Introduction (continued)
It would be one thing—and bad enough—if projection, or “the pot calling the kettle black,” only happened at a personal level. But it doesn’t. Pots and kettles regularly blacken themselves at national levels. Particularly at national levels. It’s us versus them, you know. The perpetual War on Something.
Human beings seem to have taken an awkward turn, to be de-volving. Rather than using our intelligence to correct whatever it is we don’t like about ourselves, we use our intelligence to project whatever we don’t like about ourselves onto other people.
And the year is 2008. We’ve become so good at this—projecting blame, waging warfare, producing deadly weapons—that when one country points an accusing finger at another country, all countries better take cover.
It’s time to slow the de-volution a bit. To ask some probing questions, to sow some seeds of doubt about the status quo. It’s time we developed noses that can sniff out “shadow material,” and ears that can catch “doublethink” and hear “newspeak.” It’s time we all understood how the human shadow works.
Something is seriously amiss in our country. In the world. And glossing it over, or calling it the devil, or blaming it on another group of people, or simply ignoring it while we buy something else or watch the next program, is not going to fix it.
We’ve reached the stage of development where only self-inspection will do. Where only an honest attempt to take responsibility for all of our actions, both positive and negative, will make a lasting difference.
As Jared Diamond says in Collapse, societies either succeed or fail as a direct result of the choices they make. The USA has run out of room for crazy choices. It’s time we started thinking with our hearts and our heads, not just our bottom lines.