97. END AND BEGINNING

Imagine driving on a mountain road, cruising right along enjoying the scenery. As you break over the crest of a hill the road takes a hairpin turn. Unable to react in time, you go tumbling down the mountainside. When you awaken, you find yourself in a hospital at the foot of the mountain. You're in the intensive care unit plugged into IV bags and monitors alongside other wreck victims. How relieved you are that medical technology is there to put you back together.
 
When your wits return you look out the window and see heavy equipment shoring up the hillside that you and others have excavated rolling down the slope. Looking down the street you can see numerous wrecked vehicles behind tow trucks all lined up waiting for repair. It's amazing what mechanics are capable of these days.
 
You will have a long expensive recovery and your new car was nearly totaled. But you have insurance and there are special government programs to cover the rest. If that fails, there are fleets of attorneys who will sue the hospitals and garages. Sure, taxes are high, but social programs are the only right thing to do for all the victims who keep cascading over the cliff.
 
Nobody is redesigning the road at the top of the hill, changing the speed limit, placing warning signs, or erecting crash barriers on the hairpin turn. All the money and resources are being consumed down at the bottom repairing the damage. Besides, if no more cars came crashing down the cliff, the garages and hospitals would go belly-up, people would lose jobs, and politicians would not have causes they needed more taxes for. Why, my goodness, a whole way of life would be changed. Can't have that.
 
Such a scenario may seem ridiculous. Surely, people couldn't be that shortsighted. But they are, only on a grander scale. The whole world is beset with problems that aren't getting fixed. The lion roaring at the door catches our attention but the termites gnawing in the walls are ignored. We just keep attempting repair after the fact.
 
Health, peace, the environment, economics, society, and politics are all cars tumbling off cliffs. At the bottom of the hill are political demagoguery, symptom-based medicine, environmental disregard, socialism, scientific and religious close-mindedness, capitalism without conscience, functional illiteracy (people can read and write but either don't do it or do it only for fun), dependency, and bigotry. We exert our best technology and drain resources to apply Band-Aids. Status quo is protected, short term gain prioritized, desire rules as king over reality, and real solutions go by the wayside.
 
This sad state of affairs creates enough bad news to gladden the heart of any prophet of doom. As much as it may fill us with despair, it is nothing new. Notice how well Gandhi's seven deadly sins sum it up:
 
Politics without principle
Wealth without work
Commerce without morality
Education without character
Pleasure without conscience
Science without humanity
Worship without sacrifice
 
As bad as things may seem, there are glimmers of hope here and there. Love, compassion, heroism, and intelligence can be found. Unfortunately rationality is too often suffocated by the ever-present drone of the closed-minded masses, the enticing rattle of modern-age trinkets, the grip of deep-seated unexamined beliefs, and a greedy and selfish few who always seem to have far too much influence.
 
Although we may sense that there must be solutions, we may feel too insignificant to make a difference and then allow ourselves to be swept along in the system. If we have permitted that system to influence us to any extent we will also have adopted at least some elements of the materialistic philosophy. Determinism, relativism, and fatalism are the most insidious of its irrational creeds and foster pessimistic, cynical, and hopeless people who have become like lands with no harbors.
 
The companion volume on the "Big Questions" will root out and expose the nefarious materialistic philosophy as the pretender of truth it is. There it will be proven quite conclusively that we are not mere matter and that the choices we make and the efforts we put forth to be better people are important, even central to our life experience. But that is a long story and you need to learn about it from the beginning by reading that book. For now, at least leave room for suspicion that you are more than a machine and are not confined or doomed to its hapless machinations.
 
As bleak as things may seem at times, we must realize that most of the woes that threaten or befall us are of our doing. We are our own worst enemies. But when we come to understand that every single bad idea that visits misery on the world begins with a single person, we should also realize that good ideas can begin the same way. No beneficial change has ever occurred that did not begin with an idea, from one person, who was willing to insist that it happen. Any one of us can be such a person. We can follow or we can lead. Following will only get us to where we are going.
 
Humankind has the power to safely prevent and reverse most disease (but chooses not to), eliminate hunger (though we haven't), harness all the clean and renewable power we need from sun, wind, waves, chemistry, and geothermal (yet we don't), achieve peace (we fail to), and destroy all life (well on our way). A world of beauty, bounty, health, compassion, love, and peace is mere decisions away.
 
Such a paradise may seem fitting only for hope or prayer, but the dream is entirely within the realm of possibility. All that is necessary is to come to the understanding that such a new world is not something we purchase or that can be given to us. Its potential is not out there somewhere; it is within. We find it by committing to truth, daring to be 'wrong' by departing from the crowd, and pursuing truth using the SOLVER principles: Self-responsibility, Open thinking, Long view, Virtue, Evidence, and Reason. When this is done—when we live life as if thinking matters—the wonderful possibilities are without limit.
 
By way of reminder, a special website is in place for you to ask questions, make comments, and view any updates on the topics in these books. Go to: asifthinkingmatters.com