Ok no one has yet compiled a state-by-state ranking of self-inflicted brain damage for the United States, but if someone had, my guess is that it would be fairly close to these rankings:
wallethub.com: 2015’s States with the Best and Worst School Systems
In particular, my intuition is that the ranking for “safety” in the listings linked above is the one that would correlate the closest with self-inflicted brain damage.
By self-inflicted brain damage I am of course speaking on the theme of several of my posts recently: That of a society’s inflicting of brain-damage upon itself.
This inflicting of brain damage is perpetrated by certain individuals within the society, and is tolerated and allowed to happen by others.
There may be varying explanations for what lies behind the self-infliction of brain damage with societies, but I find Carl Sagan’s explanation of the destruction of the great Library of Alexandria to be very telling. To point:
Slavery – he mentions that slavery – described as a “cancer” of the ancient world, was one factor. Today what we have in America, the deliberate flooding into the country of 30 million illiterate, uneducated immigrants for the sake of providing cheap labor to the oligarchy in what amounts to a hit of crack for “the economy” – at the expense of the infliction of serious brain damage – not to mention ecological, intellectual, infrastructural, and other damage. America was steeped in slavery from early on, and the country has never and probably will never recover from it.
Following authority unquestioningly – I didn’t quote this in the previous post, but he mentions it as a serious danger threatening the survival of the human species. Its not just that, its that people follow along with each other in a kind of herd way of operating that is extremely destructive. There is a race to the lowest-common-denominator as evolution has basically failed in a massive way.
Corrupt, greedy, and ignorant leaders. He also mentions this as a serious threat to the survival of humanity. But I will just say that its not like its just an either-or thing on a big scale – every day in our broken communities the survival of humanity fails. The failure of human society takes place every day in a thousand small ways. Every time a person is exposed to brain-damaging violation committed by people in deliberate acts against communities, it is a failure of society and a failure of the human species. By the time it reaches a point of such extremity that there is a mass cry for change, it is far too late.
If you could look back from say 500 or 1,000 years in the future, I believe the path of humanity would be much clearer than what people see today. Today people are ridiculously muddled and confused. They cannot see history. They cannot see the place of their current society and their communities in the makeup of a historical progression which is going to go somewhere.
But if someone were able to look from a perspective many, many years in the future it would be clearer.
The problem with the human species right now – the problem threatening its survival to the very core – is a failure to evolve. The other problems occurring, gravely serious as they may be, are only offshoots of this one problem. Humans’ failing on a massive scale to evolve is the fundamental problem threatening not only the future of the human species but indeed of life on Earth itself. The devolution that is currently taking place with the human species is masked by what appears to be an increase in human awareness as the result the spread of information through mass media and the Internet.
Yet humans aren’t waking up to the problem, the failure of their evolution. They are living in delusion so severe that their world is literally collapsing around them and its like they don’t see it.
Evolving is not a feel-good type of thing. Its not something that happens because anyone thinks they are right, that their ideas are worthy or good. Evolution is something that has to be enacted. It has to be earned. It has to be created and actively shaped by humans. It requires power and strength.
It is supremely arrogant to think that just because a person or a collective entity ascribes to some ideal that they therefore can just sit back and do nothing to actually enact what is necessary to create a better destiny. That is a huge flaw that afflicts especially western peoples, people who have lived through the time of things like the “civil rights” movement, anti-war movements, etc. The price to be paid for such supreme arrogance is disaster on a vast scale when the failure to actually enact, to attain the realization of a different reality is manifest.
That’s not to say that evolution doesn’t involve things like inspiration, joy, laughter, etc. Those things are important and also essential. But without power, without active will, without discipline – without the yoking which is the same as the word “yoga” – humans will not evolve but devolve, as we are now witnessing in this time of great catastrophe.
Evolution will not occur by people sitting back in arrogance and self-righteousness, thinking their concepts are the best, while they utterly fail to take action to actually direct the course of their society in an intentional, conscious manner. And it certainly won’t occur by the actions steeped in extensive delusions about “values” that are devoid of actual wisdom which only serve to reinforce arrogance and delusion while accomplishing destruction.
Leave a Reply