Hopeful Thinking - Saturday, March 3, 2018 - Our Self-Improving World

     I have always held an instinctive belief that all shall be well. In both the planetary and human sense. It’s the source of my somewhat expansive optimism. As a kid I first heard people talking about “the end of the world.” While I don’t remember the circumstances, I know it struck me deeply. I right away had a very particular view and opinion of what it really meant.

    I don’t know if it was because I feared death as a child (I did) or because optimism was already a fixed part of my identity, but I immediately interpreted the so-called destruction of civilization, as a metaphor. Not a literal death, but a change.

It was long before 80s TV films like “The Day After” depicting the aftermath of a nuclear attack. Nor the dozens of apocalypse films that have increasingly surfaced afterward as the new millennia approached and the year 2012 loomed. Do an Internet search on “end of the world movies.” It doesn’t take a sociologist to see that we have been increasingly concerned about it. Real world subjects like the Mayan calendar, Nostradamus, and Biblical prophecies have all made us skittish.

It’s infected the culture at large. Witness the tremendous shift in the grab for resources. The closing of borders. The enhanced struggle for power. Search: doomsday shelters. It’s on our minds. Ever since the invention of the printing press we’ve been preparing ourselves.

Whether or not the prophecies are real, they appear to have been self-fulfilling. For whatever reason, we have declared this era in human history to be a time of shift and change. One could easily surmise that on even the subconscious level we’d be suspicious of the day when there would be too many people on this planet. Would we sink or swim? That is the ultimate question.

I think that’s what we’re really worrying about. But the flaw in our approach is that we have been comparing our needs of the future with our productivity levels of the past. We operate on a philosophy of not-enough-to-go-around. We forget that we are both clever and loving. And ingenious.

The real fortunes of today earned their money many decades ago. Thinking was different. The old approaches were still working. Those wise enough to earn their wealth were also wise enough to foresee this time of change and didn’t like it one bit. They instilled fear in us then because they were the ones who were afraid. Because of them we are all afraid now.

But we live in a self-improving world. One against which they are ultimately powerless.

I would deduce that for all intents and purposes we are in the prophesied end times right now. The apocalypse is among us. The great revealing is at hand.

It just doesn’t look like we thought it would.

To the world’s powers, for whom the threat of annihilation is all too real, the lights are being turned on in all the kitchens and the cockroaches are scurrying. They are spinning their words and backpedaling into a chasm.

It’s too late anyway for them. The decision has already been made. The world has seen its own light and met its neighbor. Hope is at the bottom of Pandora’s box. Because we can’t un-know one another now. We’ve seen each other. We’ve heard the stories. We’ve seen ourselves in them. There’s nothing anyone can do. Neither war nor disease can make us forget.

What would happen if someone suddenly turned off the Internet right now? Would we slip back into forgetfulness? No. What would happen if the entire electrical grid broke down? Would we forget what light is? No. There are too many of us now and too few of them. They can’t win.

We have already decided that this will be a peaceful world. And by hook as well as crook it is happening. Even the darkest figures of the world are playing into the hand of progress because they are galvanizing those who can now see what they’re up to. Even people we’ve always thought of as “good” are being seen for what they truly are. The #metoo movement would agree that the word apocalypse means unveiling.

Perhaps my thinking is flawed. Perhaps I am a fool for believing that all shall be well. It is a choice to live according to the principles and hopes of faith. I can’t prove to you if there is a God or not; my belief in It is purely my own. I have demonstrable faith in Its creation, however. I maintain unwavering trust in the wider humanity. Because it takes great effort to suppress, yet so little to set free.