West: Wake up

 25/08/2023

Dear contemporary westerners,

What’s the matter with you?

It’s like too much McDonald’s mushed your brains, or something.

Today, in the Greek news channel, they said that a bunch of not-so-west-friendly-countries came up with a union between them. I did not hear anything about that on the BBC.

It’s like you people never heard any story ever, or ever played a single videogame. Do you not see what is happening? They have most of the energy resources and they seem to be more determined to cooperate with each other than we are.

31/08/2023

The East +Brazil is uniting, and the other day Mormons came in my house to tell us that mum’s baptism in the Greek orthodox church when she was a baby, and the baptism in the Pentecostal (or was it Protestant?) church she had as a ‘born again Christian’ in her 40s, where nothing more than just a nice-try to enter Haven. They (the Mormons) are in fact the only ones that ‘hold the key to Paradise’, and mum should think twice before she considers herself ‘saved’ without the kind of baptism they have to offer.

We are arguing about our minor differences in the west, as if we don’t know the meaning of the quote ‘divide and conquer’.

09/08/2023

Dear Future Historian,

I think, the reason this time that I find myself struggling to finish this letter to my contemporaries is that I do not really have much to say to them about politics, it turns out. I have so many opinions about how things should be done, and yet no plans about how, nor any knowledge of ecology, resources management, or economics. The only expertise I can claim to have some basic academic knowledge at is philosophy, and the Bible. Thus, I should leave practical or ‘magical’ solutions to experts and demagogues, and stick to the only thing I know, philosophy.

This realisation led me to the conclusion that I have nothing to say about politics to my contemporaries. I don’t have the qualifications or something to share my opinions and expect to make any difference. Philosophy on the other hand, there I have knowledge to base my opinions. History has taught us that philosophers affect the world decades, or even centuries, after they have shared their views. In which case, my real target audience comes back to you, my dear future historian. Even to you, I find myself having more questions than answers.

Have you managed to save us from the environmental catastrophe?

Have you managed to find a solution to the problem of the energy crisis?

Have humans managed to avoid an extinction from an AI rebellion war?

Has a universal income, that covers all the basics, has been globally implemented yet?

Have we managed to solve the immigration problem?

What about democracy and freedom of speech? Did you manage to keep these basics?

Have we realised that our biggest problems come from not supporting our families and friends, and letting ideologies separate us, and thus give all our power away? Have we realised that greed and pride will kill us all?

I don’t know even to you what to say. I see I have viewers in my blog from quite a lot of non-western countries.

I grow up in Greece. The bridge, some would say, between west and east. I want at some point to travel everywhere. Meet people from everywhere. Maybe instead of trying to find what to say, I should just listen for now. Pay attention.

Hope I will have the chance to come back to you on that matter my dear future historian. Next time, I’ll try to bring peoples voices, the ones that are not given a voice. And, I will keep my opinions about the things that I see are so very wrong to myself, until I have some kind of idea of how to make things better.

All I can suggest until then, as the best advice I have to the world, if I can base my hopes of the continuation of civilisation in a book, is one I have mentioned before. Read: The Open Society and Its Enemies, by Karl Popper.