Self-Absorbed

Yesterday as I was driving back from a little camping trip to the lake with the family, I thought about how what some people think of as camping is actually a test of survival skills. With this as a starting point, my mind (as it so often does) began to wander. It is interesting how for mankind our early emphasis on self-survival has evolved to become something altogether different than mere sustinance.

On a side note, if the use of the term "mankind" offended anyone, I respectfully hope you will both forgive me and get over it. I am incredibly sick of the notion that terms like this are offensive or inappropriate. There is seldom any cruel intention associated with such a term but people will get their unmentionables in a bunch over things like that. What's the point and/or big deal? It is merely a long-used term to describe humans at large and people understand that. To suggest it is anything else is just spoiling for a fight. That kind of crap (Oops. I did it again) has got to stop. But I digress...

In the early days of people on this earth (There. Feel better?) it seemed like our primary concern was sustinance. We had needs rather than wants and directed our energies accordingly. We recognized the provisions of our Creator and were close to Him on a basic level. We relied on Him and sought God, food, shelter and safety above all else. In many cases were made this a group effort and held each other up in these efforts.

Eventually, however, we decided we were pretty good at the sustinance thing and decided there must be more that would improve our lives and self-improvement began to take over our interests. We became more involved in arts and apearances and at first rightly directed these efforts to honoring our God. At the same time, we began to think that perhaps we played a pretty large role in our own existence and began to feel pretty important as a result. No longer of the collective opinion that we were totally reliant on God, we distanced ourselves from Him a little bit feeling confident that we had more control over our own destiny than we may have originally thought or given ourselves credit. Self-survival had given way to self-reliance and the difference was not as subtle as it sounds.

This chain of events was doomed to failure. This may seem obvious because of the trend of pulling away from God and this is disastrous. But there is another reason. Though self-reliance is not necessarily negative by nature, it was a rung in the ladder by which mankind has elevated itself and in so doing has given us a spirit of self-importance and this is where we are now. The selfish nature of man has reached a fever pitch in my opinion and fostered a society whereby we seek our own interests over those of our fellow man. Further, those interests are reinforced by an extremely zealous marketing machine that feeds those tendancies and feeds on those tendancies. Our desire for self-importance causes us to carefully prop up images (however fragile they may be) that suggest we are problem-free, blemish-free and living lives of luxury and priviledge. And where is God after all of this progress? Sadly, for many He is serving as a garnish to our sustinance rather than the main course and again, this approach is destined to fail. We will not, nor should we, be able to maintain a society wherein people are willing to use others and then discard them for personal gain or where we laud our status over those of others or where we dismiss the plights of those who have not been materially blessed because we are convinced this is a measure of their value.

Perhaps I am a bit too pessimistic, but I fear that this is not a situation we will fix ourselves soon enough to avoid more heartache for humanity. If self-reliance were to somehow morph into more responsibility for our actions, that might help, but I fear this may not happen. We are too entrenched in the blame game to reverse course. But the deadly mixture of self-importance with community blame is one that will make our society become enamored with the siren's song of those hoping to gain or maintain power through promises of prosperity with no responsibility. The fact is, no country nor man is elevated above another in importance in God's sight and all are worthy of opportunity and even aid when dealt a difficult hand. This is the responsibility of a community seeking to aid one another in survival and reliance on God by being instruments of His peace. So, perhaps we should begin at the beginning.