Comment I:
Morbidity

Posted 3 March 2002, 12.05 am by Acheron

It has been said that there are two inevitabilities to life: death and taxes. On a somewhat broader scale, those two sad occurrences are extinction and oppression.

Ignoring, for the moment, our society's self-destructive practices, it is a simple scientific truth that the entropic dissipation of concentrated energy (ie: the burning out of our sun) means that far off in the distant future, humanity will be extinct. Mind you, I'm sure we'll manage to detonate a very large bomb soon and save Mother Nature a few years.

Secondly, the organization of humanity into society is intrinsically linked to the oppression of its less-fortunate members. People want luxury, so they abuse their given/taken power to get said luxury. An equal standard of living for all of the world's many citizens would of course mean poverty for all, by Western standards.

Given these two very unfortunate truths, of which one is metaphysical and the other very tangible, individuals tend to act in one of three ways:

i. Ignorance.

We've all heard tell of Huxley's Soma, and I'm sure we've all retired from a hard day only to, "turn on and tune out." I sometimes wonder how people in the third world cope with their depressing situations (famine, wars, etc.) and then I remember that Africa is in the middle of an AIDS epidemic. At least the ignorant are happy.

ii. Elevation.

Thank you, Plato. Buddhists, Taoists, and goths all around just love to wax philosophical about everything intangible. We're the sort who go off and study Art History in university and shake our heads wistfully at the burning of the library of Alexandria. We still get upset talking about how young Keats was when he died. Net result: eyeliner sales skyrocket among young men.

iii. Action.

On the disgusting end of the spectrum there are those who wail out against economic practices they don't understand by knocking over police fences in Quebec city. On the positive end of the spectrum there are politicians, teachers, and lawyers - educated, hard-working professionals attempting to educate and influence society and its controlling forces. Unfortunately, nobody wants to stop chopping down sequoia trees if it means they can't have two-ply toilet paper.

Where does this leave us? In a collapsing world, rife with wars, terrorism, starvation, extiction, oppression, and a skyrocketing suicide rate throughout the Western world.

Comment II:

Your piece reminds me of William's Golding essay/short story "Thinking as a hobby" with its 3 levels of thinking.
Level 1 thinking - a blind ignorance; mob mentality
Level 2 thinking - higher critical thinking yet destructive
Level 3 thinking - not only to realize there is a problem, but to take action.

Although, you're not talking about the exact same thing, it's interesting that your three possibilites, similar to Golding's, are inversely valued.