Today humanity is in a global crisis affecting all facets of human life. And despite repeated attempts, panic decisions nobody seems to be able to come up with an answer, we do not even know exactly why we ended up in this dead end.
How did we end up in a situation where we do not know how to handle ourselves? We are experiencing crises in society and in our own lives because we are currently feeling only the negative side of the crisis, only the pangs and not the birth.
Understand Human Development Like a Professor
If we examine ourselves and our development as humans, we will see that our entire development stems from our desires, from constantly wanting more. We previously had small desires. We wanted to live in the countryside with a few cows, a few hens, and a piece of land. A man had a wife and children, he lived his life, and he knew that these comprised his life.
Then, greater desires awakened in us, prompting us to begin to trade for what we wanted. We sold our products in the market and bought other products in return. This was how we evolved and began to interconnect as our growing egos prompted us to develop.
Our entire history is based on such developments in human desires. We always want more because our desires are constantly growing. We progress by looking at others and envying them. We learn because we are motivated by envy, lust, pursuit of honor, and a desire to dominate.
The development of human desires has caused every shift and revolution in human history.
Here’s Why the World Is Not Developing Today
And yet, ultimately, progress and development have brought us to a dead end. It started to become evident in the 1960s, when environmentalists and sociologists began to warn that humanity is at a standstill in terms of being able to determine where we should focus our future development. The space program helped us forget about this for a while, but that program, too, came to a premature end.
We have arrived at some kind of emptiness. We have evolved to the point where we have nowhere else to go. We cannot see where else to develop. Our own nature and the Nature we see around us have stopped opening themselves to us.
The human ego inflated, we evolved, and we believed that our development was unlimited, that we would produce more means of communication, vehicles, and even our own personal jets! But in the end, one who consumes all those products remains with emptiness, discovering that these do not deliver the satisfaction they had promised.
How to View the Problems in Your Family
While previously a man wanted a big family with many wives and many children, today men settle for one wife and one or two children. Today, life has become so tough, complicated, and complex that in developed countries people stay with their parents until they’re 30 or even 40 years old.
People go to work and spend their entire salaries on themselves. They don’t feel they need a family.
Our egos have grown so big we cannot connect with others, make efforts for them, or tend to them so they will want to tend to us.
Today’s spouses conduct their relationships like partnerships. They both work, both partake in payments, and are equal.
They both leave home for work in the morning, drop the kids off at school where they are supposedly educated, and pick them up in the evening on their way home. Adults share the same chores and duties, and there is no longer a distinction between the father and the mother.
It turns out that we’ve come to a state where the family has lost its structure and has become a partnership, and the ego, which has grown, is telling us it is not in our best interest to get into a “family partnership.”
The education our children receive is very different from the one we received. The generation gap is such that they are often completely detached from us, almost as if they were a different species. The connection between the generations has been broken.
It is all a result of the developed egos. Demographically, we’ve grown very quickly, but now the line has flattened out. In fact, studies are showing that birth rates the world over are falling, and soon the number of children will begin to decline.
Do You Make these Common Mistakes in Your Relationships with Others?
Alongside the disintegration of the family unit and the loss of kinship, another interesting, completely new phenomenon is taking shape: our society is becoming connected. Beyond the realization that banks, industry, and manufacturers are all globally connected and trade raw materials and products with each other, we are becoming mutually dependent in culture and education. We are becoming dependent on one another.
If that dependence is the kind that exists in a good family, it gives one the confidence of a family. But if it is a negative dependence, it leads to divorce, or worse, to violence.
Even though we’re growing more hateful of each other and repel each other on a global scale, how can we divorce each other when Nature has closed us in on this thin crust? We are, in fact, globally interdependent, and we can neither divorce nor escape from one another.
Moreover, each day we are becoming more interdependent, everyone depends on everyone else for better or for worse.
This is a big problem because at the same time, our egos are becoming even more intolerant and uncompromising. Our ability to reason is muffled by our intensifying hatred for each other, and we often fear that together with the weapons, our envy, lust, pursuit of honors and domination, and ruthlessness, we might end up destroying our entire world.
We can see how Nature is leading us into inescapable interdependence, unlike being in a family where we can divorce one another.
The Best Kept Secret to Building Successful Relationships
What do we do? The only solution is reconciliation among all the “members of the family,” among all countries. And this should not be done by force or pressure, but via a mutual commitment to strive to complement one another—all the people and all the nations in the world.
Out of that solution, on which our lives depend, we will rearrange our social lives and our relationships just as a family. We must see what each of us needs in order to complement the needs of others. We need to figure out which kind of education we should inculcate into adults and children, and into the next generation to make it easier for them to join a good world when they grow up, a world of softness and warmth.
Many scientific studies have shown that the world has become “round,” connected and interdependent, and that we cannot escape it. Actually, it turns out that not only is our mutual interdependence inescapable, but each day people and nations are moving toward even greater collaboration.
It’s becoming clearer that isolationism runs against the process we’ve been undergoing from the beginning of human evolution to this day. Resisting Nature’s laws never works. In this case, it’s even dangerous for both the isolationist country and for the rest of the world.
It is important to understand what we mean when we say that if we properly keep the laws of Nature on the human, psychological level, we will succeed.
The better we know human nature and how to conduct our relationships, the better we will be able to build a society where everyone is happy, and where everyone makes concessions for others.
True, everyone wants to be “king of the hill,” but we can show that we gain more by treating others as equal, by helping and supporting each other. If we show this, people will welcome the mutual concessions, understanding that there is no other way in a system where all are interdependent. In this way we will establish a society where everyone is happy.
Written by Michael Laitman
Michael Laitman is a global thinker dedicated to generating a transformational shift in society through a new global education, which he views as the key to solving the most pressing issues of our time. He is the Founder of the ARI Institute, Professor of Ontology & Theory of Knowledge, PhD in Philosophy, MS in Medical Cybernetics. You can find him on Google+, YouTube and Twitter