We should measure the prosperity of a nation not by the number of millionaires, but by the absence of poverty, the prevalence of health, the efficiency of the public schools, and the number of people who can (and) do read worthwhile books.
W.E.B. DU BOIS
Have you truly considered how much wealth exists on our planet?
At the suggestion, one may think of money and contemplate some vast number of overall monetary units.
Leaving those values at the sideline, we might instead look to natural resources. Fresh water, air, food, medicine, raw materials, and create our value through those means.
Beside that, we would look to other resources of intelligence, capability, determination, technology, knowledge, etc.
Regardless of the values of measurement, wealth is most easily recognized by quality of life, happiness, contentment, health, opportunity and so on.
Our planet is as wealthy as anything in the universe of which we are aware, and most probably more so.
Yet, we as a species, seem to be the biggest problem.
There is a sense that aggregated wealth equals the core component to happiness, rather than a communal desire to have everyone feeling the benefits of such a world.
Those who have found a way to collect the largest sums of these units of value are the tiniest minority of our overall population. Some will ultimately make a pledge that they will eventually donate most of it back to society through philanthropic means. Whereas others, are clearly willing to squander those resources to their own personal gluttony, and hoard the wealth to the point of leaving billions of people disenfranchised from the opportunity to participate and live a life well-lived.
To contemplate the alternate methods for how this might work, we are left with the concepts that have thus far failed in their work to elevate a large volume of people to a higher living standard. Nomenclature notwithstanding, Capitalism, Socialism, Communism, Monarchy, and Anarchy are all proven to be substantially less than perfect in their ability to fully deliver a society in which all are genuinely prospering.
Rather than taking these wealth of resources on our planet and building a perfect system in which our planet operates at full efficiency and the natural resources are utilized intelligently to serve the population at large, we are now watching the trillions of dollars being expended to potentially colonize another planet and expand the human footprint across the galaxy.
Human beings, being what they are, are the problem. Our drive creates the energy to propel us into accomplishing anything that we wish. Our need for diversion from the daily humdrum of life creates a vacuum that grows ever larger with the increase of technology to propel those diversions to societies that can pay for them, and as a direct consequence, sucks the financial resources away from properly distributing those resources into properly funding education at large, by paying for the highly desired entertainment diversions with ungodly sums of money.
We can do better. We must do better.
Happy Wednesday!
Brian Weiner 