[Joe Mc]

Originally Posted by davidsun

P.S. Here's a quote from the book I wrote wherein I pointing to the kinds of 'worsening' of 'suffering' which can result from too simplistic (superficial?) approaches to making Life more enjoyable for more people:

"Because most would-be health, education and welfare providers have concentrated on giving, and most would-be health, education and welfare seekers have concentrated on receiving, what increases or provides for the increase of instinctual pleasure and gratification, instead of augmenting Creativity they have basically just helped increase the number of human organs and amount of human creature-security, creature-comfort, creature-pleasure, and creature-aggrandizement on the planet. And this but temporarily, because the exponentially increasing wave of [u]instinctual[/i] activity they have thereby engendered now runs grossly amuck—our biological and cultural ecosystem has, as a result of their choices, been cannibalized and polluted to the point where Life on earth is inexorably, day-by-day becoming an ever more competitive, narrow self-interest dominated, desperation tinged, criminally exploited and chaotic scramble for instinctual perks in ever more barren and septic environs for a greater and greater proportion of those present.

What lies ahead is truly horrendous. Because we have, to such a great extent, both been seduced by and pandered to the urges of instinct, at least as many people will die from starvation, sickness, negligence or violence, inflicted either by fellow species members or Nature at large, in the next century as were alive at the beginning of this one. And that’s only the manifest tip of the iceberg. Ravaging angst will concomitantly wreak much more pernicious havoc in the realm of the soul."

P.S. The book was completed in 1999. 'Negative' (social and environmental) consequences have snowballed since then. My prediction now is that a much larger proportion of our population will perish in such fashion in the not too distant future. I take great comfort in the knowledge that there are afterlife realms in the GRAND scheme of things, so nothing 'good' (soulfully speaking) will be lost in the process.

Interesting to read David. My first thought was this guy is turning his canon on the poor ? If that was the case and I don't think it is it would just be another classical conservative attitude, blame the people at the bottom, but I think your trying to say something psychological or spiritual here about dependency in general. I watched a documentary this week about the house of Saud, Saudi Arabia and it's vast domestic and international maneuverings in the the world. The huge corruption involved with astronomical amounts of money involved too. Lots of this activity is passed off as business, if lesser mortals were to conduct such transactions they would be now in a prison cell I'm sure. What I want to say is that probably world economic and social development matters as much as peoples attitude's, does one effect the other, yes it probably does but most of my life I've seen people take astute analysis like the one you've made above and use it to blame those at the bottom. That was all David. Thanks.