I think it’s fair to say that countries no longer dream of self-sufficiency. The idea that one country, however vast and however developed, can provide for all its needs by itself is not only unrealistic, but also very dangerous to any country that tries to implement it. The price such a country would pay is horrendous. At the same time, interdependence has also done a lot of harm, shifting jobs and industries from some countries to others, and depleting job opportunities in countries that suffered from job migration. This process, of growing entanglement and interdependence, is irreversible. However, if we play our cards right, we will benefit from its advantages and avoid its harms.
The first, and most important point to understand is that our growing entanglement is a goal oriented process, at the end of which we will all take care of each other and no one will need to worry about anything. To understand how this is possible, think of our planet as the home, where all of humanity lives. There is plenty of food in our home. In fact, there is so much food that we trash half of it because we cannot eat it all. There are also enough clothes to dress everyone, enough energy to provide everyone with heating in the winter and cooling in the summer, and enough money to pay for everyone’s education, health care, housing, and even entertainment.
Nevertheless, many people in our global home are starving, many have no clean water, many are sick and have no health care, and many more lack proper education. Why? Because we do not care about each other, and because we do not care, we also do not share. In other words, the problem is not one of production, but one of distribution, which stems from our alienation. And because we treat each other like aliens, the result is competition and destruction instead of complementation and construction.
Yet, there is a reason why we treat each other so appallingly. The more we evolve, the more egoistic we become. You would expect egoism to drive us apart from each other, but it actually does the opposite. Because we are growing increasingly selfish, we want to benefit from one another, use one another, enjoy not only what we have, but also the knowledge that we have more than others. Our desire to be superior to others has become our prime pleasure, and it impels us to live in societies where we can compete and defeat one another. It turns out that our egos are pushing us to live together, yet hate each other, and that atmosphere is toxic. This is why our house, Planet Earth, is in such disarray.
There is even worse news than the growth of our egos: They keep growing and there is no way to reverse the process. In other words, we are destined to become increasingly entangled until, eventually—unless we find a way out of the catch—we will destroy ourselves.
However, as I said in the beginning, we have more cards to play than we have used so far. If we play them right, we will be victorious.
The first card we need to play is awareness. So far, we have not been aware that we are so completely dominated by our own egos. We also didn’t know that the ego is an ever growing power. Now that we are aware, we know that the ego is our true enemy and we can start devising tactics to defeat it.
The second card to play is to use the entanglement that our egos have created to our mutual benefit, instead of for destructive competition. Just as no country can be self-sufficient, neither can people. However, if we decide to supplement for one another what we can’t provide for ourselves, we will have more than enough of everything. As said before, our house has more than we need, but it is in disarray and there are deficiencies because of our alienation from each other. Reverse alienation and you have erased deficiency.
And since our egos will continue to grow, we will have to work on our relations even harder, to keep from falling back to alienation. As a result, our relations will grow stronger and closer to the extent that our egos grow more intense. If we stick to this simple formula, we will win the war against hunger, poverty, sickness, and sadness anywhere in the world. Even better, we will discover that the goal oriented process of the growth of our entanglement has always been to bring us so close that we would not only secure everyone’s needs, but truly become as one, united all over the world. If we do not succumb to our egos, we will triumph over our egos and raise humanity to new heights. If we surrender to our selfishness, we will destroy ourselves and our children will have to do the work we haven’t, much more laboriously.
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