GuidoWorld

What mankind has accomplished in a couple of thousand years is truly amazing. The advances of the last few centuries are breathtaking. Modern industrial society with its abillity to mass produce and create new technologies and inventions which drastically improve our lifestyle, health and knowledge are awe inspiring.

Look around your house, in your closets, bathroom and bedroom and you see objects which kings of a few centuries ago could not hope to acquire. Clothes, appliances, machines, furniture, utilities and crafts exist at every turn. The infrastructure of even the most lazy rural community are efficient and dependable. Advances in communication, transportation, medicine, agriculture and science are occurring daily.

Go to any store and look around at all the objects. Think of how they are made and the incredible functioning network of resources, transportation and production we have fashioned.

Yet despite all of this wonder and activity there are many destructive and harmful tendencies that we not only ignore but foster. Despite having an increasingly globally interconnected community we still exploit our neighbors and rape the earth. Even though the US has had no real competitors on the world military stage for quite awhile, we still wage war, torture and threaten with great frequency.

Despite all our knowledge, resources and abilities our rates of murder, suicide and depression continue to increase. Individual’s are not necessarly feeling better about themselves or their contemporaries. Prejudice, hatred, fear and agression seem to be on the rise rather than on the decline.

In my book, Exploring Intimacy, which you can read in the words section of this website, I examine the reasons and solutions for our discontent. I urge you to read it. Even though I wrote it some 20 years ago it seems to become more pertinent every passing day.

We currently have the ability and the resources to create much healthier and rewarding social structures. Part of the probelm is viewing our current social structures as inevitable even though they are recent inventions. Another problem is our tendency to avoid beneficial social changes by immediately treating any suggestion as a utopia.

Just as science and technology are ever progressing, so it should be the same with human communities. Though there is no perfect society there are social structures that are healthier than others and that promise high rates of self-satisfaction and general feeling of happiness and contentment.

It is obvious to most that some home environments and parenting styles are more conducive to producing happy children than others. Likewise, most would concede that certain working environments are more conducive to productivity and worker satisfaction than others. In general people would agree that the successful functioning of any environment from a hospital to a school is highly dependent on the how it is run and organized.

Build a healthy user friendly structure and your odds of success and satisfaction are greatly enhanced. We would be well advised to put as much thought and energy into making our society as efficient as our factories and businesses.

One of the themes of Exploring Intimacy is to assess the harm and limitation done to our sense of joy and contentment by holding on to attitudes which our society has outgrown. The Fight for Survival and its attending fears, prejudices and priorities is found to be one of the major obstacles to our building and being open to a healthier society. Though we have the means and resources to feed the planet, and peacefully coexist the remnants of the fight for survival and its accompanying fears and prejudices make this goal seem idealistic. Likewise the personal angst along with the fear and mistrust engendered by the fight for survival makes it difficult for individuals to conduct their lives in a fashion which breeds happiness and contentment.

In my next blog I will continue on with this theme and discuss how our modern existence differs from the one of pain and suffering which beget our reliance on basing human existence on the fight for survival. In the meantime you might want to start reading Exploring Intimacy.

Jim Guido

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