I keep reading these news updates and thinking to myself "Will someone please STOP the world, I want to get off!"

I look at this stuff, and I look at the very valid questions you pose... and the potential solutions seem to live in an almost bottomless "rabbit hole" of contingencies and dependencies. I keep asking myself "Why are we really HERE, in this state of affairs?"

Why ARE we really here? What I mean by that, is how do we separate (and address) the core issue from a mountain of "symptoms," like the above... where is the root problem? There's always a root problem but it gets harder and harder to find, as it becomes separated from the symptoms by an increasing number of "generations" or layers.

I keep coming back to the issue of valuing "competing/controling" higher than "cooperating/collaborating," but there are probably deeper layers than that. So why do we perceive the need to compete/control? The "world of scarcity" paradigm (as opposed to the "world of plenty" paradigm) drives the need for "ownership;" ownership sets up the "us vs. them" dynamic, creating a lack of trust and the need to "hoard" resources out of fear leading to mistrust... it's just a bottomless pit, and I struggle to find the "head of the snake" because there always seems to be another layer.

Right now, the inequities (financial and influential) in the world seem to be at an all-time high, which means a lot of people are "hardscrabble struggling" to merely survive... which in turn has caused more people to reach for (or be open to) the "strong parent" archetype in government because they feel like they just have NO ENERGY left to think for themselves, so hand it off to the government.

I'm still not sure what the most effective antidote is... but thanks for a post that led to this little thinking exercise!