The Human Race Is Mentally Ill

If we were to do a psychiatric assessment of the human race, there's no doubt that in my mind as a mental health expert of forty years, that our race would be diagnosed as having a mental illness. Because of this, the world is a much more dangerous place now than it has ever been in our history.

According to polls, more than 70% of the US population oppose the proposed Islamic center near ground zero, even though our constitution has worked well for more than two hundred years, and millions of Muslims are good people and law-biding citizens. The plan of a small-town preacher to burn copies of the Koran caused a global uproar during which at least twenty people have been killed, even though the God, in whose name the preacher wanted to burn the Koran, told him to love his neighbor and the Koran was never burnt in the first place. Polls also tell us that 20% of our population still believe that President Obama is a Muslim, although he is one of the most vetted politicians in our history. There are genocides in progress in many parts of the world. We still have stock piles of nuclear weapons enough to blow up the world many times. Millions of children die of hunger every year, and billions of people still don’t have clean water to drink, and most of the world’s wealth is in the hands of a few. After more than sixty years of hostilities, Palestine and Israel still can’t even decide on borders. A few terrorists are holding the world hostage. A rogue country threatens nuclear war whenever its feelings are hurt. Children are being killed everyday by cluster bombs, and women and children are being raped as a weapon of war.

We Are Mentally Ill

These are just a few signs that much of the human race has lost the use of a major part of its mind, and that’s seriously endangering our survival. Human beings have survived this long precisely because we have had the use of a whole mind, in more “primitive times,” that gave us new solutions to new problems when we needed them. We are no longer using our whole mind, and the small part we are using can never give us the solutions we desperately need right now. We can no longer “see” the problems clearly enough, nor are we open to the solutions, because we can’t see them either.

Here are a few more symptoms of our debilitating mental illness:

1) racial prejudice, even though almost everyone is of mix racial origin.

2) religious prejudice, even though every religion preaches tolerance.

3) political deception, although our political system is based on truth and justice.

4) greed for power and money, although everyone has a right to security.

5) human-caused global warming, although the earth is our only home.

6) denial of human global warming, in spite of overwhelming scientific facts.

7) child abuse and neglect, although children are our future.

9) Tolerating modern slavery, although we know we are all created equal.

10) Tolerating hunger, although there is plenty for all.

11) Tolerating drug trafficking, although drugs destroy life.

12) Tolerating violence as entertainment, although violence causes violence and destroys life.

13) devaluing human life, although it is primary to all of us.

14) Tolerating terrorism, although terrorism is anti-life and anti-freedom.

15) Exploiting space, although we're horribly poluting earth.

Give me a break! We should be over these primitive and immature behaviors by now. We’ve had thousands of years of experience and have lived though the inquisition, the witch trials and burnings, the slaughter of the crusades, slavery, civil wars, the holocaust and other genocides, world wars, the horror of the atom bomb, old terrorism, and hundreds and thousands of other atrocities. Won’t we ever learn. No, we won’t until we cure our mental illness.

There Is A Solution

Before I say another word, let me assure you that there is a solution, but will we see it? Our collective mental illness is getting worse by the day, because our world is getting smaller by the day, causing more chaos and more fear. A famous psychological experiment added increasing numbers of rats to a small space until they were fighting and tearing each other apart. We are not rats but are acting like them. We are intelligent beings who are not using our intelligence. We are using only a small part of our mind, and it is the wrong part that can never solve the new problems we face in our new world. Hell, we haven’t even been able to solve the old problems that have been around forever, how can we solve the new ones that the human race has never experienced before?

The answer is that we can if we use the correct part of our mind, an incredible part that already knows the answers to every problem we face. But, we are blocking that part of our mind from showing us those answers by thinking too much. We are overusing our rational, thinking brain which then causes overwhelming fear and anxiety, because fear is nothing but thought in the form of memory. In turn, that fear blocks the ability of our creative, intuitive mind from giving us the answers we need right now. For instance, we have no business polluting space with further exploration until we learn to use our whole mind to clean up the mess we’ve made here at home and solve the problems that are threatening to destroy us.

We Need To Get Our Whole Intelligence Back

There is a huge difference between intelligence and education. We have glorified the rational brain and its ability to collect data and information for so long that we are addicted to the knowledge we’ve amassed. All of this vast knowledge, however, is all old as soon as we know it. Education is the collection of information that is immediately outdated and gives us only the ability to solve technical problems that we already have the answers to in our memories or libraries. It cannot, and never will be able to, solve problems we have never experienced before. For that, we need intelligence, which is the inherent ability of our minds to see and understand the nature of a new problem in its entirety and apply a solution that comes naturally from our creative, intuitive mind. In other words, our rational, analytical mind can never solve a new problem, simply because it operates only with old knowledge. Albert Einstein said that he never made a discovery with his thinking mind. He also said that we cannot solve a problem at the same level of thinking that created it. There is a much higher level of thinking, already in our minds, that is awaiting our discovery.

The human species is at another of the many crossroads in its history. Again, we have chance to succeed or fail. We will succeed if we learn to use our whole mind to solve the many major problems we face in our new and crazy world. We have the capability, but will we discover our whole intelligence to make it a reality? I’m betting we will, because we’ve always risen to the occasion when our backs have been against the wall. They certainly are now.

© 2010, sgscalese