Why do we need to recover elders

We live in a world of reduction, while being told that we have unlimited possibility.

We are limited to one or two routes to truth (scientific and reason) while denying the other two vital routes of imagination and intuition.

We are increasingly limited to our access of perspective by those who control the public media space and with AI it may get much worse.

We have lost transcendence and mystery.

We have devalued myth to being something that isn’t real.

We have over-prioritised the Left Hemisphere of the brain and its dominance in all aspects of society and lost connection and the vital role of the Right Hemisphere.

We have become fixated on individualism and consumerism and lost connection with community and contribution.

We have become swallowed up in short termism and lost connection with legacy and our impact on the next seven generations.

We have become obsessed with measuring everything as the sole mark of whether it is true and reliable and lost sight of what is equally true and reliable but not easily measurable.

We fixate on the ‘I’ and have lost the ‘Thou’

Everything has become a ‘thing’, an it, an I, something to control rather than have relationship with.

Most people agree we live in a crisis of meaning and we have forsaken the tools to discover it.

What we all share in common is our humanity and yet we have little sense of what it means to be human and how to help each other to be the best humans we can be, for both the benefit of the ecosystem we are interdependent with and each other, who we are also interdependent with. Jonathan Glovers book Humanity[1]highlights that the 20th century was the most brutal in human history, so the idea that we are evolving into better people is questionable. In many instances we know what to do but lack the political, moral and organisational leadership to act. (We know what a crisis is and how to act in a crisis, but we don’t treat the climate crisis as a crisis).

Capitalism has moved the original idea of the economy as a mutually beneficial household (Gk. oikos) into an ism that seems to be separated from social equality and justice.

Aging has become about retirement.

Aspiring youth is about accumulation and status.

Fragmentation of the basic units of community have been instrumental in leading to epidemic levels of mental health challenges.

A breaking down and collapse of social and eco systems seems to increase.

Hope for the future is now fragile in the minds of many young people.

We desperately need to recover the elders!

[1] Jonathan Glover   Humanity      Yale University Press     2000