Our inventions and behavioural changes

Each new invention may result in large-scale behavioural change, and each of these changes may result in new inventions. This is how progress is made, following an unbridled cascade of artifacts and changes in customs and customs. He agreed to rejoice. It is thanks to him that our life today is easier and more interesting, and that growth succeeds in ensuring our safety and standard of living.

However, one may wonder how far this race will go to happiness. A river that descends in cascades, following the line of least resistance as humanity has long seemed to do, always ends in a receiving basin, at the edge of the ocean. And she can’t go any further. She’s losing.

The first alarm to have us rethink this form of progress is pollution and destruction of the natural environment. It seems that the receiving basin is approaching very soon and that we are at risk of total immersion. Unfortunately, it will not be the ocean and its large blue expanses, but a polluted ocean on the banks of the fuel, which, in turn, will sparkle methane, making global warming worse. The painting has nothing poetic.

Why has humanity followed this path? For what reason, from all political backgrounds, has progress been seen as an inevitable ascent to happiness, to the point of neglecting its effet-pervers on a biotope in free fall?

The number one question is how important we are to innovation, with the idea of living tomorrow better than yesterday, and how little consideration we devote to environmental problems as soon as our interests are at stake.

First: what do we call “live better”? The criteria we apply are fundamentally materialistic. Living better means having a nicer apartment, more beautiful clothes, a nicer home appliances, a more pleasant diet, a more beautiful car, and despite all this a better bank account. The place for the spiritual is very thin in this way of seeing existence. Is there not a certain slippage there, due for example to disappointment at spirituality as it is sold to us by different religions? A deep frustration that makes us compensate outside for what we miss inside?

The frustration could also be in love or sexual. Are we sure that our way of living love meets our deep aspirations? Does our way of practicing pleasure-oriented sexuality correspond to our natural impulses? The very existence of endemic neurosis, which is known to be induced by sexual discharges, could put the chip in our ear knowing moreover that this neurosis precisely leads to investing false expectations in all kinds of substitutes.

The problem of diet should not be neglected: the epidemic of bulimia and obesity that has settled since the return to abundance, after the last war, would it not indicate some mistakes that would have been left to us by tradition? Grain crops, the corollary of our attraction for flour, have a heavy ecological impact. Rethinking our diet could play a major role in reducing agricultural pollution and degradation, as well as reducing obesity and other so-called civilizational diseases.

It is this type of question that must be asked very seriously if one wants to understand the springs of contradictory progress, which promises to lead us to our loss if we let him follow his course…