In my book "The Commoner Syndrome", I wrote about how the progress of so many individuals, as well as the world as a whole, is being held back by the fact that the world has changed so fast due to technology for our thinking to keep up. To sum it up, we are largely a bunch of commoners that find ourselves thrown into the future like some science fiction movie. This is the root of so much of the trouble in the world today.
The jobs that we do and the technology that we use today is a part of it. But it is not the major part. People in general are doing well adapting to the new world of using computers, the internet and so on. However, there is an outer sphere as well as an inner sphere to the new world that we have created and thus must adapt to.
The new technology that we use today is the inner sphere. The changed world as a whole, and our ways of thinking about it, is the outer sphere. We, as a whole, are doing a much better job at adapting to the inner sphere, actually using the new technology, than the outer sphere, new ways of thinking about the world that the new technology has created.
The most obvious change in the world that we now find ourselves in is that it is greatly increased in both scope and complexity. It is not your region or nation that counts any more, it is the world that counts. Whether anyone likes it or not, we have created a world in which there is no such thing as a foreigner. We could say that in our world of today, the only foreigners are those who still do not realize that there is no more any such thing as a foreigner. A foreigner today is not one from a different place but one whose thinking still stuck in a different time. The terrorism so far in the new century is obviously the growing pains of this new world.
No one is more out of place today than one who still sees the world as a simplistic black and white place as if it is still the Nineteenth Century. It is great to be able to break things down into simple formulas when dealing with the world of science, the physical world. But that does not work with the world of people. It is like looking at a black and white photograph of a million rainbows.
While the people of the world are becoming somewhat more alike, they are and will remain very diverse and different from one another. My position is that we should adapt to that and do all we can to learn about our fellow human beings. Each of us will live more and more in a world of people who are not like us. No one is more out of place in this world than someone with an old-fashioned set of pigeon holes in their thinking in which everyone they meet can be placed neatly in one of the pigeon holes.
So much of the trouble in the world today is because we have a tendency to lump people together that we do not understand and who share some superficial similarities or are from the same general part of the world. On 9/11 (or 11/9), America was attacked by a relatively small group of criminals. Since then, by lumping people together that had no involvement in it, we have come well on the way to creating a global war. We are in a new world in which 25 or so people can get together and launch a major attack aginst a nation without the involvement of any foreign government. The simple black and white days of Pearl Harbor are no more.
People in other countries are the same way, a cartoonist can draw some ignorant cartoon and many protesters act as if the entire continent where he lives bears responsibility. Maybe we have created a world that is more complex than we are able to handle, it is so easy and simple to just lump people all together like we did in the past instead of trying to understand the details and complexity of the situation.
One thing about the new world that the U.S. government does not seem to understand is that when a nation attempts to set itself up as an example for the world to follow, instant global news allows that world to see what is happening inside the U.S., including the details of every school shooting and innocent victim caught in the crossfire during a shoot-out between rival drug dealers.
Living in this new world means keeping up with the world. As a native of Europe, I am mystified by those with a snapshot view of the world from well into the past. The only Europe that I know is the European Union and am surprised to encounter people who seem to think that there is still a state of war between Britain and Germany or between Britain and France or between France and Germany. These countries are no more at war than are the north and the south in the U.S.
Most of us are tied down by artificial bonds that are relics of the simpler world of the past. We are shattering many of these bonds, particularly with regard to aging. It used to be that teenage athletes did not continue training into their thirties, forties and, fifties. At one time, no one could imagine college students in their forties. Beauty queens used to all be in their teens or twenties. We have broken all of these barriers in recent years but still have a long way to go in our thinking to bring the world anywhere near maximum efficiency.
We are now in a world that is not only full of information but where almost all of it is instantly accessible. People may have had hard lives back in the "old days" but the fact is that life in the old days also had the advantage of simplicity. The average person did not have to know that much to get by in life.
We have made the world of today into a vast blur of information that travels at light speed. If we choose to ignore that, we will fall behind other countries, plain and simple. Our technology has created a global village full of data but that means that is we choose to continue watching nonsense on television while people in other countries are ever learning, we will fall behind. Our mindless entertainment is the ghost of the days when much knowledge was not necessary for the average person.
This new and more complicated world requires much more of each person than the world of the past did. Back then, a person would learn and grow only until they were finished with school. Now, to be an effective people, each of us must continue learning and growing all of our lives. The thing that is missing in so many places that are not doing well economically is a sense of improvement. In contrast, in places that are booming economically, you will find a dynamic sense of improvement.
What about your own sense of improvement? Suppose you learn that you will be seeing a person that you have not seen in six years. You think of giving the person your email address but then you remember that the person did not use computers when you last saw them. But that was six years ago, what if the person had learned and is now a computer user. Or what if the person was out of shape? How do you know that they are still out of shape? Maybe they have improved. Central to the commoner thinking of the past is the idea that "things are the way they always are".
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