multitudes of people. So many thoughts, questions and opinions, suppressed for the sake of uniformity. Pretend behaviour. Infinite problems but zero solutions. Problems to compound problems and block attempted solutions. In spite of self-destructivity and negative energy, unwavering optimism.

A good way to describe today.

On thoughts first.

We are vessels for ideas. Generated from thoughts. Which can be generated at up to one a second, or even more. Do we use this one ability that distinguishes us from every other living being? Probably not. Ironically, those who do would be all for saving the planet and chastising their species; those who do not spend more time glorifying their superiority and plotting new ways to leech the planet of its vitality.

We do not train our minds to think. Nor do we feel it worth developing by ourselves. We place a lot more emphasis on accumulating knowledge, [or is information a better word,] that is potentially useful for hoarding resources. If you are successful in snatching more resources and wasting it on yourself, you have used your time and energy well, in terms of today’s society.

Is that really the way we want to have grown? All of us are facing difficult decisions and a lot of potholes and bumps in our roads to ‘success’ and working extremely hard in our own ways to achieve that. But isn’t our fundamental definition of success flawed? Isn’t it our duty to clean up our messes? Shouldn’t we feel the urge to give back, even now, while we are killing the very elements that keep us alive? Where is that collective consciousness gone? Why has even the instinct of self-preservation disappeared?

Clearly, while there has been tremendous improvement in collective environmental awareness, its pace is much too slow to generate the reaction and subsequent actions needed to save the planet.

World governments are way too involved in running, rather misrunning, their countries to bother to come together to resolve this crisis before doomsday is right under their noses.

In such a situation it is absurd to expect that a positive change can occur in time.

Mankind has gone terribly wrong. Humans seem to be essentially self-destructive, as said above; unable even to take care of their own species, let alone trying to coexist with others. In the space of some thousands of years, we have managed to bring down all the elements that are essential for our survival- trees, air, water; and caused the imminent elimination of other living beings on earth. Sunlight, another necessary element, still shines on us, but so do its more poisonous components, since we have thinned down the ozone layer. All this is a time space that is nothing by the chronological standards of the universe.

That is THE problem. The sub-problems are animal extinction, deforestation, ice-melting and the polar bears, water pollution, carbon[and other] emissions, and so on.

The humongous smoke trail caused by a factory (Its blurry because i was in a car.) 

I want to think about human problems. There are certainly more than enough to think about. Choose your pick- poverty, hunger, illiteracy, gender issues, political ones,... and so on. They are all connected. I would like to go a step further and say that they all stem from a lack of the ability to think. If we were accustomed to doing so we would focus on solving problems, not creating enough material to cause more. After all, isn’t that what science is about? A group of thinkers with good will creating something to potentially be used to help people; but it ends up in the hands of selfish hoarders to go on and become destructive. Unfortunately, before resolving the current crisis, we are already busy creating new scientific material and subsequently new destructive problems. As Einstein said, shocked and racked by guilt, after the Hiroshima bombing made possible by his widely-known formula-‘Signing Roosevelt’s letter was the biggest mistake of my life.’

Really, why are we being so blind to an obvious situation? I fail to comprehend. Is it the influence of dulling technology, fatiguing food, and no exercise that has made us as a people extremely passive and listless? We are not bothered about anything anymore. Our morals cease to act on us and our collective conscience is heading in entirely the wrong direction.

I would like to change the topic now and think about all the other sentient beings we are sharing our planet with. There is an enormous richness of living creatures around us- millions in fact. A square kilometer of earth would reveal more insects than all us humans put together.

Unfortunately for us and showing our despicable natures, we have caused the extinction of many thousands of species. We will never see these beauties of nature again. Their extinction has resulted in a chain reaction among food chains and now a lot of other species, affected by this loss of nutrition, or absence of predators, as the case may be, are slowly dying out. Lack of prey or fodder is just the tip of the problem iceberg for the species we coexist with. We are responsible for causing a lot of other problems, of which habitat destruction, deforestation, no water spaces, mining, poaching, are but a few.

And then when some carnivore, deprived of a habitat to stay in restfully, and starving due to no prey, strays in to a village and pounces on the first potential food source it sees, we make a huge fuss, fluff up in indignation, proclaim it a murderer and execute it; making us worthy of the title.

Even leaving all of these issues, if we look at how we treat live or captured creatures, we would be worthy of even more condemnation. It is hard to imagine the torture that animals in slaughterhouses or those whose skin, fur, bones etc. are used in cosmetics or clothing, are forced to endure. The act of using parts of defenseless animals as decoration for useless items is bad enough, but it is not even done mercifully. The animals are not put to death painlessly. On the contrary, locked up in extremely tiny cages, they are taken out one by one, smashed repeatedly against the earth until their own blood blocks their vision or beaten up with sticks or clubs so hard that they can hear their bones shattering. These are only two inhuman examples. Many, many more cruel treatments are actually meted out. What makes it worse is that they do not even have an outlet to voice their pain. They suffer quietly. And then, even after all this, we are sick enough to relish the taste of the flesh of these unfortunate creatures.

I want to go back now to the problems we have created for ourselves. Some of the things we subject the members of our own species to is worse than what we do to the animals, if that’s even possible. We are aware of this.

We have created such a world in which achieving self-actualization, or you could call it individual, lasting happiness, is virtually impossible. Think about it. For an average individual, happiness would mean achieving a set of personal goals. Today’s average man would get depressed if he did not get what he wanted in, maximum, a few years. If he did, he wouldn’t wait to take it in, be happy or feel satisfied. He would go on to the next set of wishes.

Essentially, our minds have, over the past few decades, due to technology that stifles imagination yet simulates it, developed a tendency to do a lot of different things, very fast. This is lauded as good by most people, but we do not realize that this means we are entirely incapable of sitting and applying our minds for enough time. We cannot focus on anything long enough. Thinking about thinking and meditating for years like the sages of yore would give most people a headache. We just flit from idea to idea, person to person, action to action, without seriously considering any thought. We do not practice introspection and find out what our strengths and weaknesses are. We aren’t interested in honing our minds and giving it knowledge to make the body act on. We are caught up in temporary, material objectives which do us no good, except releasing the serotonin that gives us a high for a couple of hours at most. We do not seem to be interested in making a difference, in leaving a mark. In giving and being happy. We have come a downward spiral from the ancient ages.

This is not, you would have realized, an idealistic piece on how we have messed up but there is plenty of time to turn around and set things right. We have passed the ‘this is your last chance to change the way things are’ sign. Now it remains to be seen how we manage these last few centuries, if that.

                                                          

                                                                       Apocalypse? 

As an amusing afterthought, imagine that humankind has perished. Aliens from space*, or newly evolved organisms, have started exploring earth. What would they think when they find evidence of our actions? Having essentially the same desires and tendencies, except for the destructive behavior seen in the last centuries, would our successors in evolution make the same mistakes we did? Would they still fight among themselves or would they seek to better themselves?

*talking of which, one thing that puzzles me is the way all of us on earth always assume that beings on other planets, if they exist, are superior to us. Knowing our egocentricity, we should be thinking that to us, organisms on other planets, in space, are less than an amoeba to an elephant. Hmm. Maybe because of our love for gaining new technology, prying more secrets, and believing that we can prevail in the end due to our cavalier attitude and spotless deeds.

'The world will fall to storm or fire!'
(An approaching storm as seen from my balcony)