So now that we’ve grown up, and started to work for money, we finally start to ask ourselves: Wherefore should we live then? We see most people choose to live for children, and some choose to live for themselves instead. The former have children and no money, the latter have money to spend and no children.
Now, these both ways to live life could not stop the deterioration of Western societies, which started in (say) the mid 1990’s and is in good full swing as of 2011. It’s not the technichal challenges of more scarce resources that we face, or the dangers of unregulated greed (in the financial markets and at home). The real, real problem is that in a land of Cockaigne like this, parents can never succeed to transfer their builder mindset (of postponed consumption, investment, hope, betterment) to their children and grandchildren. These will find out that near everything can be had without work, and will get too comfortable to even be interested, to desire to learn, and to be creative. It’s bad with the children and worse with the grandchildren. Call it decadence.
Now what? Let’s doubt that taking part in decadence is never a life lived for what’s adequate, whether you have children more decadent than you, or no children, being decadent yourself. Instead, there has to be a life to be lived against decadence. Successfully. What do we need for that?
The new, new frontier. The US could only start to become decadent where the frontier for settlement had passed, leaving civilization, but without vision and without tasks. Of course, people found something to improve and to do during some of the following generations, but finally even that faded. There was something like a last try to remedy this by calling the race for the moon the “new frontier”. Nice try, but itself influenced by decadence: Is space travelling really the first thing that comes to mind when you think of “task” and “vision”?
What we need is the new, new frontiere. And then the new, new, new one. And so on. We need eternal pioneering. Look around and see that the world is in nearly no place as it should be. Sahara is a desert, the Congo struck by malaria, all of Africa by Aids, and much of the world by wrong belief systems. Just for the start. And we Westerners dare to say we see no tasks at hand, when questioning ourselves how to recreate vision and zeal in our society, or when questioning ourselves what to do with the >20% jobless in southern Europe? And then people dare to get on the idea that adding another child or two or three to already 7 000 000 000 people on Earth is a proper reason to live for, even though its more-than-apparent that even more people will even intensify the problems and resource conflicts on this planet?
Let’s get practical: we know how to do military operations, with respect to human resources. People get “deployed” in groups of several hundreds to some battlefield overseas, for some 6-8 months maybe. Then they are exchanged by a new group, and themselves go back to their home country to refresh and prepare again for their next deployment in another 6-8 months. Let’s take this over to all kinds of development aid. Because this is attributing the right role to civilization and homes: a place of refreshment and preparation for your “mission”.
Specifically, I propose to create settlements of ca. 4000 people, who travel to overseas development assistance deployments in groups of 1000. As this is no military operation, this can and should include the whole families (children can get schooled underway). The people at home would work to support them, from logistics to medical care etc.. As in military deployments, there will have to be like 4-5 (minimum) immediate support people behind everybody on a mission, and even more so working for money for these missions. But in any case, everybody’s goal should be to go on deployment (and if only for 6 in 36 months), being the reward for year-long support work.
Some ideas for specific missions:
- Re-afforest the whole of Sahara. Yea, we had that above. Just plant the trees, it’s good for the planet 🙂
- Build some big islands, or enlarge others. Having more land in nice climate is always a good thing. Why, for heaven’s sake, would people want to live in Siberia while there’s an island waiting for them?
- Eradicate AIDS.
- Eradicate malaria.
- Eradicate hemorrhagic fevers. And all those other infection sicknesses.
- We want the rain forest back where it was!
- We want whales back, and the Indian elephant in big numbers, and all these other lovely creatures. Isn’t it somewhat … heavily self-conceited, that we allow 7 billion humans on Earth and reduced many of the other creatures to just some thousands per species?
- Yea and finally, once we repaired and tidied up the Earth, there are other planets to travel to. Yet, first things first!
Remember what the Lord God said after the deluge: spread and multiply and fill the Earth. But Josephus says, the people wanted to stay together in one location, building Babylon and its towever as their central collection point. Yet God wanted them to go and colonize the Earth, he wanted them to pioneer – maybe because of the danger of rapid decadence, should they stay together in all their civilization? So he had to mix up their language …
Pioneering never ends. It must not end, as it’s a crucial ingredient for human mental health.
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