Our world society is heading down a very dangerous path at an alarming speed. As a collective people, we are rapidly losing the essence of collective Purpose. If each of us live without Purpose, we all live without Purpose, suffering the consequences together. Perhaps we are approaching the end of human history. If we are indeed a post-industrial, cyber-techno society where crass commercialism and personal gratification exceed our desire to love, share and live with greater Purpose, then we will receive what we have asked for: the finalization of our right to exist as a human race. This is a harsh indictment of ourselves and an unpleasant proposition to consider but the evidence of this possibility surrounds us.
We are now living in a world dominated by greed, instant gratification, and weak cultural values. We are losing our ability to live with moral consciousness and belief in our Purpose and our Higher Self. We work ourselves to exhaustion, then have little more to show for our efforts than mounting debts and consumer products that are obsolete the next year. We educate our children; then lament their inability to reason, much less read. We have removed the front porches on our homes where we used to converse, moving inside to play with our electronic toys.
We are destroying our environment for profit and then complain that our fish have died, our beaches are gone and our parks are overcrowded. We embrace technology like a religion, then lose our jobs to the same machines that we created. We advance our scientific knowledge of ourselves while watching our inner cities decay. We sit mindlessly in front of true confession reality shows rather than read books or create art. We use video games to babysit our children, then complain that they won’t communicate with us. We spend more money on prisons than universities; then wonder why our crime rates escalate.
We have become a people of paradoxes, a people without Purpose. It is indisputable that our problems have not been solved through advances in technology, science, medicine or government. We still pursue inner peace and happiness, pursuits that still evade us despite our progress in human engineering. Nothing has really changed with all the changes made to our Selves and the world in which we live.
The reason is simple: We have forgotten how to love, give, share, or live for higher causes than ourselves. We simply do not have a Purpose that extends beyond our own needs for comfort and personal satisfaction. We are not willing to give up ourselves for something that is infinitely more important than our gratification for the moment. Our children are becoming our greatest victims, and the world they inherit may not be the world we intended or wished for them. We are wasting our Purpose and our cultural values for our expedient desires of today. We are running out of time. But we have still time to change this.