24 Aug Working Together or Falling Apart?
A look at viruses, climate change, and the challenges of growing up.
I’ve written a lot about how I see humanity going through a rite of passage – a collective initiation from our cultural adolescence to our future adulthood. The issues that plague us as our evolutionary drivers are the C19 virus, climate change, racism, sexism, financial inequality, and a civilization at odds with itself and Nature.
What will it take to overcome these issues?
While each one of these issues poses different challenges with varying solutions, they all have one thing in common: the balance of freedom and responsibility, and between individual choice and the greater common good.
Let’s start with C-19. Like so many issues today, this public health challenge has become a politicized issue. The far Right as well as some on the far Left have chosen the cry of “freedom” with little regard for public good. From the point of view of individual freedom alone, we each have the right to not wear a mask, to refuse the vaccine, and to gather in crowds without precautions.
With regard to climate change, we each have the right to idle our cars in the parking lot, to keep our air conditioning on, to invest in oil to make money, to cut down trees for profit, and otherwise use and pollute as our “right.”
In regard to racism and sexism, an individual has the right to choose who to rent to or who to hire and how much to pay them.
Freedom without responsibility isn’t really freedom, it’s adolescence.
If each of us follows nothing but our own dream, we create a collective nightmare.
And that’s exactly what we are creating on this planet – a collective nightmare of an endless pandemic, an environment becoming uninhabitable for future generations, and a world of inequality that creates misery, homelessness, danger, and crime.
Only an equal or greater balance toward the collective good will save us. Only through choosing the greater good will we have the freedom we truly want—the freedom to safely send our kids to school, to gather together in concerts and restaurants, to breathe air without smoke from wildfires, and keep the temperature reasonable for life to continue.
Only choosing the greater good can we have the freedom for minorities to walk the streets safely, and the freedom to co-create a far better world with a diverse society.
We don’t have the freedom to run red lights or drive when drunk because it’s dangerous to others. We don’t smoke in most enclosed places because secondhand smoke impacts others.
Vaccines wiped out polio in much of the world, as well as minimized measles, mumps, smallpox, and tuberculosis—because people agreed to get them. We can do the same with C-19, but only if we accept our responsibility toward the common good and take the vaccine even if it goes against our personal preference.
We can choose to live more sustainably and drive less, walk more, or invest in clean energy, even if it makes less money than other investments. We can make educational grants to those less fortunate, and choose to elevate more women and minorities to positions of influence.
The amazing thing about this is that when we choose for the collective good, everyone benefits, the individual included. But it sometimes requires a short-term sacrifice to make that happen.
These are the challenges of growing up, of moving from an adolescent society choosing for selfish and immediate gratification, to an adult society choosing for the greater good, even if sometimes it’s generations down the line.
This is the test of our initiation. Will humanity pass or fail this test?
You have the freedom to choose.
Anodea Judith
August 24, 2021
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