World news and you: think better about your world

This page explains why I think you should start thinking about world news for yourself

The world…

  1. The 8 billion
  2. 8 billion individuals
  3. 8 billion political animals
  4. 8 billion caged beings
  5. 8 billion inhabitants of Earth
  6. 7,359 languages in 200 countries
  7. A giant set of interlocking systems
  8. Stuff happens
  9. Uncertainty as life’s controlling idea
  10. What on earth is going on?

Old news, new news…

…more soon…

The slippery problem of ‘truth’…

…more soon…

You must think better for yourself…

…more soon…

The 8 billion

The United Nations has told us that there are already more than seven billion human beings alive on the planet. At the end of World War Two, there were just two billion.

For the next 100 years, the UN population projections vary, depending on how many babies we all have but—as far as I can see when I read the reports—it’s almost certain we will reach the eight billion people mark within the next 10–15 years.

If we imagine a person who was born in 1945 and will be eighty years old in 2025, we will have created six billion extra people in the space of a single human lifetime.

From where we are in 2011, the year 2025—in historical terms— is the same as ‘tomorrow’ in human terms. We should probably think about how we’re going to organise 8 billion people and about how we’re all going to try to get along together.

8 billion individuals

First, all 8 billion of us have to survive. We will normally struggle and fight, sometimes to the death, to achieve this first aim. The urge to live, to just be here, is strong in us. And we all need to eat and drink every few hours, continuously, for our whole lives. What we eat, and how much we eat, seems to have a terribly important effect on our quality of life, on our chances of survival and on how long we are here for. We also need somewhere to sleep, some clothes to wear and some water and soap to wash ourselves with.

In general, there appears to be what we might call an ‘action imperative’: we have to do something all of the time,. Even thinking, sleeping, relaxing and “doing nothing ” are all examples of “doing something”. So we must act. And our actions, whether we like it or not, whether we want to realise it or not, have consequences and they will produce some kind of result. They are creative.

All 8 billion of us are capable of bringing into this world, of creating, things and ideas and events which had never existed before. Some of these creative acts are predictable, others are not. The scale of each our our creations is unimportant, and we must not confuse creation with construction. What we create can inspire, comfort, anger or please others. It can build new environments and socities, and it can destroy them.

Strangely, though, whilst we all constantly have ‘something on our minds’, there seems to be no requirement for us to coordinate conscious thought with our actions, and in many cases it appears there is a shocking absence of any kind of thought behind many of the human actions we observe in the world. Many, most even, seem ultimately driven by emotions. And if there is no requirement for conscious thought being linked to human action, there seems to be even less of a requirement for some kind of intelligent conscious thought to precede individual human activity.

So we must act, and we are almost always ‘thinking’ but we need not link the two in any intelligent way, and the thoughts need not be complex. A simple fantasty will, and often does, suffice. We all use our vivid imaginations to build mental pictures or maps of the world, of ourselves, of others and of events. The thoughts we have do not need to be based on any kind of truth or reality in this world at all. They can, in fact, be complete fantasies, something we often find to be the case and something we often find to be most enjoyable.

If ‘truth’ is not so important, then what is? Belief. Belief and storytelling are required elements of human action. Faced with such large amounts of information, and such a staggering number of possibilites, so many risks and unknown opportunities, and the fact that it’s impossible for anyone to know it all, even atheists are condemened to believe something and to assume those beliefs as part of their identities, of ‘who they are’ in the world.

Particularly important in this sense are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves—our self-image—and about the world—our worldview. Who does each of us believe or imagine ourselves to be and what does each of us imagine to be happening in our world? Which values do we imagine ourselves to hold as supremely important—enough to struggle with or even die for occasionally? What do we believe to be the state of the world and the opportunities and risks it currently contains for us? What do we think its main problems are and how do we imagine a solution to those problems? And crucially, what role do we imagine ourselves playing within that world? How are we to act?

What is the right way to act? We all could do certain things at any given moment in time, depending on the range of possibilities open to us in our situation, and we all will do one of those things at some future time, but which is it to be? Which is the right way and which is the wrong way? Do we base our actions on a selfish disregard for others or do we introduce some element of morality and reframe the question, asking ourselves not what we could do or what we will do, but what we should do, or even what we must?

And how are we to act in the long-term? What shall our habits be? To what will we become addicted and on what will we choose to spend our time concentrating? Will we choose paths which resemble virtuous circles, thus increasing our prosperity and satisfaction or will we become addicted to vicious circles that lead us to premature waste and destruction?

We might speak of an ‘investment imperative’—or perhaps a ‘betting imperative’. If we imagine that we have at our disposal not just money, but also time, energy, attention and other resources, and that we get to choose what we’re going to do with them as far as certain quantities of each are under our control from time to time, we are all constantly investing in different ideas, in different adventures in our lives and in different new possibilities.

Mostly without thinking about where they will take us. All seven or eight billion of us.

8 billion political animals

…More information here very soon…stay tuned…