My major interest in this blog is the emotional maturing of our culture. As such, I recognize that our civilization is very unstable — the recent Brexit events have made this clear; the ramifications of this choice by the people of Britain may reverberate for years to come, and likely will have an impact on the whole world.

As important as the impact will be, for me Brexit represents a move away from something (the European Common Market), rather than a move towards effective vision; I am not sure here what is being offered for the future, especially for cultural maturing. Bloomberg today, for example, notes that: “Britain’s departure from the European Union dealt what may be the biggest blow yet to globalization, challenging a decades-long embrace of freer movement of goods, services and people.” Personally I do not consider the globalization of consumerism to be a move towards maturity.

Where are we going? To what?

I have decided that my next posts will focus on what I imagine a mature culture would be like. Possibly this will require a considerable number of posts, so I ask the reader to bear with me.

I believe that the single greatest need we currently have as a species is to become a culture predominantly of cooperation. Competition will still be a part of who we are, but not the major part. How we are to get there is not clear.

But it is necessary. Metaphorically, as I look at my culture, it is like going into a drug store to buy toothpaste. I am confronted with a dozen different brands, and within each brand, there are another dozen options. I don’t need this ¾ I usually feel overwhelmed with too many unimportant choices; I just want some toothpaste.

I want to remind the reader of a post I presented a number of years ago, before I myself got temporarily overcome by the difficulties of climate change: The Issues of Global Warming, 20140713 and 20140716. There I pointed out that effective change has a number of components:

• a vision of where we are going,
• honesty of where we are,
• augmentation of the forces that allow movement forward, and
• diminishing of the forces inhibiting movement.

As indicated, my next postings will focus on where I believe we need to go.