Our vocabulary is inadequate to help us understand and
address dilemmas presently facing humanity.
What is evolving, what faces us, what must be addressed and
so resolved are changes to our lifestyle so different from our experience,
understanding and knowledge that they are beyond language; they have a complexities
that largely exceed quantitative and qualitative description.
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| Lester R. Brown. |
Standing between us and the resolution of those difficulties
is, oddly, democracy and, understandably, the egotism, individualism and the
natural human hunger for what is better that drives the concept that is
capitalism.
Democracy has been society’s friend for centuries, but the
resolution of the world’s climate difficulties, dealing with the exhaustion of
our finite resources and managing the intricacies of the world’s imploding
economy needs an authoritarian-like government: or maybe a kindly dictator.
The long-term survival of society and its maturity to something
in which people are put before profit will force the abandonment of what is
understood to be capitalism; finally we will grasp that the blatant antagonism of
capitalism is foreign to the broad wellbeing of society.
One of Europe’s leading experts in sustainability strategies
and corporate responsibilities, French woman, Elisabeth Laville, has argued
that the rich of the world (that’s you and I) should be focussed on increasing
their wellbeing, while decreasing material possessions.
Laville’s ideas can only be implemented if maturity brings
with it a comprehension of the terms, the ideas, the concepts and the
vocabulary that allowed the construct of an unbalanced world; a world that
favours the rich both in terms of possessions and around that, rights.
Our vocabulary is our identity and although one is no better
than any other, in our capitalistic world those “who have the gold, make the
rules”.
Those “rules” are obviously not working, but the vocabulary
which supports and authenticates them is embedded in our language and the
survival (literally) of our society hinges on us truly understanding the
implications of what it is we are saying.
Writing in the preface to “How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse” Lester R. Brown said it was not easy to talk about the
prospect of social collapse,
because it is difficult to imagine something we have never experienced.
“No generation has faced a challenge with the complexity,
scale, and urgency of the one that we face,” he said.
Discussing the
collapse of civilizations Brown quoted former Rockefeller Foundation president,
Peter Goldmark, who said: “The death of our civilization is no longer a theory
or an academic possibility; it is the road we’re on”.
Signposts
urging us to change direction abound, but we need to understand and comprehend the
vocabulary in which they are written or we will continue on this troublesome
road.
