Book Review- Mankind's Last Chance: Healing for a Broken World by Richard Poole

Mankind's Last Chance: Healing for a Broken World By Richard Poole

The surfeit of indulgence is in no small part the product of a joint assault on our senses by those branches of the media that trade in superficial. The movie and advertising industries know only too well how to promote fantasy and appeal to our egos.

Their world of falsehood is paralleled by the less seductive but also problematical world of the news industry, led by the tabloid newspapers. These routinely simplify and distort the news they report, delight in scare mongering, and specialise in cutting others down to size. Both sides of the industry are harmful in their own way—one creating expectations that cannot be met, and the other depressing morale.

Whatever their function may have been in the past—and it may have been noble—neither serves the common good today, although no doubt each would defend the integrity of its motives and methods to the very end. There is often a time lag between our actions and the results they produce, such that we may not see a connection between the two. This is true of our relationships with those who are closest to us, and even more so where the wider community is concerned.

For well over a generation now, perhaps two, we have been subjected to a media assault that has ridden roughshod over virtually everything that was formerly considered decent and necessary for our collective well-being. And all the while, life has appeared to carry on the same, thereby proving—or so it seemed—that society can function well without a moral compass and the prophets of doom were wrong.

It has always been possible to sustain this position if most of us have been reasonably comfortable, our health has been good, and we have felt secure inside our homes.

We may have heard of others who were less fortunate—those living on the edge, with precious little to eat, nowhere to live, forever on the run, and living in fear—but it was others and not us. It was usually somewhere remote, so we were able to push it from our minds. It did not affect us personally, and so we continued about our daily business, no doubt saddened by the images that we saw but without feeling any immediate compulsion to intervene.

Namaste,

Beverley.