A NEW NEWS ANALYZER

 

 

Much like a test solution to determine the properties of a particular matter/substance, a new type of analyzer to test news/events is being introduced through my new book LIFE ON MELTDOWN

 

Our world is full of wonders, news and new ideas. But our vision being severely confined to this highly mechanized system called the post-modern society, we are unable to see or comprehend them. Our vision of this world is a much shrunken one and looks the same in every direction. As the highly developed or modernized, we don’t know what it is like to be non-Modern. The modernity is the negation of pre-modernity in which mankind lived for millions of years. But suddenly cut from this long lineage or family tree, people of the highly mechanized post-modern society live like the proverbial ‘frog of the well’.

For the frog, the well is his world. He had been born there and not for a single day been out. He knows nothing of world outside. Little does the frog know the real world that lies outside of his well. Sometimes the birds would tell the Little Frog, “Hi, Little Frog! You see, the outside world is much bigger and nicer. It’s many times more beautiful than your little well at the bottom. But the Little Frog would not believe them and would answer back: “Don’t lie to me, I don’t believe there is any place that could be better than here.”

As the latest sub-species/links/branches/leaves of the grand old human family TREE that is standing on Earth since millions of years, we cannot confine ourselves as belonging only to modern or the post-modern societies. And so must be our vision: it has to be transnational, trans-civilizational and beyond civilizations and cultures. But this hi-tech, consumerist world is putting all sorts of limitations to your visions and possibilities.

Suppose you have a long lifespan of tens of thousands of years and you are in the habit of making periodic visit to Earth with an interval of two hundred years, and suppose you were to land on Earth today. The first thing you would notice about the  usual ‘green planet’ is, among thousands of new bizarre objects, the surprising sight of an unusually new ‘species’ moving all over Earth – PASSENGER CARS. You would see that they come in all shapes and sizes, colors and are of many different brands. You would attempt to count the cars, but would get lost quickly because no brain can comprehend a number so large.

Similar is the case with tens of thousands of various man-made materials/objects like the concrete jungles, and you would be dumbfounded by comparing your earlier vision of the ‘green planet’ which largely formed the image of Earth in all your previous visits since millions of years.  Well, this time you would be full of surprise and even be apprehensive of your own survival here on this ‘new’ Earth.

(Earth is now in a post-evolutionary phase, and we live at the end of Nature)

 

Actually you have a very clear vision that extends far beyond the modern civilization and your knowledge stretches far outside the modern knowledge industry.  In fact your world is unbounded and infinite. So are your possibilities. But this hi-tech, consumerist world is putting all sorts of limitations to your visions and possibilities.

Let us, for example, analyze a very recent global news/event, namely the news about the ‘Missing Plane’, the Malaysian Flight 370 with two hundred and thirty nine people aboard.

A plane from one of the most prestigious airlines in the world disappears on a popular air route after less than an hour in-flight. No trace of the plane. Not a whisper from the 12-member crew, not a trace of the 227 passengers. No terrorist claims. No calls for help. Just gone. No hint. Not in the sky. Not on the ground. Not in the ocean. No data trail. Imagine, in a world that is so steeped in data, driven by it, obsessed by it — we still have no clue what happened to Malaysian Flight 370–an airline that forced over 660,000 pounds into the sky.

Security of all world powers with their hi-tech claim is a laughing stock today. The high-tech camouflage of post-modern world is claimed to be a boon to stealth science: big data tracking and hi-tech surveillance. Is it so hard to accept that despite advances in technology, there’s no guarantee that things just won’t go inexplicably wrong?

Almost 99% of diseases in modern society were nearly non-existent among mankind for millions of years prior to modern age. Modern man may claim to have mastered high technologies that is capable of counting and measuring materials that are as tiny as 1/1,000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000th of a centimeter or can study phenomena so short-lived that they occur in 1/1,000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000th of a second with less than 0.000000001% chance of error or can claim to have discovered planets and stars that lie millions of light years away. However, he has miserably failed to find out trillions of tiny species called FREE RADICALS that have come to develop in our body, in modern age, that cause almost 90% of diseases that modern man suffers today, namely the degenerative diseases. And, interestingly, it has now been proved that it is mainly his new found technologies and methodologies that lie behind the generation of these trillions of tiny species that cause the diseases in the first place.

But the stark and pathetic reality is that we are still looking, using hi-tech tools, for truth, truth about the causes of our problems and their solutions, somewhere far away or far deep, for example, in far away Mars and Venus; in stars and planets that lie millions of light years away; or so deep in the micro world of atoms and inside the minutest particles that are as tiny as 1/1,000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000th of a centimeter; or we are studying phenomena so short-lived that they occur in 1/1,000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000th of a second,  and with less than 0.000000001% chance of ‘error’.

Today science is overtaking art in its capacity to expand minds and inspire awe. When this world tries to live by the wits of science, by playing deep game with it, science may succeed in providing the most beautiful and provocative images of ‘truths’ of our world – not to mention other worlds – and thus capturing  people’s imagination by this art of piquing public interest and using it to romanticize. But no scientific truth has fully stood the test of time till this day although we have ‘discovered’ many.

The problem is that, in our frantic and marathon race to find truth and thus to find solutions to our pressing problems, we are actually looking for it in the wrong place, placing our vision at the wrong direction and unnecessarily using a lot of hi-tech tools in the search. And the fact is that this truth is much within us, much visible in front of us, in our own neighborhoods, and truth itself is staring us right in the face. But miserably we look the other way.

Today we live in a consumerist, free-market world where the collusion among the merry-making politics and money-making market is the order of the day. In this world of big powers and giant markets, democracy has become the greatest hypocrisy. Money buys the political leadership much like our global money bigwigs buy IPL Cricket/Football Championships and the like.

The most popular events on television today are Reality TV shows. And, more people vote for the next star on modern society idol. Democracy is doomed to fail, forcing elected leaders to adapt their policies according to a clueless mob addicted to the virtual world of the monopolist media and market interest. With clueless crowd, democracy is political entertainment for politicians and TV channel debaters. We want more entertainment, in any form, to keep us occupied in between work and TV. We need something to discuss and feel important about. In short, market has produced enough ‘popular politicians as ‘democratic TV-priests’ to entertain and as such they will act and entertain us. Actually, the highly contradictory social environment is a windfall and premium for media and channel debaters, and they are indeed having a field day in stretching the debates to any length and to any direction they wish.

It is no surprise that when Nature controlled man or when there was no modern science around, man lived for millions of years; today, when he is doing the undoable–trying to control Nature—we are now inundated in all kinds of crises, many of them reaching their catastrophic tipping points, and threatening the extinction of mankind in a few decades from now.

Unless we watch ourselves, unless we become more aware of the serious problems our technology has brought us, our entire society could turn into a kind of super-automatized state of machines and systems. It is highly alarming to realize the fact that the post modern world possesses and ‘enjoys’ the technological capability of an adult when its moral responsibility is at the level of an infant. There is a real gap between the speed of technological advance and our understanding of its implications, and this gap is growing at an alarming rate. The tragic result is that the consequence of much of the booming existential risk is “not on people’s radars”. We simply don’t get such real messages in our mind.

Any breakdown of moral awareness and of the individual’s sense of his own worth makes all of us more vulnerable to mental coercion. Nazi Germany gave us the frightful example of the complete breakdown of all moral evaluations. In the S. S. society, racial persecution and murder became a kind of moral rule. All this may sound extreme. But the fact remains that any influence–overt or concealed, well or ill-intentioned–reduces our alertness, our capacity to face reality. Our desire to live as active, acting individuals, to assume responsibility and to face up to danger takes from us some part of our essential human-ness, the quality in us which strives toward freedom and maturity.

As a methodology to search and find truth, modern science, apart from its severe limitations, is only just one among many methodologies. Modern science understands only the surface of the verifiable seen or unseen matter and even then it can understand them only very partially. Science misses out on 95 to 99%of the functioning, laws, and principles of existence. In practical terms, modern science is filtering down to be an ideology of self-delusion and self-destruction. Thus science, as the basic cause, lies behind the dualistic thinking that misleadingly regards Nature as wholly knowable, technologically manageable and accurately replaceable, which is a fundamentally flawed theory that turned evolution as devolution, leading to the consequential ecological and social crises of contemporary modern society. Incidentally science is rapidly reaching its limit and has degenerated to a system that is less about understanding and more about manipulating, and hence the evolution of a ‘culture of denial’. B.F. Skinner wrote: “The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do…”

Thus modern (reductionist) science is severely limiting our vision. However many people, who are getting addicted to this highly mechanized and market-led world, know nothing aside from their own world. Actually our real world is unbounded and infinite. So are our possibilities. The author hopes you will support this cause by spreading this message.

To know more about this book, please visit the site www.humanfirst.in which has been developed exclusively for this book. To avoid confusion and bring consistency in understanding this new approach, please try to read the ‘Articles’ (essays) from the site www.humanfirst.in in the following order:

• The Birth of Machine and the Death of Man
• Technosphere: The Counterfeit of Nature
• Mechanization and the Survival of the ‘Wrongest’
• Immature Civilization Builders and Psychopathic Societies
• Modern Scientific Thinking Is the  Symptom of a Particular Mental Illness
• Divided We Fall: Industrial Revolution and Life on Breakdown
• Free Radical: The Corrupter of Nature
• Devolution of Humans as Parasites
• Life on Degeneration
• Neutering of Mankind
• Corporate Presidency of Degeneration
• Sick Man Sick Society Sick Planet
• Professionalism: The Bane of Civilization

 

 

Note:

Media can publish any essay from the above section by quoting the Book, LIFE ON MELTDOWN or www.humanfirst.in  as source.