The Age of Human Self-Serving Angry Irrationality
God’s laws which govern the evolutionary process make interesting theatre for our existence—sometimes good theatre and sometimes bad, but always on Evolutionary Time not on the human ‘little gleam of Time between two eternities’. The whole process operates much as Lincoln’s brilliance and strength—like a steel cable which goes from pt. A to pt. B, but not in a straight line—sometimes swaying this way and then that way, BUT ALWAYS eventually reaching pt. B.
It is not human nature to deal with the above reality, and we invent a God who thinks like us, looks like us, has given the human species dominion over all other species, likes our species the best, and if we practice inherited religious rituals and scripture, will allow us to enter a Heaven after death. To ensure we get to Heaven we can be forgiven for any sins, even on our deathbed. No matter the particular human created religion, the whole thing begs any real logic or rationality. But religion is often our nature, our crutch, our pacifier—despite the cruel reality that our species, the first one ever, whose activity has created the 6th period of massive species extinction in evolutionary history. Hard to imagine this makes us God’s favorite species.
Just when our scientific knowledge has grown at a mercurial rate, giving some people an amazing array of gadgets to elevate their standard of living or to overcome medical situations, it also carried with it the ability of 2-5% of people, for example in this country, to own 90% of our country’s wealth. This phenomenon is world wide with the stats a tad different. However, the rate of this imbalance is growing faster in the U.S. than any other industrialized society. Sad.
At the same time our planet suffers from human overpopulation. These two developments have generated a long sequence of events which hardly bode well in the immediate future for practically all species currently existing on our planet. It is not coincidence that more and more national leaders bear varying likenesses to Adolf Hitler. Just look at the leaders who will guide humanity through the next decades at a point when we have already crossed the thresholds on many fronts, which will create havoc that cannot be reversed any faster than the slow speed at which these situations developed. These leaders include Putin (Russia), Kim Jong-un (North Korea), Rodrigo Duterte (Philippines), Ali Khamenei (Iran), Bashar al-Assad (Syria), Benjamin Netanyahu (Israel),
Omar al-Bashir (Sudan), Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed (Somalia), Joseph Kabila (Congo), Theresa May (Britain), Mamnoon Hussain (Pakistan), Faye al-Sarraj (libya), Donald Trump (U.S.) plus a lot of others whose names and countries are less known right now.
All of these ‘leaders’ have angry, intolerant, belligerent natures and seek to punish all sorts of groups within their own country and abroad. They are malignant fireballs of ill-will whose mental state is constantly a tirade of anger against everything and everybody except themselves. We now have two populations, one population living in the ‘best of all possible worlds’ and another population living in the ‘worst of all possible worlds’. The latter is growing exponentially.
We live now in an age of unabated self serving greed—for power, for wealth, and an unethical obsession with ‘family values’—which means everything is viewed purely on what’s immediately best for ‘my family’—whatever group constitutes ‘my family’. It could be a genetic cabal, a religious cabal, an economic cabal, a nationalistic cabal, a cultural cabal, a racial cabal, an age cabal, etc. Most everywhere we look the wagons are being circled.
It was the hope of so many, when Obama became President, that these dangerous mindsets would be reversed. After all, Obama seemed never to have met group of people for whom he did not try to make life better—more just, more peaceful, more opportunities, more goodwill toward everyone. So then why, many asked, did the people vote for Trump who admires no one but himself, is angry at just about everyone and everything, and hell bent on teaching all kinds of groups a lesson they won’t forget? The problem was, although Obama tried, he could not break the control the wealthy have over American politics. Unable to break this control, the economic status of more and more people took a nose dive with their pensions, job security, job opportunities, living wages, and whose lives were becoming fiscally harder and harder to manage. They turned angry—really angry. Kind and heartfelt words were no longer enough, and the only candidate who matched their anger was Donald Trump. “What have we got to lose at this point?”, many concluded—“let’s blow up the whole system and see what emerges, it just can’t be any worse.” As usually happens in situations like this, anger begins to focus on all sorts of groups for getting perceived help that they weren’t before getting. It is one thing to see other groups getting more justice, opportunities, and acceptance, but it was perceived by more and more citizens as coming at their expense. Of course this was not true, the real problems were human overpopulation and the strangle hold the wealthy had on the wealth distribution in our nation. Neither problem was solved—and the greed of the wealthy for even more wealth drove more wealth to them at the expense of others—-which necessitated more and more of the middle class falling into poverty. Ironically, no one represents the greed of the wealthy more than Trump. He inherited millions and parlayed that into billions adroitly using a rigged system to stiff investors and contractors, while declaring bankruptcy multiple times—-each time legally becoming more and more wealthy while not having to pay any taxes for decades.
Of course it was not logical for the frustrated masses to vote for Trump, but they just didn’t care, they just wanted something other than a continuation of their own fiscal decline. They lived through Reagan, the Bushes, Clinton, Ford, and Obama and their own personal financial situation just deteriorated at about the same pace. It was a frustration vote. Unfortunately for them, they just pulled the rope on their own trap door for hanging themselves. No party better represents the wealthy than the Republican Party.
As always, as individuals, we wonder what can we do to ensure a better future for ourselves, realizing that a better future depends on maximizing the contentment for the maximum number of inhabitants on this planet. It does not seem we can even know the answer in any real predictable fashion. As humans we are part of this evolutionary process, not the driving force. We can no more envision or predict the future than Lincoln could have predicted our present from his past time of existence. We all do ‘our thing’, driven by a real diverse cauldron of emotions and perceptions. The internet has become our Tower of Babel, our perceptions seen through the prism of our own experiences and diverse genetics and environments. Everyone is free to create ‘alternate facts’. We react, and the billions of reactions get sorted out by the evolutionary process and the process moves on. Sometimes in the process there are cruel corrections which can last thousands or millions of years before a new improved status arrives. The evolutionary process is the real object of God’s importance, not individuals of any species at any time in the process. It is difficult for us to accept that because at any time, in varied ways, each of us can suffer greatly by events beyond our personal control. This is not to say that our own actions can’t sometimes avoid or dampen the suffering, but there is no God taking us personally by the hand and leading us around the many land mines in life’s journey.
Right or wrong I feel, at age 77, like an abundance of good luck enabled me to survive this long and have some modest successes. The next generation has to tackle the mess descending upon our planet. The blame game is silly and pointless. This is just how the evolutionary process works. Even our species cannot work it out via our own decisions, notwithstanding we always think we are in control. We are not. We do the best we can, although we seldom do, and Time moves on. Time stays and we go. There is no tragedy here except on an individual basis. Even Lincoln ended up assassinated. It is not possible for any of us to earn any escape or reprieve from God’s laws which govern the evolutionary process.
When I retired it was envisioned by myself that I would do all sorts of things to enrich my life and make it more exciting and contented. But contentment is a rather elusive state of mind, and the path to contentment is not the same for everyone. It seems clear enough to me that the extent of our contentment depends heavily upon life by the Golden Rule. Both sides win in this lifestyle, the recipient and the giver. We can give via direct contact, our time spent helping the less fortunate, and via sharing our wealth. For me a contented retirement was easy. None of my hobbies, like writing musings, is expensive. Or my wandering walks, or my endless reading of biographies, or my time spent in nature, or my cooking. None of what I do since retirement directly involves helping less fortunate individuals. But I have my FANAFI Fund (Find A Need And Fill It) which provides yearly grants to worthwhile charities. More of my money goes there than anywhere else, and I get a lot of satisfaction from a situation in which I can amuse myself in pleasurable ways and yet spend more money on my FANAFI Fund without any real sacrifice. Sure, I could pester others to amuse me everyday. Sure, I could wander around some foreign country for a week OR provide the money for 2500 destitute children to get vaccines which may prevent they from dying from preventable diseases. If I were a tougher and braver nature, I could personally be part of the good people who attend hapless victims of horrible conflicts around the globe as do those in Doctors Without Borders. But lacking these admirable attributes I can at least help finance the efforts of those who do such good work. No aspect of nature impresses me more than the Redwood Forests—these trees have in some cases been around for thousands of years and their habitat is the best place to sense life from the far distant past. We are a part of nature, and seeking some kind of relationship with the process and it’s past helps us accept our role and appreciate the evolutionary process. So I also use my Fund to help protect these forests from human assault. We are, by nature, worse than locusts or pigs at a trough. And so it goes on, yearly grants which help those less fortunate than myself or protecting our environment. Gratitude is the mindset necessary to maximize our own sense of contentment. Something for nothing is universal—after all we all were born via the wheel of fortune. None of us ever earned our chance for existence and the fact we exist does not generate contentment, just the opportunity to acquire some contentment.
The productive years can be very stressful, our objectives in life difficult to achieve, but achieving personal and meritorious goals in our productive years enables us to have more contentment in our terminational years. If we reach retirement having been little more than an inane social butterfly flitting around amusing ourselves with frivolous matters at some sort of dizzying pace, what degree of contentment can be achieved from that in our terminational years? If we live our lives as if life is all about us, we eventually pay a price for this mistaken notion. All we can ever hope to receive from life, of any importance, is a high degree of contentment. Nothing here is guaranteed. We play the cards in our hand as best we can, hope for enough luck along the way, and require help from others to achieve some success. Forget the silly ass self-serving lie that “I achieved my success the old fashioned way—I earned it”. Donald Trump believes that, and it would be hard to find anyone so angry about so many others and things. He has long lived a daily life of angry frenzy. The Golden Rule, understanding when enough is enough, a sense of gratitude, and a whole bunch of luck is maybe the only path that maximizes contentment.
The many global forces bearing down on our planet have been going on for too long from too many directions for mere humans to effectively reverse these global forces which threaten humanity on a global basis. Democracy has become a farce. For 50 years we have invaded dozens of countries on borrowed money, at the same time expressing disingenuous concerns for the future of our own grandchildren. While progress had been made, substantial progress, on individual rights—the political parties simply debate whose base is to pay the cost for the debt we have been rolling up, whose base is going to get good education, get tax breaks and loopholes, and tax shelters. Sacrifice is going to come from the other party’s base. The main contest seems to be which base—the wealthy or the poor—are going beat the hell out of the other, one by squirreling away more of the nations’ wealth and the other upsetting the whole cart by social chaos in the streets. Few seem to realize, with modern communication devices, those living in rural, urban and suburban poverty will soon be able to coordinate roving riots just about everywhere and this battle—with one side having nothing to lose—and the other side having so much material wealth to protect, will find history has always been on the side of those with nothing left to lose. Many countries have already found out the police and army cannot be everywhere at once. Terrorism is unstoppable by its very nature. It has become the ‘weapon of mass destruction for the ‘have nots’. Violence begets violence has become the means by which problems are being solved—except of course this method simply is inoperative in our current times and situations. We now have 25% of the world’s prisoners in our own jails at a cost of $30,000/yr/per prisoner. Jails and military expenditures explains exactly why we have no money for universal health care, universal good schools, proper infrastructure maintenance, to pay workers living wages, to maintain or establish good pensions, good job security, job opportunities for everyone, and on and on it goes. Our priorities have never been more screwed up.
Yes we have now embarked on this age of irrationality, faith based ‘alternate’ facts, self serving anger, crazy-ass family values, and an ever increasing hopelessness for a better life for all our citizens. Still, there is no reason to believe the evolutionary process, churning on via the laws created by God (however we wish to define the term)—having continued for billions of years, will not continue on ad infinitum. As already stated, “Time Stays. WE Go”.
