National Growrh - But Any Kind Of Growth?

Dear Reader,

Today's world is virtually indescribable. The UK's new government thought they would be welcomed as heroes with their planned American-style race for growth, but have been pulled down by both members of their own party and the business market, both of which are supposed to support this flavour of government. Yet it is we voters - in a roundabout way - that put them there. A number would say it was the Tory membership that put them there, but that is not so. A chain of events got them there since the 2019 election.

Does that say something about the electorate's muddled thinking? Just what sense of life values do we possess to make this possible? These politicians are only a reflection of our own attitudes as a society that became more and more relentlessly attached to individuality and our possessions and worship of material success and glitz rather than the nation's good, socially and environmentally. And we cannot seem to see a practical alternative.

Like a lot of thinking people I have been dwelling a little on the state of life and of government - mainly in the UK but also worldwide - and I have been asking myself "Just how has all this nonsense come about?" And then I stumbled on a recent Channel 4 video interview of Guardian writer Marina Hyde in which she rather delightfully surveys all the muddled thinking and attitudes in and surrounding politics and the way society and politics have developed over the last 20 years. Please view it here.

But though it is fairly refreshing viewing - to me at least - it surely does not tell all of the story.

I remember clearly being brought up in the 1940s and 1950s with much more consciousness of sharing and the community. My family and our locality did not have that much, but that was not the most important thing in life, and if any ambition existed to be educated it was usually with the view of being for the betterment of all, not just the successful one.

Methodism and Socialism played a big part in both sides of my family. Even Socialism was influenced by Methodism.

Today it seems that we live in a world that is being made worse by the educated! And by the materially ambitious - in general, not all. I do not have to speak about what deleterious effect the media and media gadgets have had on our lives in the drive for material growth.

Yet what corresponding improvement has there been to our moral and spiritual life? Well, despite all the tendency to materiality, its consequences have at least fostered some return to the idea of community, food banks being one aspect, and the number of worthwhile charities, in general, seems to have escalated. Sympathy of some kind still exists. But who is coordinating all this separate effort to the best effect? They are all competing for the same money pot.

The most noticeable issue is, though, that all these praiseworthy works tend to be more reactive rather than proactive. What I mean by that is that once there was a lot of emphasis at a young age in learning Biblical and rightful social values and attitudes. But that was before TV matured. Today all that has become transposed into a humanistic version that leaves aside the notion of a reason for life. It has now all become a matter of opinion.

Not that the old way of teaching Biblical values was too correct either, but what I mean to say is that rather than putting more emphasis on the study of an eternal, divine reason behind life, that notion has generally been put further and further behind us as something that is almost of an ivory tower issue. 

Science is beginning to find that there's more to life after all, yet our education has proceeded to be more materially based to the point that we tend to take that to be the only practical truth worth knowing about - apart from personal relationships. And our view of life has become more money-focused - we have lost the ability to open our eyes to see through this masquerade. Until now.

Perhaps we should have read Shakespeare more closely.

So how we have treated the Earth and all its life forms all these years has now rebounded on us. We have invented sociology, environment and ecological sciences to make up for the deficiency, little realising that such sciences already exist in ancient scripture, and more holistically too, meaning that these eternal and practical teachings are in an integrated form. All is One.

Further, instead of pursuing knowledge of the Creator through spirituality we now rely on psychiatry and psychology to deal with personal problems.

All these conditions cause us to make bad decisions about politics. We can't see the wood for the trees and thus we get what we thought we wanted when not knowing what is the true basis for decision-making.

Both the United Nations and the European Union were originally set up to promote unity among nations but - as at the national government level - they have largely failed to find a true focus. The result is that there is little focus and agreement on anything that is of real importance to achieve the removal of unnecessary suffering and the promotion of true peace. Sticking plaster solutions tend to be the norm.

If I give the impression that all is bleak then I apologise! There are many individuals who are conscience-stricken and seek solutions for the needy and the betterment of society and the environment at the local level. These individuals often form local enterprises to efficiently coordinate the work required.

By themselves, they do not provide a panacea. There is hope, however, but there are great challenges ahead. It is a change in our individual and collective consciousness about who we are and our relationship to 'the All' that must evolve for true and lasting solutions to take place.

Thank you for reading this.