“History’s Clock Is Ticking” (Linkedin)
My new article on Linkedin “History’s Clock Is Ticking”
If you look at the world from a bird’s-eye view, you will see that its parts are gradually coalescing. We may approve or disapprove of the process, but it is both involuntary and irreversible. And the more we coalesce, the more frictions emerge. The trajectory of reality is unchanging—toward greater connection, greater interdependence, and greater integration. What may change is how we experience it. If we object to it, it will be painful and bloody. If we embrace it, it will be easy and joyful.
There used to be ideologies, ideals, and doctrines that people strove to implement in order to establish what they believed was a successful way for society to conduct itself. Now, the masses are awakening the world over, and they don’t care about ideals or doctrines. If they feel solidarity among them, they will support the government that makes them feel it. If they feel division, they will revert to aggression and violence, as is happening now.
No regime, anywhere in the world, will succeed these days, and the world will decline into more and more chaos, since no regime aspires for connection. None of today’s world leaders are suitable for the task of uniting the people since the motivation of all of them is power, and not the well-being of the people. While this motivation was enough to establish a stable government before, today it will not work. If it goes against the movement of nature—the trajectory of reality toward connection—it will not work.
It’s not as though governments will fall to pieces tomorrow, but the trend is clear, and nothing that leaders might do can change it. The direction of today’s governance must be toward connection in the public. If leaders want the public to connect to them, while they are on top and the public is subordinate to them, this is not connection and it will not work.
History has its own clock. One tick at a time, it is moving toward its final goal: the union of all of humanity into a single entity. As it moves, it exposes our inherent aversion to it. The abhorrence of otherwise civilized people toward people who hold different views is only the prelude. The chasm will deepen and so will the suffering until we decide that we have no other way to live except together. We, humanity, can choose to go by the short and pleasant path of connection, or by the long and painful one of division and hatred.
We should not wait for leaders to take us on the path of connection. As stated above, their sole interest is power, their own. Connection among people contradicts their aim since if people are united, they don’t need many governors and big governments. Only when people are divided do we need to compromise and governors can alternate seats, and in the end, benefit themselves at the expense of the public. Therefore, we should let governors govern, while we nurture our connection regardless of their intentions to divide.
Also, and this is important, connection does not mean sameness. In order to build successful societies we must cultivate our differences, not bury them. When we use our uniqueness to complement each other and create a more complete society, rather than to compete against others and strive to supersede them, life becomes simple and easy, and there is abundance for everyone.
When we use our differences for the common good, we create flexible and responsive societies that can adapt to any situation and make the most of it. Just as a body utilizes different parts of itself to perform different tasks, whenever social or economic conditions change, a diverse but unified society will be able to respond to it much better and use its diversity to grow stronger rather than disintegrate and leave its members vulnerable.
The bottom line is that we must not wait for leaders to do our work for us, and we must not expect them to improve our lives. If we want a good life, we will find it in unity with everyone, when we make unity our topmost value, rather than this or that political idea. Society, as I said in the beginning, is coalescing. Only if we embrace our differences and use them to forge unity will we go through this process successfully. But if we succumb to the notions of separation and aversion, we will sow wind and reap the storm.
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Michael Laitman, On Quora:
