What s Wrong with the World?

The thing that I see that s wrong with the world and the human predicament is lack of communication between human beings. It s the way people are when it comes to communicating that keeps us from achieving real and total unity with one another. If people can t agree one way or another on important issues that face them, how can they ever hope to achieve or defeat them?

Miscommunication passed down through generations leads to deep seeded differences between people that wouldn t normally have any qualms with each other. For example, Arabs never have and never will like Jews simply because of a lack of communication. Why do they hate each other? We don t know, and neither do they probably. Just because some Arab s great-great-great granduncle took some Jew s great-great-great grand cousin s goat that means that they have to kill each other today. And you can bet that these people told or related in some way to their kids that the other group was bad and should be eliminated. It was never communicated to these people why these differences (caused by lack of communication) exists, they just know that vengeance must be sought. That s basically what it comes down to. The source of every single problem in this world, past, present, or future, can be traced to a lack of or miscommunication. Huge wars and great tragedies could ve been avoided if people could just communicate what they want to say when they want to say it, or if the recipients had just listened or understood that message. The Titanic is a great example. They had the ice warnings but choose to ignore them, and we all know how far that got them.

In the text, Foundations of Theological Study there is a perfect example of how a r gime, established through falsities and violence, used a person s own words against them. The piece itself doesn t really demonstrate this nearly as well as the history behind the writing of it. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn lived in Russia during the rein of communism and Stalin. He had written some controversial articles and was suspected of being against Stalin. So one night, with no questions asked, he was whisked away to the Gulag and imprisoned for many years. There was never an interrogation and he was never given a fair trial. So, all because he communicated ideas that were misinterpreted by Stalin who was in power despite the fact he was a mass murderer, Aleksandr spent a great deal 9of time in prison. Plus the Russian people knew nothing or little about these occurrences because the information given out was either false or ambiguous. Many other problems dealing with governments have arisen from the spreading of false or misinformation.

Lack of communication is a big problem today as I see it and needs to be corrected if we are to evolve at all as a species. How are we to know the actual intentions of people unless they communicate them in an effective way? If everyone could just say what they mean and mean what they say, we d all be better off.