Mankind is so brilliant, yet so helpless. And we think too much about the brilliance and not nearly enough about the helplessness.
All this reminds me of the words of the late Herbert W. Armstrong, a truly brilliant man who understood human beings and human existence. Mr. Armstrong often spoke about this great paradox. We live in a “magic, entrancing push-button world where work is done largely by machines. It’s the glamour dreamworld of the three ‘Ls’—leisure, luxury and license,” he wrote. “But paradoxically, it’s also a world of IGNORANCE! Even the educated know not how to solve their problems and the world’s evils. They know not the way of PEACE or the TRUE VALUES of life!”
He wrote that in 1985 in Mystery of the Ages. This book explains the solution to this problem. (It is also the reason I am optimistic about mankind’s future.)
Thirty years later, that paradox is 100 times more obvious—yet far less widely perceived.
We have been kidnapped by vanity. We think that because we have an extraordinary storehouse of knowledge, incredible technology and an evolved morality, we are equipped to solve problems. This has created a frightening reality: The “smarter” we have grown, the more ignorant we have become of our deficiencies and limitations, and the more dangerous our predicament has become. Dire crises like this one in Europe are exploding, but we don’t see them—at least not as the civilizational threats that they are—because we believe we are smart enough to fix them.
What a spot we are in.
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