How Bad Will The Future Really Be?

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.
- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, nicknamed "the wise" Roman Emperor, (121 CE - 180 CE)

An emperor of Rome, indeed the leader of any country up to modern times, would need to be sanguine about the future because the chances of his having his head detached from the rest of his body before that body was worn out stood exceedingly high.

What about old Julius? He certainly couldn't have used all of his weapons of reason when he allowed his formerly trusted ally Brutus and his gang to slay him. Actually, he likely did. To the best of his ability.

Julius was a very ill man, suffering from a great deal of pain and loss of his abilities of perception due to disease at the time of his death. It's entirely possible that he did the equivalent of falling on his sword, just to put himself out of misery. He knew he was too sick to rule Rome, to give it his best. Yet his honour forbade him from committing suicide, even if it be for the good of Rome. It's highly likely that he knew what was about to happen when he met privately with his "enemies."

In other words, we now know that Julius Caesar likely used the best of his mental faculties to do what was best for both himself and for Rome. History hasn't recorded the event of his death that way, but history has a way of relating what its teller wants to the story to be.

Marcus Aurelius must also have used his abundant mental faculties during his almost two decades as emperor of Rome (actually king, as Rome did not call anyone an emperor). His reign was the ultimate example of Pax Romana and his death brought turmoil as to who should lead the greatest empire the world had known until then (later the British Empire was greatest in history, covering one-quarter of our planet's surface at one time).

Though Christians were still persecuted in his time in theory, in practice they seldom were. Rome (undoubtedly a brutal regime in many ways, though hardly the worst in history) really was fairly peaceful during Marcus's reign. It would have required considerable weapons of reason to make peace so effectively that the period was given its own name.

So we turn to ourselves. Every media outlet in the western world and most in other parts of the world report almost daily about how bad conditions are in the world. I have heard many young people from North America say that they don't plan to have children because the world is just getting worse and they couldn't in all good conscience bring children into such tragedy.
The world must be getting worse, just listen to our media tell us. But it's not so.

No point in history has ever been so peaceful, with such a great percentage of people living long lives, healthier than their ancestors, in human history. The media always tell us that the world is a terrible place and leave us to conclude that the future will surely be worse. Neither is true.

Even during the dreaded Holocaust, when millions of Jews, cripples, people with much lower than average intelligence and people who simply pissed off the Germans were being exterminated, good things were happening elsewhere in the world. In the west, women who worked necessary jobs in factories earned a decent living and started a movement for equal rights for women that is still going on today. The Jews that survived got a country of their own a few years after the war, something they had not been able to accomplish for themselves for the previous 3000 years. The powers of the world came together as never before to defeat evil.

Just as Marcus Aurelius said that we will face the future as it comes to us with the same weapons of reason that we use today, we must use the weapons of reason we have available to us today. Or we will make the world a worse place to live, unsafe, unhealthy, unlivable for our children and grandchildren.

Our weapons of reason that help us to cope with today must make us realize that good things are happening in the world each day, even we if don't read about them. We must reason that just because our media report almost exclusively bad news does not mean that the world itself is getting worse. They just report what many people want to hear. Paris Hilton makes the news when she sneezes (and maybe her dress has a "wardrobe malfunction"), but we hear nothing about the millions of good people around the world and in our own communities who are doing good deeds and making good things happen every day.

It's important that we heed Marcus Aurelius's advice about the future. It won't be as bad as the fear mongers want us to believe (they make their living scaring people, remember, rather than getting "real" jobs). And the present isn't as bad as almost every source of information we have make it out to be.

We need to use our weapons of reason every day of our life, not just about the future. The more we refuse to find out information about what is really going on in the world and decline to use our powers of reason when we learn it, the worse the world will become and the worse our own lives will become.

Not learning and not thinking is what will make the world really worse. Bad guys can easily manipulate the thinking and voting of people who are ignorant and who don't want to think for themselves, who depend on others to think and to tell them what to think and believe.

We have the power within us, even those of us with the poorest of education and the most dire of backgrounds. It doesn't cost a thing to use it. We just have to try.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who can think for themselves about subjects other than the limited ones taught in schools.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

You Can Be Free

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.
- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Roman emperor, stoic philosopher (121 - 180 CE)

As emperor for about two decades of the greatest empire until modern times, Marcus Aurelius knew what it would be like to allow external problems to prey on his mind. Though he was known as one of the five great emperors of Rome, there was always a lineup of powerful men who wanted the job and had the swords and henchmen needed to cause him to lose his life.

Any empire has problems and a great emperor has great problems that prey on his mind day and night. He had the wisdom to separate the operations and vicissitudes of his position from the conducting of his life. Not an easy task, surely.

Considering the number of quotations attributed to him that pass around the internet nearly two millennia after his death, Marcus Aurelius distinguished admirably between himself and his people, his empire and its conquered people and occupied lands, even between himself and life itself.

Thus he knew well that to allow external influences to cause you pain and worry was to adopt the pain and worries of the world. He wouldn't do it. He respected himself too much.

Look back at your own life for a moment. Remember back ten years. What sorts of things troubled you then? Do they still trouble you now? Almost no one can say their problems of old still trouble them, unless one of their problems is lack of self confidence.

A decade ago my life seemed to be hanging by a thread due to financial problems. Sometimes I wished I could just die so that the pain would go away. Until one day I had coffee with a friend who is a chartered accountant. Just when I was thinking that my next meal might have to come from a soup kitchen, he said "You're a long way away from being bankrupt, or even from severe financial hardship."

When I stepped away from my self destructive thoughts after our casual meeting, I could see that by rearranging my finances I could pay all my bills and have a decent life. My fear of becoming poor kept me from doing what I could to improve myself. I had emotionally hog-tied myself and thrown myself into a downward spiral.

That all ended that same day. As Marcus Aurelius said, I used my power to revoke external influences that were ruining my life.

When I consider how far I have come in the past ten years, that very special life lesson that came at a time of great personal crisis in my life may have been one of the best things that has happened to me.

The amazing thing to me is not that life changed for me, because others long before me obviously knew that could happen. The amazing lesson for me was that I had the power to refuse to allow problems I had no control over to affect my life.

Since that time I have developed two different medical syndromes which impact every day and hour of my life. But I know how lucky I am that I don't have to let them bother me. I emphasize the positive in my life and ignore the negative, at least I refuse to give it any power over me. I am the positive part of me; the negative comes along, but no one cares about it, including me.

I enjoy freedom today that I never had before my great crisis (or previous ones) because I refuse to let problems I can't control affect me. And the ones I can control, I fix.

Try it. I give you the gift of freedom, if you choose to accept it.

Bill Allin

, a book that shows adults how making small changes in their own lives can improve them, the lives of their children and everyone else who knows them. It tells you what you need to know.
Learn more at http://billallin.com