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What's Up With Ming

"Did you ever feel like an alien who somehow became stranded on a planet called Earth where nothing seemed to make any sense?" A quote from "Ming The Merciless"

Civilization Rehab

Recovering from civilization can be brutal but neccessary if we are to become truly free from it's influence. Kick the civilization habit here!

Being Human

The Condition Of Our ConditionArticles on the Human condition and how we might improve it.

Helpless? Powerless?

"Our basic position demands that we focus on the actual sources of the real problems faced by the human species today as opposedto throwing money at the ever present symptoms, so we can convince ourselves that we are, or even can, actually do something aboutanything and by inference are not the ineffectual morons that we might otherwise appear to be.

We believe that this is nothing more than a variation on the old 'I'm so powerless' game, in which we surrender to helplessness and then use that self induced condition as an excuse to avoid our responsibilities as intelligent life forms to address the challenges of today's world, which by the way, are mostly the result of our past neglect and indifference.

Why are we so afraid of facing the idea that we have made mistakes in the past, and thus open the possibility that we can begin to learn from those mistakes and get on with correcting things?

Perhaps an even more relevant question would be, if we don't find the courage to recognize and learn from our mistakes,will we condemn ourselves to making the same mistakes over and over until the agenda of life determines that the Human speciesis a failed experiment and begins to phase us out of the life systems on this world?"

Run? Where?

At this point all I could think of was 'why did I click on that link?' because whatever I felt sneaking up on me earlier, was a lot closer now.

But now it was like I was transfixed, like I was staring into the eyes of a king cobra swaying rhythmically from side to side right in front of me, I just couldn't turn and run.

Oh I knew what was creeping up on me. I knew where this was all going, well, I kind of knew. It wasn't so much coherent thought as it was intuition, and alarms were going off all over the place.

And my fantasies created an image of a giant speaker installed on the top of the Earth at the north pole and it was banging out the message 'you don't want to hear this, run!' over and over. I just stood there blinking, run where?

Challenges

I think all of us know, deep down under our fear and denial, that we have betrayed the promise of our species. We got distracted and captured by our own self interests and the gratification of our desires, as if we just couldn't leave our adolescents behind and grow up.

My heart aches with the knowledge of this betrayal, how could I, .... we, have allowed this to come to pass?It was all coming clear now, the obsession with all things self, the single minded pursuit of pleasure, comfort and ease at the expense of all else.

All of which contained hidden deadly tradeoffs. Who knew that comfort and the pursuit of pleasure heralded the end of learning and growing and contained the seeds of our own decay.

Perhaps if we had learned from the mistakes of other civilizations who had gone down that same path, but then, we have long forsaken the value of history, right along with learning. So unpopular are these subjects that I only got one result from the search engine and that result was like a whisper in a hurricane.

I would be amazed if there was anyone left still reading this article in the hope that the website offered at least some hope for us. And it did, but it is hard medicine to take. After all, how reasonable is it to expect that a situation which took hundreds of years in the making, might be corrected anytime soon?

Critical Thinking Skills

The race is on. I have to agree with the people behind that website when they say that it will come down to a race between us getting our crap together and the consequences of our past neglect catching up with us.

Of course, there is also the hidden question that none of us want to deal with, are we already too late? Again I agree with the website when they said that this was unproductive to dwell on, and what choice do we have anyway? We must believe we can!

One of their suggestions was that we start with the newer generations coming up now and correct some of the major mistakes that past generations have made. The first of which was not teaching critical thinking skills first and at a very young age.

This makes sense in so far as it would tend to arm them with the ability to work things out for themselves and determine what is of real value and why? The website people believe that this would allow the new generations to quickly see how such things as economic and political systems which started out as a good thing, ultimately became a corrosive and destructive influence in the world, ultimately becoming a deity, worshiped by Humans and to which Human life is sacrificed on a daily basis without a thought or a care.

Solutions

The website also said that critical thinking skills were not the whole equation but just a good start, because they have the potential for allowing us to work our way through the seemingly endless landscape of bull crap out there masquerading as the truth, and do so in ways that we can reach at least a close proximity to a reliable version of the actual truth, and it is the truth that we so desperately need to find our way back to. Especially the truth about ourselves.It sounded good to me. At least it was a starting point, so I punched critical thinking into my search engine and went on the ride of my life.