The Ultimate Existential Dilemma of Our Future Global World by Edwin L. Young, PhD

As the earth’s peoples gradually become homogeneous in knowledge and culture, while yet maintaining and even increasing individualistic freedom of thought, a materialistic world view will emerge that will supplant the prior religious world views.  The idea of a god or gods saving the individual, intervening in human affairs, and saving the planet from disaster will fade from human consciousness.  All modern sciences from paleontology, archaeology, anthropology, and evolutionary biology to the comparative histories of the first up to contemporary nations then upward and outward to astronomy, astrophysics, and finally deep down to quantum physics, all together these point to a dissembling of antiquated religious belief systems and myths. 

Humans, a few among them of that is, are gradually coming to understand that we stand alone in the universe, mortal and mere tiny specs in this huge menagerie of trillions of planets, stars, and the kaleidoscopic billions of galaxies.  As this dawning awareness eventually occurs collectively across all continents, the masses of humanity eventually will experience an existential dilemma.  A philosophy of existence as meaningless will gradually pervade throughout all cultures.  Humans will no longer govern their lives as though a god is observing, instructing, and interacting with them.  Priests, reverends, and talking heads will no longer be able to propagandize and brainwash the ignorant and superstitious but ‘properly educated’ middle class and the desperate and woefully undereducated, Limbaugh led, severely impoverished underclasses in the US and third world nations.  They all will come to view existence as devoid of a judging, omniscient god who dictated through ancient plenary scriptures what humans should believe about existence and how humans should behave.  There will no longer be an ultimate, authoritative, absolute foundation for personal and public ethics and law. 

For millennia, the least competent heirs of elitist families have become the flaming flamens of religion and the high officials in government, the petty public law bureaucrats, and the pompous, myopic administrators of justice.   These culls have invoked the imposing symbols, accoutrements, and semblances of religions’ superstitions and commandments as well as those co-opted, absurd religious ceremonies, rituals, and laws or codes of conduct to lord it over and control their awestricken believers.  They passed these customs, beliefs, and codes of conduct on down for generation after generation, through their religious traditions.  These traditional beliefs, conventions, and institutions have virtually controlled vast populations throughout the ages. Daily, billions have performed such useless acts as incantations and genuflections hoping to receive protection or a better chance in life.  

Throughout the millennia, the cultures of nations have been shaped and maintained by these religious leaders, typically at the behest of rulers of states and huge corporations.  These cultural processes have, since the beginning of civilizations, influenced the formulation and codification of laws and their accompanying judicial, punishment, or correctional, procedures, all favoring the wealthy and powerful.  All of these human institutions, from now and into the coming decades, within the modern metaphysically materialistic worldviews, will face devastating questioning and either a bloody revolution or they will begin to see and to choose the necessity for a radical reformation. 

Facing the chaos resulting from unbounded ethical relativism and a new loss belief in the efficacy of traditional institutions and values, humans will have to find a way to create new and vast socio-political-economic-deontic structures, systems, and institutions.  Leaders will be faced with having to use science and reason in forming this reformation but also they will have to gain majority consensus concerning what will yield fair and effectual results for all.  Radically new structures, new systems with new techniques and processes, and totally new institutions will have to be created. 

Money and wealth and the power they have wielded in the past will be successfully challenged as the, up to now, decisive arbiters of how society shall be run and how so called ‘justice and equity’ shall be dispensed.  The internet, now interlaced over the face of the earth, will have a major role in causing all of these changes to begin to take place.  It will be used by intellectuals everywhere to re-educate, organize, and lead the under classes and the disadvantaged so that they can and will join in mass movements of reformation.  These new leaders will have to rely on radically honest and factual mass education, shaking everyone’s worldviews to their foundations, to gain the commitment of the masses.  They will have to use consensus building, through these and face-to-face methods, to create and set new objectives and measurements of progress that will consistently be implemented around the world to insure that the wealthier corporate leaders, political tyrants, and their compliant, or submissive, yet militarily more powerful aligned nations can no longer exploit and enslave less developed nations and their un-empowered, exploited, manipulated citizens.  These new egalitarian leaders will have to use these same methods with local communities throughout all nations. 

As a consequence, of this dawning awareness and revised, more honest, education, huge movements will arise to end exploitation and virtual enslavement of the non-privileged, non-elitist, disadvantaged masses. As some enter into this new godless, relativistic world culture they may feel no sense of obligation to act in the interest of the common good.  They may feel free to exercise unbridled license to use all sorts of corrupt and unfair strategies against the unwary.  Many will feel no restraint against being and acting selfish and exploitative, and adopting even ruthless, life styles.  With no meaning or no ultimate consequences in this life or the next, nothing will prevent such degenerate humans from pursuing a life style that, in aggregate, ultimately will result in destruction of all human life.  However, as rationality, science, fairness, reformed mass education, and mass movements pursuing the common good emerge, no one will be able to exert that kind of license any longer, the kind that is so prevalent today. 

Humans, in aggregate, in this new era will have to accept an ethic of the common good that entails a diminished emphasis on personal aggrandizement and reward.  They, also, will have to adopt a life philosophy that says that, for the sake of the survival of the whole, universal altruism must take precedence over individual, local, and national greed, domination, misuse, and inhumane treatment of all forms of life and the earth itself.  Congruent with this new life philosophy, individuals’ or groups’ moral beliefs and conventions should never be allowed to be able to be imposed on them or any other individuals or groups.  All peoples must become engaged in empathic dialogues with one another.  Knowing that all individuals and the earth itself will not last forever, humans will be educated to and learn to band together to work for the common good and preserve the earth as long as our earth is extant. 

Structures, systems, and institutions such as democracy, hierarchical governance, capitalism and banking and insurance systems (Karl Marx’s predictions 170 years ago about the eventual crisis of capitalism were correct), free enterprise, inequitable distribution of wealth, the full range corporate systems and their monopolies, corporate controlled media, the inequality of the law and justice systems, employment and labor systems, monetized health systems, state mandated curricula and educational systems, nationalism (aka jingoism), international law and financial systems - all of these and many not cited that have been passed on through many millennia will have to be replaced.  They are all antiquated and ossified.  They are all seriously flawed.  They are all horribly deleterious to the majority of human individuals and groups.  They, interlocked as they are, are all relentlessly destroying the environment and are hurling all life toward extinction.

The many unpublicized reform oriented voices around the globe are begging the world’s populace to take notice; yet they get no coverage in the major media.  Protest groups around the globe have been focusing on single, or just a few, issues perceived as inhuman and unjust.  Such groups are ultimately ineffective because they do not recognize that any changes made will not be lasting changes because each issue is interrelated within a vast network within globally interconnected structures and systems.  As any one issue is seemingly resolved, in a short time, the rest of those integrated structures and systems will join ranks to pressure a return to the ‘status quo ante protestor’. 

Those capable of grasping the fatal defect of modern civilizations’ entire configuration of structures and systems must join together and devise completely new structures and systems to replace the entire set of antiquated, detrimental, integrated, dangerously and ultimately fatal structures and systems.  This challenge to the well-informed activists around the globe may seem impossible, yet maintaining the status quo is really what is impossible, and this will become increasingly evident long before the end of this century.

This is a call to ‘intellectual’ arms.  We begin either to attempt the impossible from now and into the unforeseeable future or life on earth will perish and we will not see any future at all.

As Charlie Brown said, “I have seen the enemy and it is us!”