Back to Reality

After weeks of reflecting, contemplating utopia and other abstract thoughts, reading the news brought me back to reality. A number of items, randomly brought together as I surf the web, gives me subtle warnings of the state of humanity. We are a long way from utopia.

Forbes again is report an increasing number of billionaires in the world as the global economy grew yet again over 2005, measured using traditional metrics of dolloars and cents. The new billionaires are predominantly from the US, with many Europeans, and increasing number of new faces from emerging economies, like India, Brazil, and China. All the billionaires together account for more wealth than the whole of Germany. All the European billionaires together account for about three quarters that of the Americans. In other words, all the billionaires in the world probably account for the wealth of the two countries in the G8 countries, maybe even three. That's comparing less than a few thousand individuals with a few hunred millions. The ratio in numerical term is roughly 1,000:100,000,000. In other words, one to a million.

The oceans of the world are dying as more species of marine life are threatened with extinction, and many more are getting sick and dying. Sea lions are getting poisoned from land-based toxins and infected by parasites from domestic cat feces. Fish and dolphins are dying from toxin poisoning. All the garbage that we dump into the oceans since the industrial revolution have accumulated to the level, as green house gases have accumulated, to the point where critical mass is near. Glaciers all around the world are melting at accelerating rates, while life is disappearing from the womb that gave birth to humanity.

One of the most online nation of the world, with one of the highest rate of broadband connection, South Korea is facing a new crime wave never before faced by society: cyber-bullying. It is not the same kind of bullying found in school playground, but multiplied by the power of the Internet. Instead of facing one or two, or even a dozen bullies at a time, a victim is now confronted with the all-prevasive crowd of the Internet, with thousands and hundreds of thousands of strangers who can see your picture, read rumors about you, and know little or nothing about you, yet is fanned to hot red anger at some accusations against you. News reports spoke of suicides from the pressure. It makes Columbine and other similar stories pale in comparison. The only difference is that words are mightier than bullets in some cases.

Is Schopenhauer right to be pessimistic about the future of humanity? Is there hope for a world so self-absorbed, each person living in one of the six billion odd individual world, of fantasy constructed using images borrowed from film and online games, living spaces? Is the dark world of "1984" merely postponed, controlled not by big brother, but by the "old boys club"? Will the red water and red sun described in Revelation a warning for the poison that we have been spewing into our living world? Will the new prophets of our culture, the revered economists, find a new measure to account for not only the wealth produced in today's economy, but also the hidden cost of ecological damage?

Germany began to find a solution through the urging of its Green Party by charging a form of Green Tax on many products with packaging etc. We need to do the same for those heavy SUVs and luxury vehicles that burn three four times the petroleum, not only at the pump, but also all the way back through the refinery and to the well. It is well know that the cost of production does not account for all the energy and values added to the process to create and deliver a product. That was the complain by Karl Marx against the capitalists. Although his solution was wrong, it does not mean his question was invalid. The Cold War merely postponed the day of reckoning when the capitalist economies of the world must face the truth of their own nemesis. Their success is poisoning the planet. Their wealth is destroying the means of production - the almost-free and essentially abundant resources they call commodity.

When the top five percent of humanity can find their way to balance on the side of light, of goodness, on the Solzhenitsen Line, and contemplate the wisdom within each and every one of their own hearts, to find the courage to change what they can change more capably than any other human in world history, when they can seek the wisdom of the Higher Power that has endowed them, through Grace, through the gifts of intellect, energy, determination, serendipity, and many other mysterious ways, and direct their lives to making the lives of the other six billions better, even by a little, then and only then, utopia is witin the reach of this generation.

Unlike Schopenhauer, I am an optimistic realist.