Each of us has a sense of what it is that worsens our
wellbeing but, it seems, we can’t look away.
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| Charles Mackay |
It is a frequently witnessed reality: those moments when the
life of someone who appears to have it all unravels because they are unable to
avert their gaze.
However, the dilemma is not just a concern for individuals
as with seemingly no effort it can quickly ratchet from just a few to engulf
many becoming what 19th century author, Charles Mackay, described as
“the madness of crowds”.
Mackay wrote, seemingly prophetically with regard human-induced
climate change, about the continuing folly of the human race and its
institutions, along with the distortions and peculiarities that we abide by and
make us less than we could be.
Mackay wrote with intensity in nearly 600 pages about
everything from Tulipmania (a period in the 16th and 17th
centuries when both the rich and not so rich were paying massive sums for tulip
bulbs) and alchemy to the Crusades and haunted houses.
The “madness” Mackay wrote about continues today with many
similarities, but loaded with, and worsened by, some modern distortions.
Mackay’s ideas are still relevant with some, fortunately a
minority, being doubters of the unquestionable evidence of human impact on the
stability of earth’s climate.
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| Charles Mackay's "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds". |
Most seem to acknowledge our impact on earth’s ecological
wellbeing, but with it comes an even more sinister difficulty with just a few
of us able to free ourselves from our consumptive behaviours: a way of living
that considering the undeniable evidence is a sort of Mackay-like madness.
The broad well-being of society is presently inextricably
linked to the economy and that is another madness from which we need to avert
our gaze and consider with an equal passion the integrity, health and
well-being of people.
The idea that is profit and growth has long been and
intimate part of human affairs, but it is one which has had a royalty-like
bizarre respect since the Industrial Revolution some 200 years ago and as that
paradigm has enlarged, the quality of life for most has reduced.
Human induced climate change has an impact beyond the
control of any one nation and we, certainly the developed nations, need to
break the monopoly that the military, industrial and entertainment complexes
have on our gaze, look away, take note of what we see and understand that all
in the world is not quite as it should be.
The undeniable facts pointing to human induced climate
change remind me what the late US Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan said: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion,
but not his own facts”.
Our gaze, and
opinion, reveals its own facts and wrongly, we frequently cling to those illusions.
