Don’t Look Back?

We are witnesses to, as well as participants in an extraordinary set of circumstances as the much-touted end times fantasy becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy under the mandate of the greedy and ignorant (or wilfully malicious) managers of the world’s resources. This mythomania, based on what might likely have been men of ancient times with an agenda (more likely a set of agendas) so powerful that it persists to this day and continues to cloud minds all over the planet. Hence, we’re seeing a degradation of our living space that has already become fatal to thousands of species, and which threatens the existence of the rest of life on Earth. Certainly, there is much evidence of bad behaviour in many iterations of our current societies around the world, but nowhere is there more rampant corruption, greed and destructiveness than in the managerial levels, amongst those who would pass themselves off as the governors, including the puppet masters we rarely glimpse. It is a temptation to contemplate at great length the breadth and depth of the destruction being wrought on both our physical and social living spaces and, like Lot’s wife, to be come transfixed to the point of paralysis. There is a balance between being aware and being self-preserving, and a big part of bringing that balance into something constructive is to find what looks like a path forward, a manner of addressing crisis in a way that might produce results that help to redress some of the wrong being done.

Myths can be wondrous if we remember that they are metaphoric and can see current parallels. For instance, the Tower of Babel has some interesting current applications in the different levels of jargon that haunt the professional and political spheres, as well as the consistent failure of groups in conflict to analyze the roots of their conflict with an eye to stepping back from the brink of destruction. Of course, the destruction serves the interests of some, so the likelihood of finding clarity is considerably reduced and the probability of mayhem is greatly enhanced.

The story of Pandora’s Box is another tale that has serious implications for humanity in an age where we continue to unleash all manner of technology on ourselves without proper consideration of possible downstream toxicity. GMO tech is one of my favourite targets as everything that could go wrong with them appears to be doing so in a Murphian dystopian unravelling. We are also suffering from addiction to the same fossil fuels that seemed to make us so comfortable for the last dozen decades. Much of this is a result of doing what we can do instead of what we ought to do because it’s easier and more profitable (we can make it so) than working on the pressing problems of over-population, starvation, disease, degradation of the environment and whole societies based on inequity.