Today I want to return to the business of living out our tremendous human potential. We are much more primitive than we are oft-times led to believe. We often fool ourselves into believing that we are "civilised" and "developed" while closing our eyes to our day-to-day primitive behaviours. For example, the USA, now in the midst of a presidential election, posits itself as the "most developed" country in the world while at the same time it displays a political culture that is rooted in an entrenched and primitive tribal warfare. In this war, like all other wars, there are friends and there are enemies. Enemies are to be destroyed, whether justified or not. They are to be demonised and made into objects of hatred. Friends are those who belong to your tribe. They are to be embraced and protected at all costs. They can do no wrong. Issues of morality, the core measure of human progress, are conveniently set aside. In a true democracy people have the freedom to exercise choice. People are trusted to act responsibly, to reason and to rationally and morally choose what is best for both the individual and for the collective whole. But such rational and progressive choice-making is only possible when the minds of the people are free-when they are free of the prejudices and negative conditioning imposed on them by their tribes, race, religion, culture, gender or political ideology (liberalism or conservatism). The US is still an imperfect democracy because most people seem to be still in one or more of these cages of prejudicial conditioning and, thus, are failing to exercise their individual freedom.
It is a culture of warring tribes with numerous fractions broadly coalescing into two macro tribes-the conservatives and the liberals. They are also called political parties. They are the modern-day combatants in a politically driven war. It is a war that is loaded with gross moral inconsistencies. It is a war that brings to the fore our various human prejudices. It is a classic display of our more primitive minds at work. The war is primarily verbal, but increasingly visual. This tribal alignment leaves people blind-blind to their own lack of freedom, blind to their inability to reason objectively, blind to the shortcomings and moral failures of their own tribal members, blind to the positive traits of their perceived enemies, blind to their own tribal imprisonment and blind to their still uncivil state of existence. Our humanity is still primitive-even in this so-called developed country, the US. And, as we all know, T&T is no different. Should we be emulating the US or should we be striving do better? I believe that we can do so much better. We can, if only we can let go of our biased tribal conditioning. We can, if only we can step out of our tribal cages. We all have the capacity to be free and to think independently. It is only then that we can claim to be civilised or developed. Our human potential is there crying out to be recognised and to be fulfilled. Civility beckons. Whether we live in T&T or the US, let us live in hope that we will all awaken to our blindness and proactively strive to gain the personal freedom that is necessary in order to fulfil our human potential and to build a great society. Humanity has never been fully civilised as a collective. But we have had individuals who have achieved a high level of civility, such as Mohandas Gandhi in India and Nelson Mandela in South Africa. Occasionally, we have had groups and rarely, if at all, countries.
I believe that as human beings we are in the early stage of the civilising process and that we have been slowly getting better over the centuries. To say that civility is on the decline is to display ignorance of the uncivil state of humanity in the past and the potential that we have for future development. Also, it is to display a complete lack of perspective on the nature of the human development process. Without doubt, the human being comes equipped with the potential to display a high level of civility-but it is only a potential. Sadly, most of us are not even aware of our individual and collective potential. It is now generally agreed that humanity's greatness remains mostly unexpressed. Our innate drive to do better and to seek greatness is rooted in our individual desire to fulfil our human potential. The source of much of our unhappiness is the result of the frustration of our desire to do better. Such frustration leaves us with a sense of emptiness and a lack of fulfilment. We all know that we can do better, regardless of what we have already accomplished. This desire to grow by doing better lies in the huge mental capacity of the human brain. This capacity resides primarily in our advanced neural system and equips us with the power of consciousness, the power of reason and the ability to consciously choose from a range of complex options. As we experience life, we have the ability to store a vast amount of memories, from which we can draw in our reasoning and choice-making processes. This ability is uniquely human. The capacity to grow provides us with the opportunity to form, develop and sustain complex social systems, such that through our synergistic interactions we achieve heights of greatness infinitely greater than what we can ever achieve as individuals. Thus, our individual potential can only be fully expressed when we are part of a team, a community, a society and wider humanity. In the matter of achieving our individual potential, we are all mutually interdependent. It is time for us to move beyond our normalised state of primitive war mongering. Civility beckons.