What, Why and How
What, Why and How
by
Stephen B. Waters
"Your generation suffers from too much introspection; from looking inside itself too much. Instead of looking outward, they look inward."
That is a snapshot opinion of a situation that ought not be treated as static. It contains neither consideration of how the situation arose nor a hint of how to redirect the course in a better direction than those who have gone before.
Some people in the past have had the wit and wisdom to understand what people ought to do, but none of them were compellingly convincing explaining in simple human terms why and how. Without a good why one can't tell which what to follow. And without a good how he couldn't get there even if he did know what and why. Without justification or method, chaos is encouraged.
Such instability has killed cultures before: ancient China, Alexandria, classical Greece, and ancient Rome. Each of them could have succeeded but did not. Our culture is damned close to not making it either.
Faced with internal social tension and external military threats, one side of our culture suffers from a crippling case of moral relativism and anarchy that is as unreasoned and dogmatic as its authoritarian counterparts on the other cultural side steeped in mystical, political and philosophical traditions. If we aren't rendered immobile by catatonic indecision, we risk being consumed by our own thrashing and misdirected defenses.
Many more people than ever before sense in their guts the chaos of having no how and why, even if it's subconscious. This is the first generation where those who recognize that they don't know how or why are of sufficient number and power to jeopardize the stability of the entire culture by their despair and inappropriate reaction well prior to that culture having been consumed, in its weakness, from the outside.
This is also the first time that someone not only has been able to distill the useful what's from those who have gone before us, but is also able to present those what's in conjunction with why's and how's that show their value and process with a clear simplicity that makes them accessible to almost everyone.
In my generation's introspection you may find obsession. That is often the case. But in that obsession lies the only prospect for salvation. The disease is the only process by which we may cure ourselves for other diseases and that disease as well.
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Copyright 1998 by Stephen B. Waters. This page was last built on 11/25/98; 4:18:10 PM. sbwaters@rny.com At the moment I am using Macintosh OS to work on this website. |