Purpose or Perish

Purpose or Perish

FREEMANSPERSPECTIVE

Let’s be honest and admit that Western civilization has lost its sense of purpose. Western man has nowhere he’s going, has no great goal to accomplish. As a result, he and she have become listless, disappointed, and frustrated. Some still imagine that “democracy” will somehow ennoble them, but more are realizing the world model forced upon them was a patchwork of lies… that it has left them lost in the thickets.

Sadly, millions of people have never experienced this:

When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds: Your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.^[1]This passage comes from an Indian philosopher named Patanjali.

That’s how we are meant to live, and it requires a great purpose. None of the preapproved, mundane, collectivized purposes we’re fed by authority will do; this must be something that we care about by individual choice. Each of us has to see the goal independently, make the choice alone, and act without permission.

To illustrate this further, here are some thoughts from G.K. Chesterton:

Vigorous organisms talk not about their processes, but about their aims. There cannot be any better proof of the physical efficiency of a man than that he talks cheerfully of a journey to the end of the world…

… this great gap in modern ethics, the absence of vivid pictures of purity and spiritual triumph….

So, we need a purpose… a clear, large, difficult, and supremely noble purpose… one that engages us, body, soul, and spirit. And I have one to propose.

Our Amazing Opportunity

If you can pull yourself out of the 24/7 news fear cycle, the world view you learned in school, and the irrational superstition that politics actually helps us, an amazing sight appears before you:

Humanity is ready to transcend scarcity forever.

Yeah, I know, by all that’s holy in authorized mind-space, this is “ridiculous.” The people who’ve actually studied it, however, disagree.

Do you know who Norman Borlaug was? Probably not; I didn’t either until he died. Norman Borlaug saved a billion people from starvation. A billion. How? By more or less inventing modern agriculture. When crop yields double or triple, suddenly a whole lot of poor people have enough to eat.

So, coming back to my vision of trouncing scarcity once and for all, here’s what Mr. Borlaug said in September 2000:

I now say that the world has the technology – either available or well advanced in the research pipeline – to feed on a sustainable basis a population of 10 billion people. The more pertinent question today is whether farmers and ranchers will be permitted to use this new technology.

And Mr. Borlaug wasn’t alone. Julian Simon, who made a career of analyzing such things, wrote this in 1995:

We now have in our hands – in our libraries, really – the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next seven billion years.

If you want further info on this, see an article I wrote here, or several issues of my subscription newsletter.

The point is this: We already know how to feed, clothe, and comfortably house every human being on the planet. That’s no longer even disputable. No, we don’t actually do this, but we absolutely know how. And get this: There’s no longer any actual need to fight over resources.

Yes, I know this is heresy. Every right-thinking person knows that a war of all against all is eternal. Except that it’s not. It’s a lie that became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Large civilizations have lived peacefully for periods of a thousand or even two thousand years. Not possible? It happened!

So, are we less evolved than the people who lived peacefully 3,000 years ago? No, we’re not, but we’ve listened to the worst control freaks and believed their fear-porn.

Here, again to make our point, is R. Buckminster Fuller, who devoted his life to this subject:

We can now take care of everybody at a higher standard of living than anybody has ever known. It does not have to be “you or me,” so selfishness is unnecessary and war is obsolete. This has never been done before.

Our problem is no longer knowledge, or even resources. Our central problem is simply cooperation. And this will remain a problem so long as governments control humanity. Think of it this way:

Can you imagine a worse structure for cooperation than one that enforces “obey or we’ll hurt you”?

That’s precisely what governments do, and it’s the central reason people are still starving and homeless.

We can most definitely do better. But to do it, we’ll have to go around governments, “respected international organizations,” and the entire mindscape these hierarchies have spun. We have the science, now we need the will to use it.

So…

A purpose for the ages lies before us. Either we pick up such a vision and act upon it, or else (whether slowly or swiftly) we perish… and perhaps deserve to perish.

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If you’ve enjoyed Free-Man’s Perspective or A Lodging of Wayfaring Men, you’re going to love Paul Rosenberg’s new novel, The Breaking Dawn.

It begins with an attack that crashes the investment markets, brings down economic systems, and divides the world. One part is dominated by mass surveillance and massive data systems: clean cities and empty minds… where everything is assured and everything is ordered. The other part is abandoned, without services, with limited communications, and shoved 50 years behind the times… but where human minds are left to find their own bearings.

You may never look at life the same way again.

Get it now at Amazon ($18.95) or on Kindle: ($5.99)

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Paul Rosenberg

[Editor’s Note: Paul Rosenberg is the outside-the-Matrix author of FreemansPerspective.com, a site dedicated to economic freedom, personal independence and privacy. He is also the author of The Great Calendar, a report that breaks down our complex world into an easy-to-understand model. Click here to get your free copy.]