It is as Roosevelt optimistically said in his inaugural speech in 1933 offering America a “New Deal:” “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
As a sexagenarian I do not have to be so preoccupied with the future of the world beyond my own eventual demise.
But with my lifetime preoccupation with life and living, and with the predicaments of humankind upon earth, both historically, currently and in the reasonable future that will be marked by accident, serendipity, deliberation and prevarication, I have had what I believe to be a genuine, long-term and erudite concern and empathy for the fate of the human-owned world.
If I could transmit no other lesson to our posterity, I think it would be this: There are some precious things about life and humankind on earth that are worth struggling and fighting and even dying for. This applies to all of humankind and not just to a select few. We have come upon a new global age of humankind that demands a form of maturity that would permit us to put aside our critical differences and our social biases and social pathologies in order to learn to work together without too much conflict to create a better world for all humankind and for all life on earth. In a global system, war and warfare is increasingly unaffordable.
A general systems approach offers a clear, logical and scientifically robust and valid road map for humankind to realize global social-structural integration and thus to find its true measure and place among the Stars.
As we face an increasingly uncertain future that is rapidly fast-forwarding upon our current world horizon, and as we are quickly leaving the past behind all of us in the larger world, especially as a Human history largely marked by tragedy, violence and unnecessary destruction, and now with rapidly rising scientific technological progress, it is increasingly within our means to think systematically through our problems and of our longer term goals and purposes upon earth and beyond. If our world history has taught us nothing else, it is the great cost of stumbling blindly, ideologically forward that comes to increasingly interfere in the human progress of global civilization.
Human civilization is now global—as civilization it is pan-national and trans-human. It is scientifically and technologically knowledge based.
I will go to my grave a positivist and optimist about our future in which we have allowed our collective brains to systematically transcend and overcome our political fears, our military gears and our social tears.