There’s too much wrong and: We Tolerate It.

Pollution, population growth, wars, violence, failing economies, disease and joblessness; all bad and getting worse—yet we tolerate it. This confounds my thinking! I decided if there’s a way to explain this, I needed to find it. Eventually I understood, there are reasons for this detrimental behavior—and most of them may be classified by a single descriptor; irrationality.

Can I rightfully claim our behaviors are the result of irrational influences? Well, based on the way the vast majority of people, and animals, live on this planet I consider it irresponsible not to point out relevant characteristics. If you listen to what the experts say; psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, neurologists and so on—you formulate a model of the human mode of living. In the process of trying to understand this I found it has a lot to do with myriad weaknesses and flaws—in our psychology. We’re saddled with overwhelming, internal and external influences which, at least, modulate; who we are, how we think and what we do.

The bottom line is we can, in a rational sense, understand why we’re irrational. The reward of this is the opportunity to change our inappropriate behaviors in favor of other life-improving behaviors.

In the process of discovering for myself ‘what is wrong with us’ I started writing essays on anything which seems truly important. At some point along the way I decided it’s our responsibility to improve life for posterity; but to do this we must change! This is based on the notion that the choices made to date have caused the life conditions in our societies; and the same choices will continue to produce the same conditions. Most important, if we don’t like what has evolved and want to change it we have to learn to be different.

I am not an expert on any particular subject so I consult the experts to formulate some of the details in my writing. I choose not to write as if I’m trying to educate anyone on any particular aspect of science or art. I try to write from the perspective of another of the billions of people passing through this life carrying grave concerns about the way things are and the way they are going to be while my family and friends are trying to make their way.

I make minor excursions into; philosophy, psychology, anthropology, neuroscience, and history while trying to understand and explain why it is that we are struggling with the same problems as our ancient ancestors; war, disease, poverty, violence, hunger, exploitation, unfairness, inequality and so on. Yes, it’s still the same—we just have cell phones now. In my research I explore what I consider to be reasons for our irrational behaviors; immorality, free-will, culture, human nature and emotions and how this leads to our unacceptable living conditions. There are myriad forces impinging on our faculties sometimes completely paralyzing our ability to do better—as in the case of a negative emotional outburst.

I’ve heard people say we can’t do anything about the way things are—we just have to make the best of the world as it is. There are instances in history revealing the weakness in this argument. Even as recently as the last couple years we know of several countries overthrowing the oppressive regimes which have been responsible for the poor conditions many parents and grandparents had to contend with. Over time people have fought for equal rights regarding; gender, race, social and working class and sexual orientation. When something is truly worth having it’s worth fighting for.

I do have a goal; it is to fight for our children to have the right to a decent life. This will include all of us becoming active and responsible for the kind of world we are leaving for them. It includes learning new ways to educate and socialize so that the coming generations can look at the world with new eyes and answer problems and apply solutions we haven’t been able to thus far. I have no doubt we can do a whole lot better:

But, it won’t be by doing the same things our predecessors have done.