Prof. Dr. Vagif Rakhmanov, Director of Scientific Research Institute of Child and Family Therapy, Psychology, Medical Rehabilitation, Ukraine
Modern world is a complicated tangle of contradictions, and its threads are pulling more and more tightly making the Gordian knot. It is this level of complexity and contradictions, which has made the author not only to research health care but also to glance over a wider picture of the world using for this goal a huge amount of facts gathered during half a century medical practice.
Principal narrative thread is a live connection between the past and the future. The trouble is that nowadays this connection is often broken, and a wide range of problems related to each person’s health worsening becomes revealed in sore spots of the conflict.
History, the present and the future are not only narrative thread, but a revived relay race of generations, parade of healthy life potential, a reason to expose challenging past experience by which one can enrich modern world.
The 21st century is truly named both flourishing and recessive. Cognition comes through comparison, you know. When contrasted with past ages, life has become more comfortable without a doubt. Strange as it may seem, welfare has a reverse side of a medal. This paradox needs thorough examination and that not theoretical but a practical one. This is what the author’s going to do.
Welfare doesn’t guarantee the common good if limited by economic accumulation of possessions without putting it into healthy way of life. Wealth for one generation can turn into poverty or even disaster for another as mankind is involved into a complicated circulation of combined relations. It should be noted that development of civilization is heterogeneous. The further it goes, the more contradictions are arising and entangling into a vicious circle with poles and extremes. As a result, one end of our civilization’s dinner table strikes with luxuriousness and is heaped with food, while eaters at the other end can have only crumbs. On one life pole the feasters don’t notice grieves of the poor on the other pole because the former are hiding from problems of majority behind entertainments and luxe.
Glitter and glare of modern life can be illustrated by twofold good of night lantern which lights wayfarers’ way and at the same time cheats moths, bugs and other insects. With hope they fly to the lamp but fall with the burning wings, and on the floor become an easy prey for stronger species also attracted by light. But their feast is not long, and these winners end their life in insatiable jaws of quick hedgehogs, snakes and rodents, the latter in their turn become victims of foxes, wolves and other predators. In the morning we look with despise at these dead creatures and can with disgust, and some of us with pleasure, crush, mash them without a notion that all living creatures are God’s work and no deeds stay unpunished.
Talking about survival chain, it is only a nutritional chain where the strongest wins and it is life in itself which makes every creature go up the stairs of struggle for survival.
In the basis of evolution there are global laws made by the Creator, creator of the whole world alive and that is why this world is called Creation. In this very context all of us are God’s creatures, this is etymological meaning of this term.
And now some parallels become obvious. Let’s look whether our world is very much alike the life of these insects. Their life cycle is just very short and we can watch it. God gave us 70, sometimes more than 100 years when life and death cycle is about a century. It’s a considerably long period full with events making us dizzy. Remember David Lloyd George’s (one of British politicians and Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s close friends) quote “The world is becoming like a lunatic asylum run by lunatics”.
This sad idea sounded at the beginning of the 20th century, and at the beginning of the 3rd millennium people’s competition for survival shifted to a new higher level. And here it’s appropriate to recall the judgment of a famous philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer “Our world is an arena of worn and frightened creatures which exist only with eating one another”. As they say, one should learn history.
“Our children, descendants! Stop, muse what you are aspiring to and what you are abjuring?! You don’t treasure the memory of your ancestors who with hard work in grievances and sufferings had created and preserved a beautiful and harmonious world, had given it to you, ungrateful children and grandchildren. Having violated the memory, you got free from remorse. Like mankurts you are dancing on the graves and bones of grandfathers and great-grandfathers. You are running blindly for dear life… And nothing but abyss ahead! Emotional draining and physical extinction is an outcome of desperate fight in insatiable band of consumers. This is the last chance to muse, repent, go back to roots!”
Literature
1. Rakhmanov Vagif: Optimism – Pessimism. Paradoxes – Excesses of Modern Civilization with Eyes of Professor, Psychiatrist, Psychologist, Psychoanalyst. Dnipro, 2018