2005 A.C.

So, a slice of life at the beginning of the third millenium after Christ: although the duration of our planet's years have been pinned down to the millisecond, we still use multiple systems to measure the passage of time. In some places we divide years into two slopes: those that came before the birth of a religious prophet, and those that came after. In other places eras succeed one another seemlessly, according to the length of time a symbolic government figure holds his position as symbolic government figure. In yet other places, even though people pin the beginning of an era at the same moment, their calendars diverge in the length and succession of their years, so that they've become out of phase with each other. And finally, there are those who don't count years, and thus don't know them.

We are equally disparate in our measurement of temperatures, distances and weights; hundreds of currencies coexist and each of them attempts to give value to the same thing. Those values are not only hard to translate from one currency to the next, but they are also different from place to place and from moment to moment. And there are places were currencies don't exist, and people barter, instead.

The most astounding thing about this confusion is that we propose thousands of theories about what is the right way for things to be or be measured, but most of us are simply utterly confused. The information is too much, and in such superabundance honest, informed decisions are hard to make. Much of this defending of one system over another is the result of either dishonesty or ignorance.

We have not enough control over our insecurities: greed is rampant, and so is the inability of identifying with others and their needs.

We have not enough computing capabilities, either.

Emotional education and more technology are the things we need.

Information technology does gather speed all the time, although since it is being developed by elites that use and issue it according to their own interests, its value can also be perceived as double edged, particularly because we still have very little control over our thougths and actions. In this respect, some steps have been taken in several fields and there are whole new disciplines, such as Conflict Transformation and Eco-economics, that are very promising indeed.

Nevertheless it would seem we are rather lopsided, and our immaturity can be seen in the way this lopsidedness is explained: you will hear some people saying that technology is proliferating unduly, and others will blame it on a stagnation of the Humanities. We still can't see that our problem is the whole, not the parts. Not that that would immediately help us; problems would still remain as big as they are, but a shift in attitude would help us tackle them better.

What is most frightening is that many of us foresee a time of great suffering coming. Millions are already dieing in the so-called Third World, because of unfulfilled basic needs; in the meantime the First World (there's no Second), hasn't realized that we all share the same planet. The brand of prosperity that is enjoyed here is entirely dependent on resources and people coming from that Third World. Even leaving aside the injustice of a system that prospered precisely because it took advantage of others' disadvantages and, directly or indirectly, ensured that these disadvantages continued to be there to be exploited, the situation is not tenable for much longer. Change is not a question of retribution, but of survival.

Yet we don't change things; we don't know if we can't, or if we aren't trying hard enough... Or if, indeed, we aren't trying hard enough, and we're just not admitting it to ourselves. Perhaps we need to become wiser, or be replaced by some others, wiser than we can be.