Using our opposable thumbs to rebuild the world

Nature equipped mankind with opposable thumbs.

Nature ensured, also, that man would evolve with soft, sensitive pads on both those thumbs and opposing fingers enabling us to exploit our fine, evolving motor skills.

Nature, sadly, was unable to ensure a certain, and necessary, equity between our physical prowess and our intellectual skills and abilities.

Mankind’s numbers were quite small in the early unfolding millennia of our history with only some 30 million plodding about planet about 2000 years ago.

In what seemed instantly, at least in a geological sense, the growth in our numbers became exponential and in just a blink of time our numbers this year passed the seven billion mark.

The earth was groaning; it was full.

Interestingly it is not our physical size that has filled the earth, rather what our ill-balanced intellect has allowed.

Fundamentally we have evolved from being a hunter-gatherer based society to a cultivator of food supplies and that, associated with other basic improvements in our way of living, primarily the development and use of medicine, has lifted our numbers to levels beyond which nature can cope.

Humanity misunderstands it reason.

Throughout its chaotic evolution, mankind has equated success with growth and consumption and within that contentment is measured by the accumulation of material goods.

We are mistaken: success and its associated contentment should be measured by, and equated with, the resilience of communities, their strength and enrichment of neighbourhoods; neighbourhoods that are the core of life, rather a place from which people disperse every day as they pursue growth and enrich themselves to enable even more consumption.

Rather than devote ourselves and our time to further exploit our traditional system, we need to focus on working less within the existing processes and use that “new” time to be a part of life, engage with your community to make it a more vibrant , interesting and so exciting place to live.

That, I acknowledge, is utopian in hope, but the present promise of utopia favours a few and access to that sympathetic place hinges on a brutal individuality, a willingness to exploit the other and nature, and within and because of that threaten the wellbeing and future of all other species upon which human life irrefutably depends.

Employing those opposable thumbs, and our powerful thinking processes through which we can consider, plan, anticipate, exercise memory and understand our past, and decide how to behave to provide for the future, we have built a world that is stumbling blindly, it seems, toward the abyss.

Now is the time for us to abandon personal wants, act altruistically and build a life that has a truly civil society: open our eyes, step back from the abyss and working together, rethink and reconstruct our world.