April 10th, 2007

There is no thing in this world quite so hopeful as the assertion that "we don't have to live this way".

I mean, we humans are quite convinced these days that we are marching to our collective environmental doom posthaste. And, certainly, the preponderance of the evidence shown to us on television, on the radio, in magazines, and even in movies is quite overwhelming: We are wrecking our planet, and endangering ourselves too.

The danger we perceive is resource-based, of course. I mean, let's assume the world heats up 2 degrees in the next 100 years. Droughts, cataclysmic weather, loss of valuable (and well-developed) coastal lands will all change how we live: We will have to compete for fewer resources. Oh, and in case you weren't aware, there are more and more of us every year. At the time of writing this (April 2007), I just checked an online population counter: we're closing in on 7 billion people. Yikes. That's a lot of people and most of us are competitive enough that we wouldn't willingly give up that last morsel of food no matter how hungry the other guy was. (1)

So we face a dreary future looking a bit like Mad Max perhaps, or maybe just a whole bunch of overheated violent hungry people, and we think, "We are so awful! We humans have seriously screwed up this planet, and there is nothing we can do about it except wring our blood-soaked hands and cry!"

It's an interesting comment on human psychology that the bulk of us are either strung out in desperation about how awful we must be, or we are in heavy denial of those feelings (and dancing on the thin ice). But, regardless of whether we are soul-searching and agonizing in self-loathing angst, or we are overcompensating and reveling in our consumptive economic resource-based orgy of Western Civilization's party-hearty rock-'til-ya-drop frenzy, we are all convinced (overtly or deep down) that There is Something Wrong With Us.

But there is a third group: a very few folks dotting the landscape here and there who are not self-flagellating and who aren't whooping and hollering in orgiastic denial: They, rather quietly, assert that "we don't have to live this way" and they mean it. By gosh, perhaps they are even right. I don't know personally, since I am one of the "we humans are awful" crowd myself.

(Right, and so knowing which of the three I belong to, you must know that it is going to flavour anything I say about the "better way" folks.)

Frankly, you have to be careful when you find one of these "prophets", as you inevitably will from time to time. They are scarcer than we generally think. A lot of so-called prophets are just regular cynics with a serious case of denial—those are, generally speaking, the preachy little prophets ("emissary prophets"). And a lot of us pause to listen to the Better Way that they seem to have an insider's knowledge of. Their serenity and peace that they exude look pretty good from our side of that fence, and so we kind of get seduced by it. But here is the problem: Some might really be onto something, the way Gandhi or Muhammad or, I don't know, say, Zoroaster demonstrated by living a certain way ("exemplar prophets"), but some might be big-time religious lecturing assholes with an empire built from donations made by an ocean of little old ladies, and some might live a "pious" example while quietly preparing their small but fervent group of followers to wage war with the local police force. You just don't know, and though we might think we are ready to identify the cult leaders like David Koresh or Charles Manson, we are all at least a tiny bit susceptible. And that susceptibility is what makes us so adamantly (violently) against cult leaders: Nothing enrages us more than the possibility that it could've been us that were the suckers.

So we stop trusting the prophets, and considering modern history that's probably a good thing. But it also traps us into that despair or that denial that "there's something fundamentally wrong with us humans" and that there is no way out of the headlong rush into oblivion.

And, I think, the really truly sad part is that the real, true prophets who could say or show a thing or two about how to live without that despair or denial the most of us currently labour under really do walk among us ... but we can't trust them enough to believe them.

(1) But that may never really be a problem. I can't explain how, exactly, but we humans seem really good at making food. Hell, we Westerners have so much of it we are growing distinctly portly!

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