Here are three paragraphs written with clear insight by contemporary members of the human race:
Our culture is obviously in a time of trouble. Many have foreseen breakdown in our economy, since a great technology obsessed with getting rich quickly is too clumsy and topheavy, and altogether too inhuman in its values . . . ecologists are becoming aware of how delicately poised the living organism of the ecosphere is . . . Our present difficulties may well be the overture before the ringing up of the curtain for the grand opera. It is therefore necessary to see current events and complexities in a broader context, as component skeins of an enormous canvas. It is too sanguine, too naive, to assume we can just patch things up and carry on. We must learn that merely getting more possessions and satisfying more desires and supposed wants is not the object of life. We shall have to simplify our lives drastically and be prepared to let go much that we now strive desperately to hold. Values and consciousness must change, not just tastes, manners, fashions, social structures or politics.
Nation-building is part of the overall evolutionary process: the blossoming of the soul of humanity; as such it is continuous and inevitably painful and challenging. The world is still characterised by the divides, north and south, rich and poor, developed and developing nations. However, in spite of this, the world is becoming more interconnected and interdependent. In such an interdependent world where some nations or communities are apparently making more progress than others there is bound to be friction. In the circumstances, the Common Good can be assured only when the weakest and poorest developing nations and communities are not neglected but given adequate attention as members of the same human family.
In order to serve the common good of the peoples of a nation more effectively, governance must be fully representative, transparent and equitable, and for now and the foreseeable future, democracy proffers the most appropriate and attractive paradigm for good governance and true nation-building, provided that the underlying and fundamental principles, ethics and rules of democracy are well understood and studiously adhered to.
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