We have reached a remarkably strange point in society where there aren’t any meaningful goals left when it comes to the domain of improving the world. Of course, there are still meaningful personal goals. Many around the world are just trying to make a living, and that’s just natural.
But when communities and even countries do get on track to allow their populations to make a living, the endpoint is always to become like some developed country which just takes advantage of the earth and poorer countries, and starts to contaminate the entire planet with insane amounts of carbon dioxide.
In other words, every pathway provided by modern society to ‘succeed’ ends up with people perhaps being comfortable but only in return for being instruments of destruction. This is not surprising either, because over time, the existence of technology has slowly co-opted our own instincts so that the only true high-level purpose of any of our activity is the growth or strengthening of technology. Yes, there are still some conflicting interests because people grow increasingly restless within the technological system, but technology is adept at managing that and converting even this disquiet into tools for its own purposes.
The strange thing is that this state of things is not typically conscious in the modern individual, because at the same time, our behaviours over time being constrained by technology have led us to subsume this distortion of our goals as a subconscious feeling. It remains only as an instinct to be controlled by technology. Mostly, we operate consciously only within the set of rules provided by an increasingly restricted modern society. These rules vary across the world, but they typically are either the game of avoiding suffering or the game of working to promote technology in exchange for a place to live and food to eat.
And regarding food and shelter, it’s important to note that although finding these things has always been a matter of survival, the methods by which we find them have been constrained by technology so that we must in exchange destroy the earth and fight each other to get them.
For instance, most people are constrained to live in cities, so their only option for food is to work for someone, which is increasingly likely to be controlled by a large corporation. Such large corporations necessarily are unsustainable and go against the long-term good for all biological life.
Houses too have become a commodity to be traded, so that their prices can be maintained and controlled by the system so that we can’t just easily stop contributing until we pay our dues. Survival has always been difficult, but in primitive times we at least had the choice to be self-sufficient. Now, few people have that choice. And if they do have it because they’ve learned how to grow their own food and build their own shelter, likely they’ve contributed to technological development sufficiently to afford their land in the first place.
So no matter who you are, it’s unlikely that you have the opportunity to aim for goals that actually improve the world in the long-term. It sounds depressing, but the system just changes the name of the game so it appears we’re improving the world, thereby cunningly making us avoid much psychological distress.
For example, someone might go into computer security, thinking they’ll improve something, even though it was the introduction of computers and their wastefulness that caused the need for computer security in the first place. Computers development and hacking is just an arms race with the by-product of millions of tons of electronic waste in the earth and in the ocean.
Or a scientist might go into medicine to cure diseases. But part of the reason why we have diseases is because we’ve used technology to grow our population beyond a sustainable level. In the long-term, curing those diseases will just cause our population to expand even more, causing more diseases and even worse living conditions in the long run. And a few diseases aren’t a bad thing if it means we don’t grow to insane levels. Human beings say this about all animal populations, and we only are revolted by such thinking because safety is all we have left in an advanced technological society.
Even wildlife conservation, which is a lofty goal and one which I think is important, is really just a bandage to ease the encroachment of technology on the world. Thus, it’s no long-term solution. And conservation is also a way to provide nice natural spaces for those who are rebellious and need an escape from technology. As well as a reward for the rich so they can escape as well, etc. After all, after the tech CEO has just developed a new, extremely useless and wasteful technology, they’re likely to want a nice vacation on a private, tropical beach full of bird sounds.
So, the only real goal remaining that can actually improve the world is a revolution against the system. And, at some point, one of only two things will happen. Either humanity will become so enslaved by technology that it will win permanently, and this goal will no longer be viable. Who knows what will happen after that. But if that does happen, it will mean any resistance will have ended and technology will just use us as it sees fit without much input from us. And this may already have happened.
The other possibility is that human beings will become so tired of this system so that the uncontrolled parts of humanity and biological life will fight back against it. Unfortunately, this will likely involve wars and other calamities, but at least it will give humanity a chance to fight back and change its ways. It may even allow us to enter a new era of being very cautious about new technology. I sincerely hope for this latter possibility, and I think even though the chances of it are slim, it’s a cause worth fighting for.