Is the World Floundering or Has She a Vision?

• Main Author: Ashok Natarajan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Risk Institute, Trieste- Geneva 2015-05-01
• Series: Cadmus
• Online Access: http://www.cadmusjournal.org/article/volume-2/issue-4-part-1/world-floundering-or-has-she-vision
• ISSN: 2038-5242; 2038-5250

To all appearances the world seems to be floundering without leadership, direction or even a clear formulation of goals and processes. Yet, paradoxically, amidst the apparent chaos and confusion, evolutionary patterns of advance somehow seem to emerge, universal values become ever more prevalent and powerful as deep drivers and determinates, a more than conventional wisdom seems to guide situations where conventional wisdom is stymied or blinded by dogma and superstition, and susceptible ignorant masses sooner or later choose a course that leads to the future rather than back to the past. This progressive movement is far from steady and often interspersed with retrograde steps and descends into utter folly and vicious violence, but all the same a direction seems to emerge that defies the expectations of scientific projections and doomsday prophets. Despite our adoration of rationality, irrationality prevails even in the halls of knowledge. Bursts of extraordinary creativity follow episodes of suicidal stupidity. Humanity’s predilection to self-destruction exists side by side with a serendipitous capacity for creativity and coming to our senses just in the nick of time to avert calamity. Pessimists decry the negative tendency. Optimists affirm the positive. None seem able to discern the pattern or process by which challenges become opportunities and imminent disaster is transmuted into progress. A key to deciphering this enigma lies in the invisible, yet to be realized potentials of the individual and society. This clumsy, costly, painful process is the mark of a still largely unconscious species struggling to discover its raison d’être and the secret of conscious evolution. Utopian ideals discredited by a world disillusioned by false promises exhibit a remarkable regenerative power to advance toward unseen goals. An unrealized vision founded on universal values guides us toward an inevitable destiny we have yet to conceive. Those seed values represent the quintessence of wisdom for humanity’s survival, development and future evolution.