We must break this horrible cycle. Everyone has to do their share. No excuses.
The question is how? (Thanks to William who asked it.)
I won’t even attempt to say how. We can reach the how, as most other goals that man has set eyes on. But first, we need to be ready for the how. Not trying to be patronizing, people should get back to basics, as we seem to have gone adrift from our nature.
As Homo Sapiens (the wise man) nonetheless, we have the gift to understand the reality around us and be rational. By now, as we pretend to be living in the most developed civilization in history, there shouldn’t be any question about our human nature. However, there is.
Thus we are nearing the obstacle to reaching the how. It seems there has been a questioning of the very nature of the human over many decades, ignoring the virtues mentioned above, while increasingly (self)imposing the limits of materialism and nihilism. This has made people function at a low standard of self-expectation. In numbers, as with any network, it has been only reinforced and has resulted in an exponential lowering of the collective standards of expectation.
There seems to be a philosophical, hence a cultural and moral question. If we want to live up to the name of our species, we must individually strive to be its full expression, a freely rational and at the same time social individual. Let’s not kid ourselves, we are not even social, as that assumes care for others, civility, non-aggression. Obviously, we have plenty of aggression going around in society.
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| Erich Fromm |
We are born with a potential to be the best we can be – a homo sapiens. It is up to us how we will end up. There is nothing more valuable for a person than protecting and developing one’s humanity.
We need to revive and re-energize ourselves and each other with the values of humanity. If we start expecting more of humanity, and hence of ourselves and of others, we will have the “why”, so the “how” will be trivial.
“Madness is relentless. Reason must be stronger!” – Stefan Molyneux
Here is Stefan’s lucid reflection on the Barcelona attack:
Finally, the key question remains, how do we regain our humanity to raise our standard of individual and collective expectation? Human values are subverted and replaced with a nihilistic ideology that is best represented by postmodernism. A good start on the matter is to understand the underlying ideology behind this trend. The information in the book “Explaining Postmodernism” by prof. Dr. Stephen Hicks is a good read, available both as pdf and as an audiobook: