What Meanest This World And Us?

I have been trying to place a finger on the pulse of what makes the world go round and why we have landed ourselves in the position we are now in on this blue planet. That must be the other reason why we are the blue planet apart from the usual one of oceans covering three-quarters of its surface.

There is only one undeniable fact and that is the "economy" that we live in. This is the only means which we live and sustain ourselves by. Everything else is subsidiary and works towards this economy.

The economy creates jobs. Without it, we would not be able to live.

Remembering that we lived 99% of our time here on Earth as hunter-gatherers and you can surmise that what we have built is only a recent phenomenon and perhaps an un-natural one. We virtually lived off the land then. The land was able to sustain us by its abundance of flora and fauna.

I am not sure if men were ever meant to be living in 'captivity' and densely crowded together. But this is how city-living has made us do .

The old days saw people owning one plot of their land, self-sufficiently growing and herding what they need for food. That was work. It was each to himself and no one dominates over another.

Now with industry kicking in, we have organised complex organisations and hierarchies where we are all interdependent. Interdependence has also pitted man against man. It is an artificial system where we created the rut ourselves.

It used to be just man against nature - animals and the natural elements of climatology.

Can you imagine putting the Khoisans culture and a Chinese one together? Do they not differ in so many ways as to put living together seriously flawed? Even if they could co-exist peacefully together, it doesn't mean that I would want to live close by listening to Mr Khoisan clicking his tongue every now and then to speak to his people.

This interdependence has gone beyond the boundaries of one's home to trans-national and international corridors. What happens in someone's backyard affects you and what one nation does within its borders transgresses sometimes upon the whole world. Think SARS and you pretty much understand what I am saying.

Gavin Menzies and even Professor Stephen Jay Gould posited the possibility of a very different world order if only the imperial Ming Chinese had not decided to shut its doors and seclude itself after very successful navigational conquests.

As it is, it became the Western dominance of the world and we have wars, science and industry all spewing forth at an unprecedented pace. Many of our institutions and industry are products of this invention.

We in particular have imported many of these inventions, rightly or wrongly, which may not have been suitable for our Asian culture in so many ways.

Our education is distinctly British but our media and many of our cultural imports are American. America is surely one of the cleverest and most innovative country ever. However, as history has shown, it had also bungled as many times.

Therefore many of what we need now are artificially created for the economy's sake. We would never have needed branded goods, fast-foods , tuition, the military and the stock exchange.

All we need is food and a roof over our head. Now that this has been so complicated that we cannot live or eat without work. Work used to be looking for this roof and food.

And to continue living under this roof, we need to plan for our retirement. Because once we hit that humongous biggy in age, we can't work anymore. The caveman probably just lived out his dying years , holed up and embracing death as it should be - naturally without funeral rites or a need for a sarcophagus or cremation. The Egyptians must have been the stinks to upset this apple-cart with their mummification and life-after-death reincarnation aspirations.

So if the United Nations , being the world platform as I see it to pull countries together, could collaborate and decree to halt this world nonsense and go back to basics, perhaps we as the most intelligent of primates (but not necessarily the most dominant or best suited to live out this world) could still have that last chance to live at peace with ourselves and with nature once more.

That I think will be the only surviving grace for us to bow out of commerce and industry and preserve the only planet we have for living our miserable short lives out.