There was a message going round the net some time ago, stating, amongst other
things:
a) If you condense all the world's population to 100 people, 6 people would own
59% of the world's resources and they would all be from USA; 70 would be
analphabet; 50 would be starving.
b) If you have enough food, enough clothers, a roof, and a bed, you are richer
than 75% of the world's inhabitants.
c) if you have any money in a bank account, you are among the 8% richer people
of the world.
The most disgusting, and immoral thing of all, is that consumerism is still
trying to fill our heads with artificial needs, thus
further reducing the chances of anyone outside that 6% to have any piece of our
wealth. How can you be generous to the poorer when it's so hard for you to just
make ends meet? Who's gonna pay for your car, your house, your food, the college
for your children, your (so unsatisfactory) vacations, if you don't defend each
penny with teeth and claws? I also suspect that the trends are not positive for
what concerns the fair distribution of resources on earth.
In my elaborations of the MOQ, I have come to identify (intellectual) SQ with
the personal world each of us lives in, made by his/her beliefs as to what is
good and what is better, and to identify DQ with the force that drives us
towards better worlds, made of better beliefs. Every system of (static) beliefs
preserves some good and also perpetuates some evil, some unseen, unthought of,
mistake. When we finally see (part of) this mistake before our eyes, we have to
drop some of our beliefs and struggle to find a solution, and that's where DQ
comes into play, helping us to build up a better belief system where the
intellectual wound is healed.
Mass media and other phenomena that david so eloquently described seem to be
powerful tools to put low-quality beliefs in our heads. We are very smart and
sophisticated in many respects, but our eyes are mostly blind to some of the
most devastating problems of our planet now. Eventually we see that our belief
system about the future isn't working anymore. Maybe that's when we understand
that we are *both* believing that everything's gonna be allright as long as we
earn a comfortable living for ourselves and our children, *and* that the planet
is going down a slope of self-destruction. When we understand that we are *both*
believing that technology is making our lives better *and* that it only applies
to 6% of the world's population, while the rest is busy killing each other for
beans to resist another day without starving.
The problem also is: it is not bad intellectual, individual patterns that are
doing this. It is large-scale economic and political patterns. The Internet is
something new and powerful, and maybe we have not yet learnt how to use it. Or
maybe there's really no chance to invert the process. But still, the only
Quality attitude we can have is to try -
Andrea
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