Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
The world we are living in is unifying itself at a prodigious rate. And this is not the
will of institutions. Andy made reference to what a con this drug war is, because it's
making so much money for so many people. The chief function of institutions appears to
be to retard progress and to keep their criminal enterprises bubbling merrily along on the
side. Meanwhile, the rest of us, the masses of people struggling to come to terms with
the end of history can see, can feel, that what we need is a sense of unity. Not an idea
of unity, not an ideology of unity, because if there ever was an ideology of unity it
was communism and the pieces are still falling from the explosion of that system of thought.
We need a feeling of unity. Feeling is primary. So, it doesn't come out of intellectual assertion,
it comes out of a personal act of courage made by the individual. An act of courage
which involves surrender. Surrender is the opposite side of ego. The central of issue
of our times is our inability to surrender to what we know is right. We have the ability
to feed the hungry, we have the ability to educate our children, to clean up our environment,
to eliminate sexism, so eliminate racism. The question is can we change our minds fast
enough. Not can we change our minds, but can we change them fast enough. The momentum of
the institutions that were created out of the collapse of medieval society has become
so great, the momentum toward a lethal conclusion, that if we don't act quickly to pull ourselves
out of this power dive, eventually the political world, the resources, even the infrastructure
will not be there to support this kind of an reorienting of our thinking. If you state
your self-identity on the aggrandizement of a single atom of humanity, which you call
your Self, then what hope is there for creating a coherent, communal future. None, I submit,
and I believe that's the position that we are in. We need a radical intervention in
the evolution of our social psychology.