Facing down the myth that ‘all will be well in the end’ for everyone
slums – a figure that is expected to rise to 2 billion by 2030.
Rural areas also suffer from poverty, which the UN says is 17.2 per cent higher than in urban areas. As we in Ireland know, poverty in the high-income countries is unacceptably high.
As a society, we need to awaken from our induced infantilism in regard to societal problems, and no longer passively accept the mantra of our pivotal institutions that ‘all will be well’ if we have sufficient faith, vote for them and buy their products. Highlighting the pitfalls of not questioning those in authority, Frank Herbert, author of the bestselling 1965 novel, ‘Dune’, said in an interview with Mother Earth News in 1981 that he thought President John F. Kennedy was among the most dangerous leaders his country ever had.
This is not because he thought Kennedy was malevolent, but because people didn’t question him.
It is ironic that in spite of the emphasis society places on each new generation receiving a good education, and the widespread understanding that education is a lifelong process, we don’t sufficiently question the soundness of the dominant political-economic paradigm, or the lived theology of our religious institutions.
In regards to the former, while the major political parties are emphatic in saying that they want fundamental change, each – without apparently being aware of their cognitive dissonance – advocate the very thing that is the cause of the rapid degradation of the biosphere, and so much human suffering: continual economic growth.
Consuming more means more mining; the poisoning of rivers, lakes and seas; an increase in the loss of biodiversity; air and noise pollution; traffic congestion; more indigenous communities being expelled from their ancestral lands; and rising temperatures.
As Joyetta Gupta writes in ‘Scientific America’ (March, 2024): “There are limits to our natural resources. At some point they run out, or we ruin them.”
Many religious people – perhaps the majority – accept without question the idea that the primary purpose in life is to ensure that they and their loved ones go to Heaven rather than Hell, or their equivalents.
The belief that of all the species that have existed in the 3.7billion years of life on Earth, Homo sapiens is the only one that is immortal, is the ultimate in exceptionalism, and gives license for humans to treat nonhuman beings as objects.
Within the framework of religious belief, it is reasonable to think that
God did not create multiple forms of life for humans to mistreat – as in factory farming – or to destroy, through agricultural run-off, and exterminate.
The idea that ‘all will be made well’ by technological innovation in the form of electric vehicles, and solar-, wind- and nuclear-generated energy, is one of the most dangerous myths of our time, as it is so readily accepted by the Pater Pan part of our psychology.
This is our inclination to believe in implausible things such as that we can reduce our negative impact on the biosphere without changing our lifestyle, that there are no moral constraints on how we treat nonhuman nature, and that, regardless of our eco-callousness, all will be well in the end.