FROM MY CORNER: Unsmart People

Nice, France . . .

October 4, 2021

Planetwide, what we are largely dealing with today are people who either are uneducated, prejudiced, oppressive, submissive, or stupid – or some combination of these all-too-common human characteristics.

From those who stormed the halls of congress to those leaders of commerce who base their corporations purely on personal profit rather than any semblance of care for the populations of the countries in which they base their businesses, we are confronting a seriously damaged global society.

In our own country, the United States, a demagogic buffoon, who has gathered about himself a cadre of illiterate servile politicians and an intellectually-lost constituency of well-meaning malcontents, hovers in the wings eagerly anticipating the next presidential election.

If his Democratic opposition remains internally contentious, he might even win the thing. The Democratic cabal presently in theoretical political power is a fragile coalition. They are so often so divided they don’t efficiently wield the slim margin of advantage they possess.

The over-all problem is intellectual distance. Neither party’s leaders, let alone their constituencies, are capable of viewing the world situation and our human place in it from any meaningful perspective.

What is needed is a tangible philosophical perspective energetically applied to human politics.

What is abundantly available everywhere is semi-literate leadership of the human race’s precarious position in our dangerous and highly unpredictable Universe. We spend 99% of our time, money, energy, assets, and effort trying to make a truly ill-conceived society function.

An ill-conceived society cannot function.

We are not very successful in our quest of rationally conceiving of a reasonable society. As a physical planetwide presence we humans spend 99% of our time competing against one another: person against person, corporation against corporation, nation against nation.

While we are driven individually and in groups to view one another as opponents, our real opponent, the Universe, has revealed itself to be superior to us in nature. After all, the Universe is Nature. Nature is the Universe. And it is unquestionably supreme.

We are the insecure supplicants to our natural Universe. And we maintain a very shortsighted view of our existence within this context. We are like children fighting in a crib with one another while quite violent external forces continually try to attack us, if not outright destroy us. Wolves are at the crib’s edge.

Our nearsighted view of our actual physical environment (the Universe) is persistently clouded by our religious fantasies and our myopic greed for physical profits. It would be funny were it not such a serious mistake on our part.

For it is this miscalculation of our existential situation that is our Achille’s heel. There is no assurance that our race will last a long time. For a few million years we did pretty well. Living on the earth in a most basic fashion, we did our environment little if any damage. We respected the power of the Universe.

Our disturbance of its life-supporting capacity is a relatively recent occurrence. It has, however, in the last 10,000 years finally reached a precarious tipping point. The anti-scientists among us, those who utterly do not comprehend the intellectual discipline of scientific thought and behavior, are the vulnerable factor of our fragile Achille’s heel.

It is they who, when collaborating with the unpredictable natural Universe, can literally become the end of us all. If any truly dangerous force exists on the earth to extinguish the life of science appreciating humans, it is they.

I do not fault them their wish for a protective invisible God. There is a certain honor in their argument that they are the humble ones, and that we who believe in our collective ability to more rationally deal with our Universe are the usurpers of the natural order.

But, it is truly an existential battle we are confronted with. We humans either learn, and do it now I contend, how to better manage ourselves as a unified racial planetery whole – or we do indeed define our own potentially premature demise.

I for one, for instance, do not want to die because some 33 millions of people can decide to follow an intellectual buffoon, who has neither the intelligence, the education, or the human will to invoke rational thinking into his infantile view of the earth and his place in it.

There comes a time always in life when one must pick sides in various human struggles. We as a race of people are at such a time in my opinion. Our philosophical need is to shift our view of life from a competitive and mutually antagonistic one.

We need to embrace a vision as a cohesive group who understand our collective and individual goal is to create a way of life that will hold a halfway decent chance of sustaining us for centuries and centuries to come.

Some very difficult intellectual and philosophical choices are going to have to be made in the coming years. We had all best put on our best thinking caps and make the smartest choices we can come up with.

Any resolution between scientific realists and political/religious theorists must – and I believe will – only come from a combination of effective non-violence and intellectual persuasion. Some very poorly-educated and often outright stupid people need to be educated and made smarter.

Each of us is obligated to be a part of this transformation.

This is not a responsibility we may abdicate. The stakes are too high.

We each must think through how can I contribute to this outcome.

And then act upon it.

Hal