concerns for the future

I am an optimist. Normally I feel that the next half century will be a wonderful and magical ride for the generation fortunate enough to live through it, but lately a few things have been worrying me.

• Religion isn't declining at a fast enough rate, and it seems to be the major source of hate and violence in the world.
• Worshipping of money continues to rule much of the world. I am dismayed that the gap between the rich and the poor is still widening instead of blurring. This guarantees further unrest and rebellion, and is a major source of fuel for religion. The rich consider the poor as irrelevant or contemptible, and the poor consider the rich as the enemy.
• We continue to use violent solutions to problems instead of attempting to understand the deeper causes and correct those. Almost every TV drama hero carries a gun and uses it instead of their brain to solve daily dilemmas. This lesson is not lost on generations of viewers. Where are the modern versions of Columbo and MacGyver? Columbo was a humble and polite detective who never picked up a weapon. MacGuyver was an engineer who used his brain to think his way out of situations and hated guns; if he ever picked up a gun it was to throw it into a vat of boiling water. OK, CSI is a giant step in the right direction, but the characters are often arrogant or even rude to those they interview.
• We still don't try to learn how to raise children with tolerance, interest, and intelligence. Incredibly it is considered less important than learning how to bake cakes, or constructing woodwork, or telling the difference between a noun and a verb. It is almost by chance that any of us get a good upbringing and avoid major psychological damage.
• Our "leaders", political, religious, and corporate, lie and cheat. And we have come to expect this rather than call them to account for it. Those in very responsible positions should lose all and become social pariahs if they betray that trust. A poiltician who lies should lose his job, his life-long pension, and his public standing. A religious leader who foments hate or intolerance should be swept from their position and humiliated. A corporate leader who cheats and steals should lose every cent, spend more time in a real jail than a burglar would, and be barred from holding such a position ever again.

We will almost certainly develop godlike powers through our technology in the next several decades, so we had better do more towards healing our broken emotional responses. The spike is coming soon... if religion, big business, and politics don't manage to drag us down into a new dark age. Technology has been accelerating in capability for hundreds of years. Some time over the next 60 years it is projected that this curving graph of technological capability will climb to near vertical -- the spike. I fervently hope we can heal our damaged psyches before then.