A World of Limited Resources and Unlimited Ego. Is There a Way Back?
It is said that the progress of a civilization is measured by its ability to avoid self-destruction. But looking at the map of today's world, dotted with hotbeds of conflict that seem to never end, i ask myself with a pang: are we not witnessing, live, a profound and accelerated degradation of the human mentality?
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If we look beyond the political rhetoric and ideological justifications, most of today's wars seem to revolve around a single core: resources. Whether we are talking about oil, gas, rare minerals or simply the strategic control of trade routes, the mechanism behind it is the same. Someone, somewhere, is seeking to dominate everything.
This insatiable thirst for control is not just an economic problem; it is a symptom of a mentality that has degraded to the stage of primal instinct, although it is masked by modern technology. We have replaced diplomacy with force and empathy with algorithms of military efficiency.
What worries me most is not just the fact that these wars exist, but the way we, as a species, have come to perceive them. We have become spectators of suffering. We watch news reports about conflict zones as if they were action movie sequences, forgetting that beneath those numbers and maps lie broken destinies.
This emotional “numbness” is, in my opinion, the most visible form of our degradation. When the thirst for power of a few becomes more important than the right to life of millions, it means that our moral compass is not just faulty, but completely demagnetized.
We live on a planet with finite resources, but we behave as if our greed can be infinite. The idea of “mastering” everything is a dangerous illusion. History has shown us time and again that empires built on stolen resources and blood fall under their own weight. And yet, we learn nothing.
We seek to master the land, the water, and the sky, but we have lost our self-mastery. The current mentality seems to have regressed to a cruel pragmatism: “If i don’t have it all, i’ve lost it all.”
We must understand that a man who seeks to master everything is, in essence, a man who has lost touch with his own humanity.
Perhaps it is time to stop measuring a nation’s success by the resources it controls and start measuring it by the peace it can maintain. Otherwise, we risk remaining a species that, in its attempt to master everything, will end up with nothing left to master but its own ashes.
- What do you think? Are we at a tipping point, or has this always been human nature, we just now have more destructive means of expressing it?