Blog

Richard Bryant-Jefferies

I tend to comment on a range of issues and I have therefore created separate pages addressing different themes which can be accessed from the left.

I made the following comment on my old website a few years back. It remains as true today, and perhaps more so:

We need to start to reject the short-term, materialistic and consumer-centred values that have crept across the world like a cancer. We need to reject violence as the major element within our entertainment. We need to see the cult of celebrity for what it really is, a diversion from the real issues: Why is cancer and disease on the increase? Why is our society becoming more violent and intolerant? Why are we (in Britain) producing a new generation of weaponry having the capability of inflicting destruction on a massive scale? Why are so many exploited in order to feed the beast of consumerism? In short, we have to now take full responsibility for our actions and the effects that they have on others. That is the moral end ethical imperative facing us all in our 'globalised' world.

We need to ask serious questions of the societies that we live in. We need to ask what it is that ails our societies and our world. What is the purpose of life? What is it all about? Where do we find meaning? We need to seek out the co-operative and collaborative values that must lie at the heart of any possibility of a peaceful future. We must remember that peace is an effect, and not a cause. We have to create the right climate of human relationship and interaction in order for peace to exist, and this is true not only at an international level, but at national, community and familial levels too. And it starts with ouselves, with our attitudes and our choices.

We need more community. We need more compassion. We need more empathy for others. We need to place human relationship, good, constructive human relationship, as the goal of our endeavours. And we need to be better informed, to have more freedom to think for ourselves and not to be constantly fed by a media that simply wants headlines and greater circulation or viewing figures.

We also need more tolerance. Too many societies are wracked by intolerant attitudes. Democracy can only exist by consent and such consent we can see cannot be sustained where there is an unwillingness to accept a majority view.

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So, where are we today? It seems like everywhere we see a crisis of one form or another. And whilst they may appear separate, they are all linked. All crisis' in our world have a common factor - human-beings. It's out actions, often then linked to inactions, that create most of the crisis' in our world. And the common factor within human beings is self-interest, whether for us personally, our family, our community, our business, our multi-national organisation, our country, our bloc of countries. It sems the only thing that can and inevitably will jolt us out of self-interest is experiencing the painful effects of our actions. We seem incapable of collectively making constructive choices for the good of humanity and of the planet until we personally feel hurt by something.

The problem human beings then have is that when hurt we want to blame someone or something, rather than unravel what we might be doing that contributes to what has arisen and make changes in our own lives and areas of responsibility and influence - however small or large they might be.