John Vespasian - THE MIRAGE OF A PERFECT WORLD AND WHY YOU SHOULD AVOID IT

One day, human beings will inhabit a perfect world. There will be no violence and no poverty. Productivity will be high and consumption will take place without waste. Everybody will be free and healthy. The environment will always remain clean and nature, most of the time, green.

Discussions are ongoing about how long it is going to take us to get there. Some say a hundred years, others speak about seven times seven generations. Giving a precise estimation is a difficult question, since reaching the goal depends on so many factors.

The positive side of having ambitious plans for the world is that they keep people busy reading newspapers, watching debates on TV, listening to talk radio, campaigning for this or that cause, making speeches or pretending to listen to them. The bad news is that those activities, whether taken all together or one-by-one, will have little effect on your own life.

The more passionate you are about improving society, the harder it will be for you to accept the world's fundamental inertia. Even if you devote all your resources to a single goal, give up sleep, and work at your cause year after year, chances are that your achievements will remain modest.

There are powerful reasons for this:

1. Fundamental changes in society take place only at low speed.
2. From the perspective of human lifespan, even major world improvements can remain imperceptible.
3. The dominant change paradigm is false. The truth is that rapid technical innovation does not necessarily bring profound changes to society.
4. New technologies often do little but reinforce traditional views.
5. Making the same old mistakes faster does not improve anything.

You will find irrefutable proof of my thesis by opening any History book at random and reading a few paragraphs. In hindsight, we can tell that the Roman Empire was doomed already by the beginning of the 3rd century. The effort of millions of people during the following thousand years did not manage to save it, only to prolong its agony.

Is the fact that we will never get to live ourselves in a flawless society a reason for despair? Should we let the mirage of perfection paralyse our actions? Absolutely not. Psychologically, cynicism is as lethal as perfectionism. The answer to the riddle is rationality.

By all means, do work at improving society, but make sure that your actions generate also short-term victories that you can enjoy in your own lifetime. Do be idealistic and seek to eradicate world problems, but do it in an affordable way.

Nothing is gained by your going bankrupt for a good cause. Nobody is helped by endless discussions about what society will look like in a hundred years from now.

One day, human beings will inhabit a perfect world. That's a great place to dream of. That's a wonderful target to aim at, provided that we keep our present actions focused on the small gains that make our daily happiness.

[Text: http://johnvespasian.blogspot.com]

[Image by (~ +) Luis Barreto under Creative Commons Attribution License. See the license terms under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us]