Excerpt
BUILDING A BETTER WORLD
We have become a nation of sleepwalkers. We look around at the world's
problems and wish they would go away, but they stubbornly persist despite
our most heartfelt desires. So we end up living in a kind of ethical
haze. It's not that people are bad or that evil is winning some kind of
eternal battle. The vast majority of us have good intentions when we go
about our daily lives. It's that we have been lulled into a sense of
complacency around the world's problems, like they are less than real
occurrences so we react similar to how we might normalize strange events
that occur while we're in the middle of a dream. We are stuck in our
daily routines, living on auto-pilot when it comes to the rest of the
world. As we withdraw, we see our society rushing aimlessly toward an
unknown future without any sense of morality or conscious purpose to
direct it. Awash in a sea of knowledge, we lack the wisdom to guide our
own destiny.
So what happened? How did we become this cynical? Simply put, our modern
society manufactures cynicism. Everyday we are bombarded with media
reports, both locally focused and from around the globe, of crime,
disaster, conflict, scandal - anything dark and sensational enough to
generate a headline. The stories are presented in a manner that is
usually too brief to gain any meaningful understanding of the problems
and that lacks any options for us to contribute in any significant way to
their resolution. These waves of negative imagery wash over us
relentlessly as we try to keep up with what's happening in the world
around us. Like sponges, we absorb this negativity, and it spills over
into how we look at and, ultimately, how we act or fail to act in the
world.
THE CYCLE OF CYNICISM
1. Finding out about a problem
2. Wanting to do something to help
3. Not seeing how you can help
4. Not doing anything about it
5. Feeling sad, powerless, angry
6. Deciding that nothing can be done
7. Begin shutting down
8. Wanting to know less about problems
(Repeat until apathy results.)
The Cycle Of Cynicism (see above) begins when we first find out about a
social problem through the media. When we initially recognize that others
are suffering, our immediate reaction is to want the suffering to stop.
We even wonder if there is anything that we might be able to do to help.
When no viable avenues for action are presented, and we fail to generate
any ourselves we end up feeling powerless to help the suffering we have
just witnessed. This knowledge that others are suffering and we can do
nothing to stop it saddens us. We may become angry and blame people in
positions of power for not doing anything to stop it either. We feel that
we are good people, but we see an injustice and we don't do anything
about it. In the end we reconcile this dissonance by accepting that
perhaps nothing can be done; the problems are too deeply rooted and we
are powerless to change them. We then initiate process of slowly numbing
ourselves to the suffering, and because knowing this kind of information
about the world only results in taking on negative emotions, we subtly
begin to avoid finding out about the suffering in the first place. Over
time we end up shutting out most of our society's social problems and
retreating further and further into our own insular personal lives. We
become apathetic.
THE CYCLE OF HOPE
1. Taking personal responsibility for being a good person
2. Creating a vision of a better world based on your values
3. Seeking out quality information about the world's problems
4. Discovering practical options for action
5. Acting in line with your values
(Repeat until better world results.)
The $64,000 question now turns out to be, how do we break out of this
cycle of cynicism? First, we must stop blaming others for not doing
anything and begin to take personal responsibility for being good people
in the world. No one else can do it for us. We need to seek out
information about our world's problems that provides us with a basic
understanding of what's going on as well as a variety of options for
action. We have to generate a form of practical idealism based on
well-informed actions that are accessible to all of us and that actually
make a difference in the world. Each of us must decide what we want our
lives to stand for, how we can uniquely contribute to a better world. By
thinking about our lives in terms of what we can provide for the next
generations rather than we can take for ourselves in this lifetime, we
are choosing to create our own destiny instead of leaving our children's
future up for grabs.
As a society we must reconnect to a set of values that re-ignite our
collective humanity so that it burns bright within each of us. No society
survives for very long without a moral compass to guide its evolution and
progress, especially not one as powerful and rapidly changing as our own.
We need to bring our values back onto center stage as a people. We must
consciously choose a set of core values that every one of us can embrace
despite our many differences-values like compassion, freedom, equality,
justice, sustainability, democracy, community, and tolerance. Then we
have to go about deliberately building our society as a place that
increasingly reflects and nurtures the growth of these values in the
world. We create this world by having each of us individually choose to
live and act in ways that more closely reflect our own personal values
and those values we share as a people. We must begin by creating a vision
of a better world.