Sustainable Development vs. Artificial Armageddon

In 1998, after observing activities of the Christian Right in California where I was living and working, I predicted what was going to happen. And it did. I knew what they were up to, and I described them as Nazis of America. I knew that they were going to seriously undermine, the country, and they did just that. And now it is time to pick up the pieces.

To be fair, the ideologies of the 1990s that they have replaced were full of hideous error. Political correctness made it impossible for people to say what they thought, resulting in massive hypocrisy and strangulation. The idea that everything is about self-esteem created an inverted value system in which those who have lowest standards for themselves and thus find self-esteem most easy to come by dominated those who have higher standards and thus find it less easy to think as well of themselves. The brain-dead concept of adequacy dating from Alfred Adler, and the perversion of the concept of winners and losers from Eric Berne, turned people into enemies of one another, kept people from doing good to others, and allowed entities to play divide-and-conquer and to ensnare both those who thought themselves winners and those who were seen as losers. The war waged by worst elements among feminists against beauty, love, tenderness, warmth and goodness made the climate so toxic and horrible that people flocked to any ideology that might protect them from it, including ideologies that were completely destructive. The DSM-II psychology with its erroneous concept of what is health - and consequently erroneous concept of what is sickness - aimed to - and, where implemented, did - rob America of its sources of creative thinking, ingenuity, risk-taking, passion and greatness, reducing the productivity of its science, impoverishing people’s minds and relationships, and keeping true innovation from taking place. And the New Age idea that everyone makes their own reality – that no one can either help or injure another – that everyone is in control of everything that others do to them – and that someone to whom bad things have been done caused them and will be bad for everyone else - stopped people from doing good, denied assistance where it was needed, kept people strangulated in bad situations, and supported corruption, cruelty, crookedness, callousness and conmanship all around.

What followed however was not an improvement but degradation. What followed was a totalitarian misogynistic apocalyptic cult that warred, with predictably disastrous results, against human rights, liberty, peace, prosperity, science, reason, women's rights, and democracy itself. What followed was the darkest hour in American history since Second World War, with none of its glory. What followed was a Giant Leap Backwards to 19th century and an undoing of the accomplishments of civilization that took place since then.

There was - and is - another totalitarian misogynistic cult attempting to war with this one and with the rest of the world. And to both of the preceding, it is time to say: You do not have the right values to lead. If you believe that it is OK to conceive - and work toward - a world that ends before your children or grandchildren have reached maturity, and where the bulk of the people wind up in hell, then you do not have the right moral values to lead the great countries of the world. Having gone into one of these cults - and having had close personal relations with people from the other - I have come out having made a moral decision. And the decision is this: I would rather burn in Hell than conceptualize and work toward such a future, or be a part of any entity - secular or religious - that does.

And I hope that more people of goodwill and intellect - and ones of either of the preceding - make the same choice.

It becomes incumbent to move away from both errors - those committed in 1990s and those committed in this decade - and work toward a sustainable, peaceful, beautiful, long-term future. To use high-technology, high-intelligence, high-job-creation abundant clean energy solutions to provide for the world of civilization that man has created while impinging minimally on world of nature that man has not. To fully fund nanotechnology, stem-cell research, and genetic cures for cancer and congenital disease. To create synthetic life-forms to eat the plastics and clean out the landfills - to replant rainforests - to support both public and private space travel, resulting in colonization of Mars and Moon and eventually long-distance space travel. It is time to develop and put to work human brilliance, passion and inspiration and create a long-term beautiful sustainable future for humanity.

It is time to create true family values - values that allow in relationships for men and women to have meaningful roles suitable for who they are; that teach men to respect their wives, and teach all parties to have the attitude, respect and goodwill to negotiate among themselves and work together to better future for both their daughters and their sons. To create beautiful, loving relations between men and women, where women are respected as being women and do not have to act like bad men in order to gain equality or respect. To teach men how to treat their wives nobly and to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law domestic violence and child abuse.

It is time to create better social values - values that celebrate and make room for the fulfilment of beauty, intellect, caring, insight, and benevolence, both in women and in men. It is time to create better psychology - psychology that affirms, accepts, and allows to manifest and constructively implement, human genius, insight, brilliance, greatness, ingenuity and love. And it is time to create better moral values - values that accept life, celebrate life, and reward what adds to it and leads to its richness and continuity.

It is time to create covenants that respect all these things and tap into their endless resources in humanity to avail of their riches and employ them for benefit of the present and ages to come. It is time to sustain such covenants by values and ways affirming and hospitable of the above. It is time to move away from oppressive, destructive, malicious mentalities - secular or religious - and replace them with mindsets affirming of life, in its natural and man-created aspects, allowing a replenishment of nature, continuous prosperity and accomplishment of the civilization, and affirmation and constructive fruition of both natural and creating aspects of human being.

It is time to use intellect not to divide but to create, and to strive for win-win scenarios. It is not nature or civilization, reason or feeling, love or equality, spirit or body, business or government, doing good or doing well; with true use of mind, it is both in every duality. And by being employed to do the tasks necessary to make possible the preceding, intelligence - now a tool of combining and creating instead of dividing - becomes a path to true peace, to constructive sustainable integration, to life being seen and given path to benefit at all levels. At which point intelligence - which has at all times been the true saving grace of humanity - becomes saving grace once again and a basis for a long and beautiful future.

It is time to look at the inherent logic of the beliefs - secular and religious - and trace them to their logical consummation. And by doing so, to predict their effect on the world. Whether a secular belief that claims that creativity, ingenuity, passion, originality, inventiveness, greatness and love are pathological - or a religious belief that claims that women are root of all evil, that nature and physicality is of the Satan, that the only good in the world comes from the belief and that all else is going to hell - can be traced and easily found out for their results. The first being, stagnation and decline and graying of the world - and the second being, a totalitarian misogynistic abusive world-gobbling apocalyptic cult. And then it becomes possible to create better ways, better values, better traditions, that tap into instead of suppressing the genius and beauty and greatness that lives in humanity, and apply them toward creating a beautiful livable sustainable peaceful world.

At this point the choice is really nothing less. Will humanity bring an Armageddon upon itself before the babies born in this baby boomlet have learned how to read, or will the future extend indefinitely and reach ever greater beauty and ever greater accomplishment. These are momentous times in world history, and it is up to us to decide which world will be bequeathed to our children and theirs and ones after them.

This, is the true moral choice facing this generation. And it is a choice that will resonate - on earth or in any conceivable afterlife - for ages to come.