The worldwide social disorder we face today has not suddenly emerged out of the blue. On the contrary, it has been observed, documented and commented upon since the end of the First World War over a century ago. Now, as then, we seem to be none the wiser as to the causes of the general malaise.
Eimar O'Duffy, Irish poet, playwright and economic philosopher, wrote Asses in Clover in 1933. He neatly summarised the dilemma of the 20th century. Like so many at the time, O'Duffy knew that the problems of war, poverty-amidst-plenty, environmental degradation and over-production were the direct result of the muddle-headed-thinking of the ordinary citizen- in-the-street who is prepared to go to work or to war if they are paid an income to do so. While people continue to be educated on a pure diet of materialistic philosophy, it is small wonder that, to this day, Cuanduine's quest to free the natural world (songbirds and wildlife) from the grip of corporate ownership would be met by the same blank incomprehension as when O'Duffy wrote in his dystopian novel:
"The unfortunate people being so muddled in their heads by all they had been taught by their schoolteachers, their professors, their novelist-philosophers, their publicists, their economists, their politicians, and their newspapers, that they were quite incapable of thinking to purpose for themselves."
Nothing has changed over the intervening decades. If anything, the situation has worsened. Stop anybody in the street, - academic or activist, nurse, salesman, physicist, parent, teacher or grandparent, ask what they think should be done, and the same refrain will echo back: "I'm too busy to think it through right now".
And what are they so busy doing? Earning the money from some kind of employment to pay the rent/mortgage to keep a roof over the heads of their family so that they can put their children through an educational system designed to turn out adults incapable of thinking why they have no time to stop and think, because they have to go to work to earn the money to pay the rent... . So long as people are brought up from childhood under the impression that working for tests, exams, certificates and qualifications to improve their career prospects and earning power is the main priority in life, it will be emotionally tricky for them to undertake any fundamental re-think of the social order under which they live and gain their livelihoods.
In an article in New View, published in the Summer 2006 edition, anthroposophist Terry Boardman makes the following observation:
"Since the reign of King James I, the colossal consequence of the Anglo-American globalising process with its overwhelming concentration on the products of the sense world matrix, there has been a mighty acceleration in the pace of economic, scientific and technological change to the point where today, the very future of humanity is threatened by nuclear annihilation, ecological disaster, genetic manipulation and the replacement of human beings by robots and cyborgs, all the consequence of a reductionist philosophy of natural science that rigidly restricts its investigations to the world of the five senses and their technological extensions. We are finally beginning to realise, as we never did during the nuclear showdown years of the Cold War, that unless we change our way of life significantly, our so-called post-industrial civilisation may well not see the end of the 21st century; the human race will have committed suicide."
Prospects for the future look gloomy, and will continue to do so so long as citizens are content to work for money as nuclear physicists, researchers in Big Pharm companies (see Le Carre's The Constant Gardener), academics and politicians across the board, in banking, transport, farming, health, welfare, education and in administration. After all, as was well said, it is difficult to get a man "to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding". Or, to put it another way:
I thank the goodly god of Gold
Who has denied me nought,
Who has increased me fifty-fold,
Because I have not thought.
(Eimar O'Duffy 1933)
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