It would be hard not to see that there
exists a (albeit officially not yet declared) state of a globally wide
emergency. This emergency is unprecedented in the entire history of
humankind. Humans have run out of physical space. Until relatively
recently the wise way to solve disputes and the lack of fields to grow
crops on was to pack up one’s family and move onto a new, by other humans
not occupied, territory. To employ this stratagem of solving intergroup
differences is no longer possible. The landless and persecuted ones can no
longer go into a “New World”; the proverbial “young man” of New England
can no longer “go West”, and no islander can any longer set the sail for a
new, of humans devoid island. Yet, while the habitable space is limited
for humans, the problems and disputes that humans are creating for
themselves continue compounding themselves in the crucible of the world in
which the precious and base substances stay inseparably together to react
together again, with outcomes that are impossible to foretell. The only
sure prediction that can be made is that along with increasing wisdom, the
sufferings of the Earth’s inhabitants will also increase, - the suffering
generally affecting much larger number of beings than the number of those
who benefit by the increased wisdom. The more smarter computers and bombs
we have, the more homeless, hungry, criminal, imprisoned, and desperate
ones we have also, and their fate interests us less in inverted proportion
with their rising numbers.
We, the people of the academic cloth,
are directly responsible for this state of things in the world, because it
is us - the magisters - who are creating precious substances, but (at the
same time) it is also us who administer this world (most statespersons are
academically educated) and thus, directly and indirectly, we are also
creating all the misery that seems to be impossible to get rid of. Those
two aspects of actions performed by university created people imply that
the hands of alma mater do not know of each other’s doings, but the alma
mater should know! The state of affairs in the world is the direct result
of the woefully inadequate education of those who lead humanity. At
universities to care about the welfare of the world is a subject at the
bottom of a list that is headed by learning about how to excel in subjects
whose objectives are only arbitrarily held to be important, only in order
to decide who is going to be the leaders, and who is going to wash the
dishes. It is time to indeed “invert the paradigm” and put first things
first - there is a state of an acute emergency in the world that is being
inexcusably ignored.
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