BG 244 – Our arrogance
For hundreds of years, fueled mainly by Christianity, Western man felt like the supreme being on this planet. As far as we were concerned, animals, plants, other life forms and non-living matter existed only to be exploited by us. And not in a balanced, sustainable way, but simply as much as we could get hold of in our greed, with the help of increasingly efficient technological tools. There was no end to it, we thought.
We thought we were superior. Or actually, I shouldn’t use the past tense, because most, especially Western, people still think they are superior. The result? Plundering of the Earth. Depletion of natural resources, pollution of our living environment, and the extinction of many species of living beings because of our actions. And there is no end to our greed. Not even now that we are all, to a greater or lesser extent, having to deal with the first serious consequences of the climate disaster we have caused. And with shortages in what we long thought were inexhaustible resources, to which we believed we were entitled.
Why do we think we are superior in the first place? For hundreds of years, we had forgotten that we are just one of the many animal species on this planet. We had invented spoken and written language and started an agricultural revolution, an industrial revolution, and an automation or information revolution, and there was no other living being capable of such a thing, so we felt omnipotent. Even when we had long since gone too far …