Roots of Problems
What problems are we facing? How do we identify and address the roots of problems?
We can live positively, we can take up the challenge of wholeness, and we can fail in that in various ways. At that point, in that scope, we can soberly consider, what is going wrong? What can we do? How should we change?
Healthy thinking has us focus on the root of the problem at various levels: the big picture, our own lives, the civilization we are creating, and the civilization that we find ourselves in.
- In the big picture, the radical conclusion, in whatever words, is that God does not have to be good. Life is not fair. Learning forever, growing forever, living forever is understanding that the holistic love beyond us is unconditional, whereas the good of the slack we cherish is conditional. Our own spiritual growth takes place in that disconnect between our personal affairs and that bigger picture. This is the sum of all wisdom, the ability to let go of our own context. We can ourselves be good, thus reclaim our context and proceed from there.
- The root of the problem is also found within ourselves, the many ways we fail to be whole. We can let go of ourselves and live not as a person-in-particular but as a person-in-general, focused not on what makes us special but rather on doing what any good person would do.
- The root of the problem is also in our colleagues with whom we are working towards a new civilization, and in whom we often recognize the problematic logic of our existing civilization. These practical failings are what may yet give shape to our cognizance of how the civilization we seek to live by takes place in the civilization that surrounds us. What do we learn? What can we do?
- The root of the problem is also where we can focus our efforts to address the problems caused by our existing civilization. Climate change, and the reticence to address it meaningfully, is surely not accidental, not simply circumstantial. It is believable that there are individuals who are actively betting against humanity, actively wanting humanity to fail, actively keeping the problems from being solved. This is peripheral to the centrality of positivity in healthy thinking. Negativity should not have our full attention. The attention that we do focus on it should clarify the mechanism by which individuals are abusing the current system to actively, willfully, cognizantly destroy it and us all.
Our main attention should be on positively organizing the new civilization we seek. The problems we address can be primarily those which stand in our way, but we can also think creatively, how we can get around those problems, or turn them into advantages, solutions and opportunities.
By focusing on the roots of the problems, we minimize the psychological and emotional attention that they would draw from us. When we understand the nature of the problem, what it would require to solve it, and how that compares to simply tolerating the symptons or handling the consequences. We can embrace the problem, as in the case of waste management, and understand its role in greater cycles.
We also have problems in communication. To what extent are we in agreement? We can consider the nature of our disagreements, how fundamental are they, what we could do to understand each other and ourselves. What could we investigate together to develop a shared reality, a shared understanding of each other?