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Can it be commonly understood that character development or the lack of it is the root of our collective ails and their solutions?
All human behavior can be traced back to two primordial archetypes, the creative and the destructive, light and dark, chaos and cosmos. Thus, individually we are responsible for aligning ourselves with either the creative or the destructive principle. Our effectiveness in doing so is reflected in timely action or lack thereof.
Our current climate crisis can be viewed as a collective failure of individuals to adequately development maturity and sanity. Our financial crisis is the result of collective greed of individuals.
Is it not true that someone develops a cure to a disease because at their core they have compassion and care enough to help alleviate the suffering of others? Is it not also true that those who design financial systems to ensure their own wealth with no regard for the social or environmental devastation that they cause are significantly lacking in superior traits of human beauty?
Can it not be commonly understood then that character development or lack there of is the root of our collective ails and their solutions? That by expanding compassion and consciousness rather than with holding their growth is the core solution to our collective struggles? Are we not faced primarily with moral and human challenges and secondarily technical ones?
Matt Fitzgerald
Solution: 'You're more than capable, want the job?' 'Hell no'. 'Hello candidate 1'.
Erik Richardson 500+
Adam Burk 500+
Erik Richardson 500+
Perceived intellectual/moral maturity seems to be a function of conceptual proximity to a person's own views. We must be careful, however, not to imagine some neutral position in which only the person who sees the relativity of such claims is truly mature, for as MacIntyre and others have shown, that perspective is, in itself, a constructed worldview based on a set of similarly non-universal first premises.
The other factor that must be taken into account is that very rarely do people choose to participate in something they think is 'bad.' Much of the brokenness of our world, from whichever point of view we happen to be looking, is caused by a difference in the hierarchy of goods and acceptable costs for achieving them within those different positions within the manifold.
Harald Jezek 50+
Although you are certainly right that lack of character is a contributing factor to humanity's ailments, I don't think it's the exclusive cause.
People often engage in destructive (or at least not creative) actions, not because they are evil, but because of ignorance.
Climate crisis: true, some entities are contributing to the crisis, although they are fully aware of their deeds, but I would say, the vast majority of people contributes, not because of lack of character but lack of understanding of the implication of their action (or lack of action).
Financial crisis: again, some entities, on purpose contributed to the crisis, but then, the crisis was not only a result of banks and large corporations engaging in unethical behaviors, but the individual on the street, spending more than he could afford, is to blame as well. Is that a question of lack of character ? I wouldn't say so. Again, to me it looks more like ignorance.
Adam Burk 500+
Harald Jezek 50+
Adam Burk 500+
Anna Hoffmann
Tyler Vega
Adam Burk 500+
"God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference."
And my question may not clearly articulate all the intricacies of my thinking. I do not point to lesser evolved as a class or group of people, but rather lesser evolved qualities that we each individually have and can be seen in collective issues.
George Sosyukin