Unbalanced
The world is unbalanced, and not because of the Japanese earthquake that shortened our days by 1.8 microseconds, shifted the earth’s axis 6.5 inches, and moved the island of Japan 8 feet to the east.
No, we are unbalanced morally, financially and politically. We suffer a societal disequilibrium. Up is down, down is up, and the walls are caving in. Progress has left us bankrupt and sliding backwards.
In 1944, Aldous Huxley wrote:
"Industrial man --a sentient reciprocating engine having a fluctuating output, coupled to an iron wheel revolving with uniform velocity. And then we wonder why this should be the golden age of revolution and mental derangement." (Time Must Have a Stop)Have we all been crucified upon the wheel? Is our Western wheel only a less brutal, velvet covered version of the Middle Eastern and Third-World Wheel? Our internal rhythms are no longer our own, life has become digitized, incompatible with analog souls.
Knowledge without love, technology without common sense, progress without morality
In the same book, Huxley also injects this Shakespeare quote from a wounded Hotspur...
But thought's the slave of life,
and life's time's fool,
And time that takes survey of all the world
Must have a stop.
and life's time's fool,
And time that takes survey of all the world
Must have a stop.
When we can no longer imagine the infinite, our thoughts become a slave to life, here and now. Time marches on, making a fool of life and our hopes and dreams. So life can't be the great end, can it? There must be more... Otherwise, as Huxley concludes, our lives are reduced to a "pointless or diabolic foolery."
Huxley on Shakespeare
Google Books – Henry IV
