Why is the world the way it is? The world does not really have to be the way it is - it is not predestined, despite the apparent, conventional wisdom view.
Why is there constant war? The warring of religious beliefs, the war against fascism, the cold war, the various interminable regional wars like Vietnam, Korea, the Israel/Palestinian conflict, Bosnia, Sudan, Iraq/Afghanistan, now the ongoing 'war on terror'?
Why, with all the knowledge, wealth and technological advances of science and medicine, is there still demonstrable injustice throughout the world; why are there still millions of people in poverty, ill-health and educational ignorance?
Why is there such a stark and growing disparity in inequality and wealth; multi-billionaires living alongside homeless people and families struggling daily with debt?
Why is the democratic system, now the predominant worldwide ideology, such an authoritarian, hierarchical, elitist system?
Why is the world completely hooked on money, power, mass entertainment, celebrity and status? What has caused all this?
A facile explanation, of course, is that the world is what it is because it is what it is. It is human nature.
But then the reasonable question to ask is: why is human nature the way it is?
In the technological world, if something goes wrong with your car, for instance, then you immediately set out to determine the cause of the problem. Similarly, if you develop a health problem, the rational and logical approach is, where possible, to determine the cause or seek medical expertise to find this cause so that you can effectively treat it. If one doesn’t take this first simple step one obviously cannot even start to resolve the problem at hand. This is not rocket science.
In the psychological realm however, this first principle, astonishingly, simply does not apply.
Take war as an example. Military conflict is universally regarded as an inevitable activity of man. There are very few people in the world who reject war per se. We adopt a consensual view on this and all other basic subjects. There is great safety in thinking in groups; there are very few people who think (so-called) ‘outside the box’ - which in the actual scheme of things is not thinking outside the group at all, when you really look at it, it’s just an attempt at minor reform around the edges.
Wars are cleverly justified for a range of reasons, which usually boil down in one way or another to ‘national security,’ which is simply individual security on a national scale. As far as its ultimate origins or root cause is concerned, many reasons are put forward as explanations - political, nationalistic, religious, economic reasons. But all these issues themselves have a first cause, yet this first cause is not even discussed by the individual, media organizations, or the public, let alone investigated in depth. It is obvious that the political, economic and religious structures of the world are put together entirely by the human mind. It is the mind that is behind all our actions, which on a relationship level brings on conflict and anger, and on a social, national and global scale brings about war.
Take also climate change. The thrust of current, majority scientific thought states it is caused by human activity (which still has not been definitively proven) - so what is the main cause of that? Obviously, the bulk of CO2 emissions come from the oil and coal industry -- oil is the most profitable business in the world, with a strong historical connection to the coal industry. (The largest oil company, ExxonMobil, is also the world's largest, most profitable, publicly traded corporation.) These global industries, which have over-exploited the Earth’s natural resources, now prop up the entire economic system as it stands at the expense of viable, sustainable, renewable energy resources - solar, wind and geothermal power, amongst others; all this is part of a system of sustainable ecology. (Even if human-caused climate change is incorrect, the fact of rampant exploitation of the world's resources for private profit still stands.) These renewable ecological resources only require policy priority from politicians and businessmen to become the new world standard.
This whole capitalistic system, which underpins all democracies throughout the world, is founded on incentive, which in its essentials amounts to the reward and punishment system upon which society is based. Without sufficient incentive, there is no consequent drive by people to create, to succeed, to build, to reform, and to change. This drive is aggressive and ultimately ruinous competition, both between individuals and between nations. Nothing is done because it is intrinsically right to do it; competitive action is taken only when there is sufficient reward at the end. In democracy, currently the world’s ruling ideology, this incentive is called private profit, and it rules everything, along with the 'National Interest,' which is the never-ending search for state security that doesn't exist.
This overarching private profit principle has demonstrably proved to be vastly inequitable. Capitalism as a social system is essentially founded on comparison, as well as rank exploitation of both human beings and nature. There will always be some more clever at competing and exploiting people than others, more motivated to succeed, more intellectually adept, so social inequity is inevitable if the overarching principle of personal gain rules. Self-interest is, of course, the primary activity of the self, which knows no other way.
This competitive drive for 'progress' and profit is simply human greed, but greed is a subject that is best avoided in polite company. It is a given. So you cannot say that the entire society is founded on greed and fear. The word is cleverly disguised by euphemisms, such as the stock market term previously in vogue: ‘irrational exuberance’.
Now of course, the results of that greed and fear are to be plainly seen in the current financial ructions, where the lender of last resort - the taxpayer - has to step in to save the financial system from the greed of the bankers and businessmen, in their race for ever greater private profit, at the expense of the sustainability of the overall human race.
In fact, society as a whole regards greed as good: it is the great motivator, the enemy to indolence, poverty and stagnation, as exemplified by the following, portrayed prominently in popular culture, now subtly imbedded in the zeitgeist:
"The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed -- for lack of a better word -- is good.
Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms -- greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge -- has marked the upward surge of mankind."
These are, of course, the noted lines from the 1987 movie: Wall Street. Although the film itself is fiction, this passage was derived from an actual speech given by the noted 1980s Wall Street arbitrageur, Ivan Boesky, in which he extolled the role of greed in society.
Like the poor, as the biblical saying goes, greed has always been with us and will always be with us, it is the accepted norm. Being slaves to the ‘herd instinct’ and dutifully conforming to group-think, we condone and justify this greed and the social mores behind it; we accept it uncritically, mostly without even thinking. This mindset blocks any meaningful investigation into possible change in the first instance.
Greed in fact is the underlying principle behind Adam Smith's "hidden hand":
the notion that individual self-interest in commerce will be to the overall benefit of society as a whole. This whole treatise, the pre-eminent work even today of all economics, thus condones greed as the beneficial underpinning of all social activity arising from business.
Hence a major philosopher has laid out the accepted foundation stone of selfishness and inequality as the paradigm for the following generations of the human race.
This greed now threatens the entire global, financial, economic system of free enterprise.
Likewise, tradition and experience tells us that the human mind cannot be changed, it was ever thus and it will ever be. There are apparent properties, faculties, traits of the human mind that appear completely intrinsic to it. The term we have for this is, again, human nature. Everyone knows, or assumes, or has been told, or has concluded, that you can’t change human nature. Our parents, our teachers, our peers and our social authorities have all told us this in so many ways; it is an immutable, inviolable reality of life.
It’s a given, it is what it is. That’s why when someone comes along and talks for sixty years about changing our very basic ‘human nature’, which includes radically changing all of society, an inbuilt suspicion subtly arises in our minds. This goes against everything we have been brought up to believe in; it is to our minds, as we term it, ‘counter-intuitive’. Pointedly, there are very few people in the world who actually see that the present society is corrupt and failing, so why change something that is basically functioning correctly, with only a few outstanding problems at the margins?
Moreover, the man had an intention to free everyone from their conditioning, to thus change the world. This made us even more suspicious, skeptical.
Is this deeply ingrained and apparently innate skepticism the first cause to the impediment to actual listening? That is, have we ever actually listened to the talks of this man, without any conclusions, choice, or mindset whatsoever? Or have we been distracted by the knee-jerk reactions and desires of thought, of the "me," based entirely on our memories and experiences of the past?
So then, what is the first cause - that is, the root cause, not an incidental cause - behind all these global issues and all of humanity's problems?
Thought.
The thought that has invented everything: from gods, to religions, philosophies, beliefs, theories, superstitions, stories, illusions, fairytales and myths.
It’s special, grand narrative invention - the supreme idea of the separate self.
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