Many books have been written proposing grand solutions to social problems facing our world but failed to offer immediate, everyday actions we can take. The Better World Handbook written by authors Ellis Jones, Ross Haenfler and Brett Johnson suggests actions connected to everyday life that you and I can take NOW. The introduction to the book, so accurately describes the state we are in.
“We have become a nation of sleepwalkers. We look around at the world’s problems and wish they would go away, but they stubbornly persist despite our most heartfelt desires. So we end up living in a kind of ethical haze. It’s not that people are bad or that evil is winning some kind of eternal battle. The vast majority of us have good intentions when we go about our daily lives. It’s that we have been lulled into a sense of complacency around the world’s problems, like they are less than real occurrences so we react similar to how we might normalize strange events that occur while we’re in the middle of a dream. We are stuck in our daily routines, living on auto-pilot when it comes to the rest of the world. People starve, communities fall apart, violence thrives, families fade, and nature disappears, and we continue on with our lives as if nothing is wrong. But like a whisper in the back of our minds that stays with us always, we have the feeling that something has gone awry. We have lost our faith in each other. Politicians are corrupt, lawyers win cases without justice being served; it seems that everything and everyone is for sale. Nothing remains sacred. We feel that perhaps we can only truly rely on ourselves.
“When these negative beliefs become widespread, we disengage from the outer world, recoiling into our own personal lives. As we withdraw, we see our society rushing aimlessly toward an unknown future without any sense of morality or conscious purpose to direct it. Awash in a sea of knowledge, we lack the wisdom to guide our own destiny. How did we end up here. Of late, many people have begun to point the finger at a culture that breeds apathy. In fact, beneath apathy there lies an even bigger culprit, cynicism, which may be defined as the deeply ingrained belief that human beings are, and have always been, inherently selfish. Cynicism in this form is not just a long-term emotional state or adopted intellectual philosophy, it is a way of relating to the world. As a consequence we begin to see the world as a place that will always be filled with social problems because we are convinced that people look out for their own best interests above all else. It is the fundamental destruction of hope. The most that you can strive for under this kind of a world view is that you become savvy enough to pursue your own self-interest in such a way that you come out somewhere nearer to the top rather than the bottom. The pursuit of happiness is relegated to an equation that consists of accumulating material wealth, increasing your social status and having the freedom to indulge in any pleasure you desire. Helping others, giving something back and making a difference in the world no longer show up on the radar of popular culture.
“People who decide to seriously pursue these less common goals are often labeled as odd, naive, overly sentimental, unrealistic or simply irrational. In a world of constantly increasing complexity, this kind of cynicism becomes the safest, most strategic position to adopt. It involves no action and thus no risk. Cynics can portray their inaction as more rational, objective and even more scientifically founded than people who are taking action based on incomplete information. Consequently, apathy becomes an acceptable state of being. So what happened? How did we become this cynical? Simply put, our modern society manufactures cynicism. Everyday we are bombarded with media reports, both locally focused and from around the globe, of crime, disaster, conflict, scandal... anything dark and sensational enough to generate a headline. The stories are presented in a manner that is usually too brief to gain any meaningful understanding of the problems and that lacks any option for us to contribute in any significant way to their resolution. These waves of negative imagery wash over us relentlessly as we try to keep up with what’s happening in the world around us. Like sponges, we absorb this negativity, and it spills over into how we look at and, ultimately, how we act or fail to act in the world.
“The $64,000 question now turns out to be, how do we break out of this cycle of cynicism? First, we must stop blaming others for not doing anything and begin to take personal responsibility for being good people in the world. No one else can do it for us. We need to seek out information about our problems that provides us with a basic understanding of what’s going on as well as a variety of options for action. We have to generate a form of practical idealism based on well-informed actions that are accessible to all of us and that actually make a difference in the world. Each of us must decide what we want our lives to stand for, how we can uniquely contribute to a better world. By thinking about our lives in terms of what we can provide for the next generations rather than we can take for ourselves in this lifetime, we are choosing to create our own destiny instead of leaving our children’s future up for grabs.”
“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” M. K. Gandhi*
