We Have to Get Better

The writing has been on the wall for quite some time now -- that we can't simply continue to provide for the care of a population that continues to get worse, and need more enablers in that manner.

Undoubtedly, modern technology and medicine, can sustain life far beyond the point at which it would have long ago perished -- but is that the best use of that knowledge, or would it be better to apply that skill to improving the highest end of actualizations instead? Otherwise, the healthy and able are consumed entirely, in caring for the increasingly many, who merely exist -- without any quality of life anymore, including all their own most personal functions -- of eating and elimination, and little more beyond that besides exhibiting the most primitive "vital signs" -- not including any cognitive recognition of any distinctive life that identified them as human personalities.

A large part of it, is enabling those lifestyles -- as though it were still the primitive times in which the only use one had for prosperity and abundance, was its insatiable consumption -- of food, shelter, clothing, transportation (travel) -- without qualitative improvements beyond that.

And when one thoughtfully examines the great crises of these times -- those are the problems, disruptions and challenges of the modern era -- in obesity, real estate speculations and the resulting homelessness, the wastage of resources as fuel -- in highly consumptive lives. Meanwhile, there is no or little thought given, to creating more resources and reserves (capital), instead of depleting them -- ever more widely and equally. It was a bad idea when even a few could do it -- and not a better idea, when everyone else felt just as entitled to do the same.

But instead of simply answering "More," as the solution to every problem, an obviously better idea should be, "How can we do it differently?" That should be the end result of education and society (culture), and not simply, "How can we do more?" -- of what is turning out to be the problems and crises of the foreseeable future.

Of course there is an irresolvable problem as many more people keep getting worse, as many people live longer lives, and fewer die prematurely because of global wars, disease, persecutions, purges and famines -- but those are the opportunities for people also to get unprecedentedly better -- than they ever have been before -- and not just within the parameters of the old "normal."

Initially, new technologies make more possible -- but that serves to create the critical mass from which different and better, become the new imperatives -- and not just more of the old ways of doing things, whether it be education or health care in the old manner of needing it evermore. At some point, more of the old health care, has to morph into better health -- requiring less of the traditional health care. That is the difference between enabling and empowering.

"Enabling" requires more manpower and labor for problems that simply get worse -- while "empowering" means those old problems go away, because they're not enabled to continue -- and multiply out of control, and create evermore (high-paying) jobs to have to deal with them. Instead, a society awakens to realize they could do something better with those resources, time, energy and attention.

But the institutions exist primarily to defend that status quo, and its hierarchies of people who profit from it -- greatly, because they are conditioned to. They will insist that the problems are immutable and essential "human nature," that must not be violated -- all the while lamenting that more money should be funneled that way -- because the students are having a more difficult time learning than they ever had before -- because now there is so much more to learn, rather than less, or people can be sustained for longer at even more irrecoverable and hopeless conditions.

Human civilization advances when there are less rules to learn because the rules they do learn, are much more valuable, valid and versatile. Thus, one no longer has to learn a hundred or a thousand different truths (facts), but the one that implies and from which one can deduce the others -- as one really needs to -- and not just learn a thousand things for the day one will need to recall the one, which of course, is the old model (paradigm) of learning many so-called educators are still propagating as the same need as valuable as a hundred or a thousand years ago.

In fact, such people still insist that one has to learn all the old, before one can learn the new -- or the present state-of-the-art. If that were true, than one would first have to own and operate a Model T before one could board a space shuttle, had to have operated a hand-crank telephone in order to qualify for the latest iPhone/iPad, and had to attain the status of a "successful person" of the last century, in order to live life at its highest possibilities of actualization with all the knowledge and wisdom now available to everybody -- and not just the bureaucracies that controlled them for their own exclusive benefit previously.

That is the reality of these times crumbling before the eyes of the defenders of the status quo -- to their great bewilderment. Something terrible is happening to their old worldview, and something marvelous and wonderful is taking its place -- without their permission, knowledge, and control.