by Elton Gahr

Created on: May 04, 2009

It is quite clear that there is something fundamentally wrong with the world. There is some crack in the foundation of all society. This understanding has existed for as long as civilization has. We have ancient religions that tell us of a fall from grace into the world we have now. They tell us we are cursed, and perhaps we are but what is that curse?

First we must examine the three problems that we have in the world. Those that we can solve but choose not to, those we cannot solve, and those that we are solving or have solved.

Each of these can tell us something fundamentally important about the world.

The first of the three categories of problems is the most disturbing and also one of the largest. Problems in the world that could be solved but we have chosen not to solve. This includes famine, war, poverty, hatred, social inequality and crime. That isn't to say that any of these could be solved easily, only that if a species we made a choice we could solve any of them. But there are also simple answers that could solve many of these.

Take for examine famine. The general assumption of famine is that there are 6 billion people on the world, but only enough food for 5 billion so clearly someone is going to have to go hungry. We are playing a game of musical chairs with food and someone is going to be the odd man out. The problem is that it isn't true. We have 6 billion people
and enough food to feed them all. There is in fact food rotting while children on the other side of the world are starving. The question then becomes why? I suspect it is the same reason that 5000 children a day of diarrhea because they don't have clean water. It's not happening here.

Human empathy is a fantastic thing, but it is limited. If we saw a child starving to death outside our home we would give them our last dollar to make certain they ate, but show us a million starving children in Africa and empathy doesn't work the same way. It has been said that a single death is a tragedy and a million deaths are a statistic. It's not a pretty truth but it is true.

Next are the problems that we can't solve, or can't solve yet. This list is far smaller than you might think. We have asteroids hitting the earth, a handful of diseases, earthquakes, typhoons, shark attacks and similar things. Even the damage of these we can often mitigate, and the lack of that mitigation moves into the things we can solve and choose not to category. Beyond that though these can largely be ignored as simply part of life, at least until we can fix them.

The third are things that we have solved, or are in the process of solving. Sadly, I believe that the solved list is limited to Polio and a few other diseases that have been eliminated, but there are a great many things that I believe we are on our way to finding solutions for. These are slavery and racism, totalitarianism, and hopefully many others.

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