I think there is reason for hope. Hope because we've discovered cleaner energy sources and gained deeper psychological insights, and psychedelics have become a global phenomenon, with the body of knowledge describing their effects and applications quickly expanding. Outdated religions are gradually losing their grip on society, and the internet has created an alternative to the diurnal brainwashing that affected the generations of our parents and grandparents.
Cleaner energy sources are not capable to power our big industries. That's one of the things thats majorly overseen by the majority of people. People seem to believe that 'our' way of life can be sustained by just using a cleaner energy source. For the record, there is no (clean) energy source that we know of, that we can (ab)use to keep our industries going.
Psychedelics have been a global phenomenon since the sixties. I don't see much hope here now. In my experience, there was more hope at the start of the nineties when we got a mild case of (re) emerging psychedelic society. I don't see a lot of that now. I still don't see real opportunities for anyone to work with these things in a legal context to provide alternative mental therapy. At least, not in the Western world.
Outdated religions are still dictating the day. We have Islam on one side, the religion of peace that actually will provide world peace, once the entire world is converted to Islam. On the other hand we have the Christians being the gigantic assholes they have been since that Jewish zombie supposedly roamed the streets of Bethlehem, getting into everybody elses business.
The internet can be used to inform oneself. The problem is, most people that should inform themselves, are not doing that.
I want to hope but it becomes exponentially harder in my experience observing the blatant pre-adolescent state of our culture that is basically ravaging the world without any respect for future generations or the preservation of life in general.
Jeniger makes sense (or so I want to believe
), if you change your life for the good, people will recognize it and want that too (if they see that change actually made your life better). I've witnessed this among friends who are now trying out a vegetarian diet, if everybody became vegetarian, we would take away the single most important contributor to global warming for example.
The biggest thing for me working against hope is the realization that most people are perfectly aware of our non sustainable way of living, but almost none of those are willing to accept the consequences of that and change their style.
Here's a very interesting docu about exponential growth of our culture, what the consequences are, and how we are lied to by our governments in relation to how much gas/petro is actually left for us to use.
