I have been seeing the crisis of the world, aside from numerous skirmishes of politics and battlefields, as predominantly one of climate change, which no doubt remains the greatest physical threat to humanity, to say nothing of so many other species.
But recently I have begun to perceive a greater threat - mental illness. Not the mental illness of those who know they are suffering, but a far wider mental malaise afflicting the whole human race. No doubt it has always been there, but recent advances of technology and international power, have amplified this disease.
Put simply, people can no longer think straight. The human mind has turned upon itself, and is eating itself. Increasingly, I am seeing this as a kind of mental virus. The question then, becomes how can one counter its effect?
The problem is that this illness is extremely clever. One has a choice to disengage, but that's not an option in the long term, as it will surround and flood us all. The other choice is to defeat it at its own game, but that requires a lot of intensive discourse, and the illness is ready for that - it is not amenable to reason. Another choice is to use force, and yet the illness is asking for violence to be done against it in order to prove its claims.
Certainly, in those only mildly infected, a call to sanity and sobriety can bring a person back from the brink. But it's feeding tentacles never surrender, and fight must be conducted repeatedly. The only fail safe method to break its hold on the individual and collective mind, is the crushing blow of material reality through the smoke screen. Unfortunately, that option is not always available.
This has historical precedence, and humanity's only saviour, oddly, has been overwhelmingly destructive war. The advent of global peace has created a fertile space for the festering of insanity. On a community or individual level, the only tried and tested cure has been the blunt assault of the brick wall of reality. I guess, that's why we came to this planet in the first place.
But I'm not happy with this brutal cure - there must be another method of cleansing the human mind.
