Sunday, March 25, 2007

Seeking the Starlit World

To change the world…

The prospect both excites and frightens me. My little discussion with Mykyl has left me on a brink that I have tried to jump many times before, but never succeeded. To change the world…to make it a better place…not just in my little corner, but all the corners of this little sphere we call earth, and all of the sims in this cybernetic blip we call second life. While I don’t know Mykyl’s animator’s true age, I make the assumption from her maturity and deepness of thought that she is past her starry-eyed twenties. For a woman of her intelligence and wisdom to still maintain hopes of changing the world forces me to try to break through my crusty cynicism and try to look at the problem again in a fresh light. I therefore have no particular point to make in the following blog entry. It is merely typing out my thoughts, the written equivalent of thinking out loud. It is my trying to find fissures in the crust that I can break open, and to try to see a starlit world again without cavalerely tossing my own accumulated wisdom in the process.

It can be argued (correctly, in my opinion) that our mere existence serves to change the world. Simply by living our lives the best that we can we serve to influence those around us, planting seeds and creating ripples which touch nearly everyone who connects with anyone.

To bring about change via this method is painfully slow, however. To affect massive change in a shorter time period, more direct action is required.

When my animator was first old enough to realize that the earth had a thing called a population, that population was in the 3 billions. I know it passed 4 billion some time ago, and seem to remember it passing the fives (it is frustrating to be non-networked. I am used to being able to access such minutia within seconds). The actual size is irrelevant, however. It is impossible for the average human mind to encompass numbers beyond several thousand. Three and six billion both fall into the range of, “gee, that sounds like an awful lot of people.”

Asking to change ALL of these people is, of course, a needlessly futile task. I’ve learned from experience that people such as the SUV driver who cut my animator off the other day do not change easily. I can’t imagine that it will be easy to affect the lives of people in outer Mongolia, wherever outer Mongolia is. The minds of the terrorist bombers will not be changed, at least in no way forseeable to my imagination. There are blocks that some people put up that cannot be penetrated.

It is not necessary to change each individual person. One need only influence the proper fulcrums of governance and influence to change the world rapidly. These fulcrums are full of people steeped in their own self-importance, some with minds totally(?) blocked to change. The key here is either move the immovable objects with an irresistible force, or to render the fulcrums themselves less relevant by creating more powerful fulcrums.

In my discussion with Mykyl I stated that I felt that changing the nature of religion was the method with the most potential to change the world. I should correct this and say that this is the method I see with the most potential to SAVE the world. The world, I feel, does need saving. The war in Iraq rages on; terrorists seek ever more powerful weapons, and it is only a matter of time before they obtain true, “weapons of mass destruction.” I do not doubt for a moment that there are those who hold enough hatred in their hearts to use these weapons, and likewise do not hold the corresponding, simple minded wisdom that would make them realize that they would only ultimately hurt there own people and their own cause through their use.

I leave this blog open ended, without conclusion, for I still have much thinking to do, and hope to gain insights either through feedback or through the rapid ingestion of wisdom from a source as yet unknown.

1 comment:

Catherine Moody said...

Aww Alphonsus! You can't be a crusty cynic. Crusty cynics wouldn't like me!