My Suggestions For Achieving World Harmony

Good and evil exist in the world. This is true whether you like it or not. We are encouraged to believe that there is nothing to be done about it. I am no longer sure that that is entirely true. I certainly believe that there are no instant, magical solutions that we as individuals could apply to the problem of worldwide good and evil, but there are opportunities for us to begin to move the ball in the right direction. We are all stronger and more capable than people have ever been, thanks to new technologies that we are already taking for granted. This might be a good time to revise our big-picture strategies and goals.

Any ideas that concern helping people are immediately challenged by a wave of negative energy. Whatever is proposed would be “too expensive,” or is “impractical,” or even “socialist!” This is true even of good things that have worked successfully in the recent past, like free education through university and widespread, inexpensive health insurance. The wave is paid for and supervised by people who do not have the best interests of society in mind. Here is a good place to include the definitions section of today's essay.

Good generally consists of orderliness, cooperation, empathy, compassion, and love.

Evil generally consists of chaos, self-interest, greed, violence, bigotry, and hatred.

Admittedly, I will be praising herein the attributes of good that are listed above, while condemning the attributes of evil. That does not make me some kind of communist, nor a crazy left-wing liberal wealth redistribution fan, nor a dirty hippie, nor even a Pollyanna. Hell, I'm not even an optimist. I am, I believe, a very practical person, a responsible adult, and I am in most ways a centrist, with fiscal-conservative tendencies. It is my advised opinion that there is plenty of room in the political center for good, and I believe that moving world society in the direction of the general good is a practical goal.

If you, dear reader, find yourself defending chaos, self-interest, greed, violence, bigotry, or hatred, and if you find my attacks against these things unfair, you should probably consult a mental health professional, just to be on the safe side.

It is usually the practice on this blog for me to complain about things and then offer no solutions. Today, however, we'll be moving to the solution portion of the text shortly. The subject here is promoting good while discouraging evil. My ideas along these lines echo homilies that have always been in the air, little blasts of good-will that our friends share now on social media. Bits of Buddhist or Christian wisdom reduced to greeting-card sized messages of good will. The problem is not that they are wrong or foolish. The problem is that in their brevity they are easily misunderstood, or not understood at all. It's amazing that you can hear something over and over again but still fail to understand it.

Take, for example, the simple admonition that one constantly hears in golfing circles, “hit down on the ball!” Everyone agrees that you must hit down on the ball in golf. I played golf for forty years before I understood what that the phrase means. For forty years, the picture in my head was of a golfer holding a club aloft like an ax and swinging it down in a hitting motion like someone playing Whack-A-Mole. I was beginning to think that maybe I was crazy, or maybe all of the “hit down on the ball” people were crazy. It came to me suddenly on the driving range one day. All it means is that you must begin your swing forcefully! The club-head should describe an almost perfect circle, and there is a momentary pause at the top of the back-swing, before the swing portion of the exercise is begun. From that pause, hit down on the ball with some force. Don't start the movement lazily and build up speed. I still don't know why this is referred to as “hitting down on the ball,” but I now understand what it means. This kind of misapprehension happens all the time.

We are told to “love people,” and “help people,” we are warned against acquisitiveness and longing for things, we are asked to consider other people's needs and to help them. From the look of things, the understanding of these concepts remains at the low ebb at which it has coasted along for all of recorded history.

Here, now, the lesson.

I'm going to start small. Consider, if you will, a married couple. This is a subject that I know something about. If you observe a married couple in which the husband concerns himself mostly with his own happiness, and the wife is equally focused on her own happiness, that marriage is doomed to failure. It cannot survive. Both husband and wife are being selfish, and they lack empathy and love. They are both failing to cooperate in the enterprise of marriage. Divorce is inevitable.

If, on the other hand, you come across a married couple for whom the best interests of the other party always come first, you are witnessing a successful marriage. If the husband wakes up every morning fully determined to do everything that he can to make his wife happy, and considers her feelings and needs before acting even in small matters, and if the wife does the same as regards her husband, the marriage is and will remain successful. It's as simple as that.

Note that the husband and wife in the second example are making themselves happy by devoting themselves to the happiness of the other. This is the beauty and wonder of it: by being generous of spirit and considerate, each spouse is also helping themself.

Scaling up slightly, consider a band consisting of four or five musicians. Any kind of band, a wedding band, a jazz combo, a chamber music ensemble, a thrash-metal band, any kind of band at all. If all of the band members are only concerned with making themselves sound good as individuals, the band sounds like shit on a stick. If the players are selfish, the band loses the musical idea. If, on the other hand, all of the band members concentrate on making the band itself sound good, the band will have a chance at achieving that true magic that is the goal of shared music. When the band is really humming, individuals hardly hear themselves playing at all. They hear the band; they hear the shared music. I can tell you from experience, you can hear yourself playing in the mix, but it is almost removed from the physical act of playing your instrument. There is a selflessness in the musical experience that would be wise for us to cultivate in our experience of human society.

Scaling up a bit further, this idea of concentrating on the success of the group also works very well for team sports, especially sports that require a certain flowing action in the motion. Sports like soccer (football to the rest of the world), or basketball. The best players visualize the flow of the entire team; they know where all of the players will be at any moment in the near future. They can see the plays in slow motion, and they can pass wordless cues to their teammates. This level of cooperation and group-interest makes teams great. I've seen soccer games where individual players were trying to go it alone, and it almost never works.

There is a strong strain of selfish interest in the world these days. Many individuals, and many individual families, are engaged in a futile contest to see who can accumulate the most money. The buy-in on this contest is way up in the tens of billions by now, with the top winners passing the hundred-billion mark as we speak. I say “winners” because the participants obviously see it as a contest. I say “futile” because all of these rich assholes have long since surpassed the greatest amount of money that anyone could possibly hope to use or benefit from in any way. The entire game is ridiculous. I use the term ridiculous advisedly.

Some of these individuals still earn money by selling things, but some of the things that they sell are themselves ephemeral. Microsoft and Amazon sell mostly things that exist as computer files. It's like one of the old gangsters said about prostitution: it's a great business, you got it, you sell it, you still got it. Other rich bastards make money out of thin air, like those who sell securities based on future earnings or market fluctuations. Amazingly, much of the new wealth is created from debt. (I have that one on good authority, although I don't totally understand it myself.)

Instead of allowing all of this squandered, stolen money to pollute our politics and strangle the entire world, it would be better to seek ways to cooperate in the alleviation of suffering in the world. Society must eventually cut back on all of this pointless competition and scale back the ambitions of individuals who aspire to wealth that is beyond imagination or utility. Strategies and tactics for achieving those things are beyond the scope of a mere blog, so let's start small, shall we?

A good beginning might be to start thinking of ourselves as “us,” instead of “us and them.” It's not so hard. I also have a suggestion about that. I was as crazy as most young people when I was young, and I would just shoot my mouth off about this and that, like many young people are wont to do. Then a few years went by and I found myself happily married with two nice children. I loved those children beyond measure, as a young parent might. They needed me, and I enjoyed their company. The experience of parenthood put life in a different light. The whole thing became more real, and I felt more connected to the world and to the future, and to the past. When they were up and running around, I got to know their little friends. It seemed only natural to expand the circle of love to also include the friends.

That's how it goes, how it went for me anyway. The circle kept getting bigger. My children; their friends; their friends' families; all of the children at their schools and their families; Los Angeles; California; America; the world. It seemed natural to me. Why draw lines? Children are children, why not take care of them all? Take care of them by helping their parents to have better lives. The best way to help children is to help their parents. Why don't we just take care of everybody? Well, why not?

Did I say that I wasn't a Pollyanna? I still don't think that I am. What is so Pollyannaish about taking care of everybody? There is plenty of money and resources in the world to do it. No one is suggesting that we change every single aspect of our current system all at once. That would be the biggest revolution in history, and we have all seen where revolution leads. It leads to war and mass death. No, far better to take it in steps. The only thing standing in the way is evil. Self-interest and greed lead to bigotry and hatred, which leads to violence and chaos. If people have security and can be free to benefit from their efforts and raise their children in peace, the result would be a flourishing of good. Wouldn't that be nice?

Well, wouldn't it?