“God has not given us a spirit of fear but of power and love and of a sound mind.” 2 Timothy 1:7
This is my attempt to summarize what we can learn from this moment and where we can go from here, as humans and what that has to do with WRWK, TheWork FM, and my work as an individual in my 80+ years on this planet.
Life consists of humans looking to understand the world and then inventing ways to avoid, deal with or change it.
We can decide that the world is very dangerous where only the brutal survive, and we come to believe we must become dangerous to survive.
Alternatively, as thinking humans, we can decide to take control of the system and change it instead. We are, after all, homo sapiens, “wise men.”
Humans share many characteristics with other animals just as we share similar parts of our brain with them.
Whether you believe in evolution or not, the similarities are striking. Life is geared towards survival through change.
We can even see parallels with single cell organisms which can find food and avoid danger, or with chimpanzees which can find food, mate, avoid danger and share social functions to make life better for all of them.
Then there are humans with the stimulus response brains of reptiles, the social brains of chimps and then that something extra, a huge prefrontal cortex. This is the “something extra” that allows us to create realities in our heads that allow for us to see the one we live in even as we imagine a alternative one; and even how to inspire it into existence.
We have to accept the world we see but we must also imagine a better world, and the ways we can get there.
The dilemma is that we are something like 7 times more likely to act because of anger or fear than out of inspiration.
Anger and fear are hard-wired in ancient parts of the human brain. This leaves humans open to seduction, even self-seduction by their own fear and anger. And anti-social “leaders” are always looking for vulnerable people.
You see this commonly in fear based cults, political parties and religions. Fear and anger are also used to sell bigger cars, guns, defense budgets, and to get us to the polls.
Bigger cars, guns, swelling defense budgets and fearful and angry voters have seldom led to a better world though they can be very profitable.
Until the Russian leader decided to hold us all ransom to his paranoid and violent version of the world we could wallow in our ignorance and put up with his well documented misdeeds and other misdeeds closer to home.
Now that humanity is in his cross-hairs it is too late to avert his 20th century version of the world, where violence is still an option.
It is not.
As an example, hundreds of thousands of people have died in the USA, a far greater percentage than any other country, because for political advantage, many leaders of the fear and anger persuasion used the epidemic as a political football.
Thinking humans, this is your moment to put into action your ideas for the world you want. Don’t let fear and anger be your guide, look for leaders who can inspire you to new ideas for these new times.
Let’s go for it!
