Incoherent and unfiltered.
Whenever I seriously ask myself what it is I want to do in this life the answer is almost always the same. Save the Earth and conquer the Moon. Or possibly Mars.
Is that so much to ask?
Cont… (and then some)
posted by Benjamin Nakizo @ 12:42 pm
1 Comments:
According to my last real post I hope to a practicing teacher by the year 2012, with a passable knowledge of the French language and having spent some time serving in Her Majesty’s Service. But to what purpose? Beyond keeping myself housed and healthy what else will this have achieved?
A couple of years teaching will mean that I will have had the opportunity to influence, in a very small way, the lives of sixty or so individuals. This is nothing to sneer at and is quite a noble and worthwhile pursuit. Being able to speak French will impress people and when on my holidays I might be able to contribute a tiny something to improving Anglo-French relations. And serving in Her Majesty’s Service, in the role that I envisage, will mean that I will have helped safeguard the flow of oil from Iraq into the worlds economy. Assisting a recovering nation and keeping geo-politics temporarily stable – at the price of pillaging our planets ecosystem for yet another generation.
But none of this will really have been my doing. I will simply be a cog in all these processes. A cog that would be filled by an equally capable candidate if I didn’t exist. So who does have an impact? Who is at the helm?
Authors have a wide impact; they can spread ideas and raise issues. Politicians can, if they are clever enough, also bring about change in practices and opinions. Business leaders can make a far more dramatic effect – assuming they own their own companies and don’t have a legally responsibility to create short term profits for shareholders. Scientists can create breakthroughs, but only with the help of numerous colleagues and even then their discoveries can only make a real difference if yet more people can commercialise them.
On a day to day scale, it is teachers, doctors, nurses, police officers and soldiers that bring about change. They do the grunt work, but it is the people directing them that shape the world.
Are humans little more than primitive reactive organisms? Do economic, environmental and social forces – all of our making yet seemingly all out of our control – determine what we do, say and feel?
Can no one make a difference on the scale I envisage?
I will not be content unless I see us living in almost perfect harmony our Earthly ecosystem. And I will not be content until I have walked on the Moon – and had others follow.
I think I am going to be disappointed.
But given that I am only one six billionth of the human race – then if I can move us just one six billionth of the way towards this goal – then that will be something, right?
But hang on.
I’m a middle class European, right? I’ve had great health care my whole life and have enjoyed a fantastic education compared to the majority of people on this planet. So doesn’t that increase my comparative influence? My comparative responsibility?
If the ‘human race’ is something that all six billion of us have a joint responsibility for, then isn’t my responsibility larger since I have consumed a greater share of our collective fruits?
If you could devise a system that broke down all existing ‘influencing factors’, such as health, wealth, education, opportunity etc and then looked at where they are distributed across the globe as a means of creating a global ‘responsibility index’ then I must rank pretty highly right? Anyone reading this blog and anyone that has ever met me must also rank around the same level.
What this exact figure is, I do not know since such an index does not exist – but it means that my (and your) responsibility to the human race is significantly larger than just one six billionth of the whole.
How do you judge your contribution? Having a child and raising them into adulthood is a significant achievement and a unique gift to mankind – right? Is having two kids better? Or is having none at all better still?
Remember that I am simply talking about responsibility output – not overall success. Someone with a low responsibility index figure can punch far above their weight – but still not achieve as much as a low performing individual with a high responsibility figure. Yet the lower indexed individual would be by far the most successful of the two, despite not contributing as much.
Should we judge ourselves in comparison to people with an equal ‘responsibility index’ figure? Probably. Should we compare ourselves to others at all? A high school education which systematically hammered out any notion of there being such a thing as a winner tells me that no, one must never judge yourself against those around you.
I think that’s bollocks. Every successful person on earth only got that way because they were an ambitious, jealous and stubborn bastard willing to bite and scratch their way to the top – and therefore punch above their responsibility index.
Perhaps the only person in high school who was ever actually speaking any truth was the one teacher I despised – the PE teacher. He told me then when running a race focus on overtaking the person immediately in front of you, and then the next, and so on until - hey presto – you’ve won.
Of course you should always try to be a goods sportsmen. Being graceful in defeat, assisting those in need and giving credit where credit is due are all essential attributes. But perhaps more so is the ability to shake a mans hand while already planning how you will well and truly thrash him next time.
My responsibility to the species is small, even when put into the context I have spoken of. I will never be able to see all of my wildest dreams come true. It is unlikely that even one of them will be fulfilled.
Yet I suppose the most I can do is try. And if I have to use the success of those around me to activate my (well buried) competitive side in order to drive me on – then so be it.
Therefore there seems little choice but to give it absolutely everything and see what happens.
Since regrets are far worse than failures.
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