A balance of "tunnel vision" and broad perspective are needed for human society to flourish.If you live in modern society I'm sure at some point in your life you've sat in a window seat of an airplane looking down at
fluffy blanket of clouds and thought to yourself, 'Wow, it's so big and flat, fluffy and soft, I wonder what it would feel like to lay down on that super-soft mattress.' Well, think about what Socrates, Lao Tsu, Confucius, Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Moses or Mohammed would have thought if they saw same sight that we pretty much take for granted as 'normality'. Last night I watched a show on TV entitled, "Limits of Perception" that showed our newly discovered microcosms and macrocosms of life with photography from atomic force microscopes up to Hubble telescope that looks out into vast Universe. We can now see below level of atom, creatures one-tenth of a millimeter long that resemble monsters of our dreams, and thousands of galaxies grouped together in super-clusters (each galaxy containing billions of stars like our own Sun).
As I watched this show I had to wonder about way our human society has evolved. I mean, why wasn't this show seen by every person in our world? Imagine how much ignorance and beliefs to do with why people think they are different from each other would change in an instant. We would all know that we are each made of thirty trillion cells, same kinds of cells as everyone else, made from same kind of energy. Wouldn't this affect way we treated each other, knowing we are all intrinsically made of same essence, not to mention that we all come from same one small home in an infinite Universe of worlds? Wouldn't this help us from feeling like an isolated species, knowing that every species on Earth is made of same elements and DNA, and that we are really not alone in space as we are actually surrounded by trillions and trillions of life creating fireball stars?
The funny thing is that I stumbled upon this TV show accidentally, unless of course you believe in destiny rather than random coincidence. TV is full of violence and crime these days, as we seem to have a real curiosity about darker side of our natures. But truth is there are people out there who are making TV shows like this one with really positive perspectives, isn't it strange that most people won't have known it was even on? It was shown at 11:00 p.m. at night. Have we relegated magic of life to not-so-prime-time? It's hard to imagine what great minds of our ancestors would have thought and done with information that we seem to take for granted. However, maybe there is a simple reason and subsequent solution to this issue that if we implement could really have huge positive impacts on our society and environment.
Recently a friend of mine gave me an abstract from website www.getAbstract.com from a book called "The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life" written by an economist Paul Seabright. Let me tell you that I've always been a little skeptical about economics, except for when I was ten years old and greedily dreamed of being an accountant counting other people's money and subsequently counting my own. But things changed and I started to believe that all of degradation of our morality and environment had to do with economic policies and that greed that I knew all too well. Now I try not to look at things so black and white and realize that economics is just a natural process and although it has hurt our world when it has been abused, it has also helped humanity greatly when used responsibly. Today happiness and a high quality of life are being lived by many human beings, yet I think we still need to try and balance scales by helping unfortunate people to become more productive.
