The End and the Beginning
Attained “evidence” is always dependent on the specific focus of consciousness. This means, first, that it is an outcome of the values, desires and concerns that lead research in one direction rather than in another direction. This much must be obvious, even without further reflection.
The emerging “scientific” world view is therefore entangled in the prevailing social, economic and political order. While it is often acknowledged that science is social in its essence, the full implications of this social entanglement are seldom faced. Simply, it means that the “world view” that emerges through scientific investigation is not, strictly, “scientific.”
Human desires, values and concerns originate in a metaphysical act of identification, whether the latter is fixed or fluid and shifting. A fixed identification along conventional lines of mind-body alignment and orientation to the exterior environment, the leading paradigm of our time, favors a useful stability as well as social acceptability.
On the other hand, obsessive fixity and lack of flexibility result in the crystallization of the subjective limitation. The “system” built up to a point of complexity and relative perfection begins to decay as the momentum of human motivations is ever more remote from the creative source (locked into the fixed system). Such a process may be the fate of any human system that has reached maturity.
The destruction or break-up of the current system may be understood as the living imperative of growth and progression, which does not permit a closed, permanent system of any kind.
In view of widespread corruption and the evident disintegration of the materialistic social order (which has arisen and achieved its apotheosis in a brief three or four centuries), it is necessary to look for solutions outside the paradigm that has prevailed.
Some of this intent was already in evidence in the aftermath of WW II, but in the absence of the stimulus provided by global war, the tendency has been to backslide into old habits. Nations are not unlike individuals in this respect.
The victory of “the free world” in the Cold War was mistakenly understood as an unlimited endorsement of capitalism. It was, rather, a victory of the right of human beings everywhere to be the arbiters of their own fate, unfettered by the tyranny of any national or global system, which, in its design, would reduce whole classes of people or nations to a state of bondage; or fetter the free spirit of humanity.
With every wish to avoid catastrophe or unnecessary bloodshed, it is time for honest thinkers everywhere to place common sense and fresh thought above the rigidity of ready systems and addictive specializations of interest, in the search for solutions that will bring broad benefit to humanity and to the nations, one and all. The era of parochialism and petty self-interest departed many decades ago.