Everyday, current affair programs bombard us with stories and images of war, violence and generic human atrocities and quite frankly it is depressing. By my own admission I’m not an overtly optimistic individual and on more than one occasion it has been put to me that I look sad, and if pushed, then yes, I’d have to concur with such impressions and confess that I am not entirely happy; but it is a relative supposition. To be fair I bring about this alleged “sadness” unto myself, however, in all honesty can anyone truly say they are indelibly happy when confronted with the wretched futility of our own nature? For as long as I can remember there has been some conflict been aired across the media’s and this time is no different to the last. Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I don’t believe there has ever been a time that looked favourably upon the plight of humankind and I think this is enough cause to feel a little sad. I’m sure the sadness I feel at times is in response to the media coverage of our inherent lust towards destruction. A helpless shroud covers the entire populace when history marks not progression but the timeless dissolution between clans and tribes.

Perhaps I am more optimistic than I give myself credit for, because my mind keeps returning to the idea that, we as human beings, are better than the behaviours we may exhibit. I cannot help but believe that there has to be some sort of resolution to the blood lust we choose to savour, that there has to be some compromise or happy medium that can be achieved. Maybe all it is, is just wishful thinking. Perhaps the sadness I feel is attributable to the plain facts of a finite set of resources set against a backdrop of superfluous consumers.

Such an environment is not conducive to peaceable outcomes. I can get all high and mighty with ideological fancies about some utopia where a collective whole is reality but the reality is such that the opposite is true. One only need look at the natural order to gain some semblance of what is indeed true and the truth is that hierarchies and pecking orders exist and perhaps the unnatural view is to think a leveling of this order can exist. Its a bleak view for a higher order animal like humanity but try as we might, the likely hood that we are able to restructure the societal order like we shape the macro sphere of landscape is slim if not inconceivable.

It has been said and perhaps popularised by movies/documentaries like The Secret that there is abundance for everyone and the claim is probably not without a glimmer of truth, however the ideology is somewhat different to the reality in this current state. It would be a nice scenario…paradise on earth no less, if just by dreaming or praying to the universe that abundance will envelop the whole of humankind but like me it is easy to proselytise a utopia whilst sitting in the comfort of having been born in a relatively safe and stable environment of a wealthy and prosperous culture. The flaw, as I see it, with the abundance theory is not with the sweeping statement that there is abundance for everyone, because abundance is there for everyone to share, with that there can be no argument but the problem is that the abundance is positioned in specific locales. The specific locations containing the wealth and governed by different authorities creates a division of abundance and in an ideological perfect universe it would only be a matter of logistics for the universe to redirect the abundance to all and sundry but the universe has deemed a natural order appropriate also. There seems to be a conflict of interests here already. The ideology falls flat when we incorporate greed and power into the equation, which incidentally also seems to align itself with the hierarchy or natural order. So we have abundance for everyone but the control is not within the universes power, two or more sides are petitioning the universe for the right to control the abundance, hence an inevitable conflict arises and needs to be resolved somehow and apparently the only language that we are prepared to listen to, is that of violence.

As much as I’d like to envisage a world where abundance is distributed on an even platter, it is unlikely that such Utopian fantasy will materialise in my lifetime nor do I really foresee it happening in future generations either. Humanity it appears is still in an infantile state and the waring factions are more about tantrums than they are about enforcing some higher truth. Intellectually we have grown faster than we really have emotionally, in fact emotion is perhaps the root cause of our failing attempts at achieving world peace and striking out poverty and abuse. Historically we are in keeping with the human condition, although now that we have developed and fine tuned the killing machine the threat of extinction is a little greater than it has been. If nature calls for a clean state then it will be done. It’ll just start over with another attempt, we aren’t that special to think life won’t go on if we happen to disappear.