The 2007 Shift Report: Evidence of a World Transforming (The Institute of Noetic Sciences)

I'm beginning my reading for one of my classes, and it is like a flashback to Hawaii.
Trying not to stress out about it, but can't not write something about this interesting statistic.

"The majority (79%) of freshmen in 1970 had an important personal objective of 'developing a meaningful philosophy of life.' By 2005, the majority of freshmen (75%) said their primary objective was 'being very well of financially.'"

This scares me a lot. People believe that "it's perfectly reasonable that the economy should be the paramount institution around which everything else revolves and economic logic and economic values should guide our decision." However, as the article I am reading notes, "It turns out that if you look at the assumptions underlying our economic system--especially the ones regarding the prerogatives of ownership--and then you look at the goals we humans have about how we want to live our lives, there is no compatibility. The assumptions can never lead to the goals" (The Institute of the Noetic Sciences, The 2007 Shift Report: Evidence of A World Transforming).

So, in other words, we are living a modern myth and we need to WAKE UP! Over time, our materialistic and scientifically based worldview has done some good things for society. For instance, lower infant mortality rates, extinguished fatal diseases, brought about an information explosion in technology, etc. etc., however, "the net result has been disastrous." I don't feel like going into it right now because I should be relaxing right now and preparing for an interview, but I will end with this little blurb:

Conditioned by a Tribal Mindset
"I think that we reject the evidence that our world is changing because we are still, as that wonderfully wise biologist E.O. Wilson reminded us, tribal carnivores. We are programmed by our inheritance to see other living things as mainly something to eat, and we care more about our national tribe than anything else. We will even give our lives for it and are quite ready to kill other humans in the cruelest of ways for the good of our tribe. We still find alien the concept that we and the rest of life from bacteria to whales, are parts of the much larger and diverse entity, the living Earth."
-The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity by James Lovelock (Basic Books, 2006).