Where humans got it all wrong

As the whole world watches the United States' count of death from covid19 up to more than 50,000 today, I wonder what made the world's most powerful country become a facepalm moment to the whole world when it comes to their treatment of the pandemic. At the forefront of technology with so many intelligent minds at their disposal, large state and federal funds to defend themselves, how the United States and their people reacted to the coronavirus is evidential that humans have somehow gone the wrong way. We have not progressed in the real sense. In fact, we, as a species may have gone backwards.

Arrogance

Arrogance, the first sin ever committed and recorded, have much to do with the seemingly failure of human to provide a better, happier life for everyone. US President Trump was warned so many times of the impending threat of the pandemic yet his attention was on his rating. He thought he knew exactly what it was and when the death count rose, he backpedaled and lied about everything again. And yet, the support for him is evident in many parts of the USA, from the people who protested the lockdowns, even when they have access to Internet and able to analyse the issue constructively. Unlike the whole world, these protestors didn't practice distancing and most didn't even believe it the threat from the virus was real. 



Arrogance is the very same thing that makes most powerful people and empires fall, and humans, possibly the only living thing that can be arrogant, decided they knew everything about the world. How wrong we were.

Douglas Adams had the answer:
“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this, at a distance of roughly ninety million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet, whose ape descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. This planet has, or had, a problem, which was this. Most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small, green pieces of paper, which is odd, because on the whole, it wasn't the small, green pieces of paper which were unhappy. And so the problem remained, and lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans. And then one day, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl, sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realised what it was that had been going wrong all this time and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no-one would have to get nailed to anything. Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone, the Earth was unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass and so the idea was lost forever.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

World Gone Mad

The world’s 7.6 billion people represent just 0.01% of all living things, according to the study. Yet since the dawn of civilisation, humanity has caused the loss of 83% of all wild mammals and half of plants, while livestock kept by humans abounds to become food. Priorities.


Is there something wrong with the human race? We seem to have gone just plain loco, with compassion, sensitivity, honesty, courage — all the values that are essential to drive the wedge between a man and a beast — replaced with anger, greed, dishonesty, nastiness and what have you.

Violence happens in all environments. In Iraq, where a prosperous society has been annihilated, in Syria where hegemony has been reduced to rubble by armed insurgents, in Libya transformed into a hellhole for its people; similar in Pakistan and Afghanistan. There was a Tamil pogrom in Sri Lanka not so long ago. Hatred and inequality seem to have taken root in India. Anger substitutes for the kindness and the ideals shared by Mahatma Gandhi that guided the nation came into being.

The government's first response to the people's opposition is to arrest, silence and kill. Nationalism, completely conneated with military machoism, has become jingoistic. If you are thinking for peace, you are anti-national, you are real patriots when you think of war, violence and devastation. You are a liar and a traitor to your race or faith as you think of social unity, camaraderie and reaching out to welcoming. You are a victim if the violence takes place; you are a liar if you keep the opinion and integrity.

We Are Not That Knowledgeable 

Indeed, we are rounded with proof that we're all mistaken when we look back at modern history.
It was just five hundred years ago when we thought the planet was the centre of the universe. We didn't really know about dinosaurs for 200 years. At most, "new medicine" is only one hundred years old. It was assumed in the 1600s that miniatures of life existed in the semen and would then spread to the full-grown species in the utero. And how dare humans try to focus on "artificial intelligence" when we can't even understand the complexity of our own brains.


Everything's Failing Spectacularly
Look at the system we have in each categories, they are all failures:

University and schools don't educate anymore, they are merely certificate stampers. Government don't help the people but the politicians. Banks are parasites. Arts is business, science is commerce. Work is backbreaking , life is death. Values are gone in favour of KPIs. Meanings are gone in favour of useless wealth. No empathy, no one cares.



Religion and faith that we see today are totally different to what the initial messengers or Prophets told. Christians are not doing what Jesus told, Muslims are not doing what Muhammad (Peace Be On Him) told. Buddhist are not doing what Gautama Buddha told. The Chinese people are not behaving like what Confucius or Taoism told them. Heck, even atheists are not being atheists.

So what do we do now? Forget experts. They are the ones who brought us here. Think for yourself and save what you can and enjoy the ride.