(Five-minute read) 

You don’t have to be told when you look around at the world, you are looking at the same things since time memorial – the blue sky – the land – the sea- the sun.

However, everything you have seen, heard, felt, emotionally, or not, are your cells communicating with each other, helped by trillions of nanotechnological machines.

It is true to say that the truth has no past.  Reality is what it is. 

However these days, we see the world with a completely different set of eyes.

Eyes that are subject to the mental filter of black and white conclusions, made by algorithms.

This binary perspective serves to negate what is really happing in our world. It lacks historical awareness, which is creating isolation that can be literal or psychological.

We hear talk about your values, my values, “democratic values,” the “values” of this or that community, “values clarification,” “changing values,” and many dozens of different employments of the term.

Now, of course, the very ubiquity of the term might mean that it is valuable — perhaps even invaluable. Or it might mean that “values” is an overvalued, inflated — and perhaps even a well-nigh worthless — coin of communication. I take the latter view.

Take a look around you. What do you see?

You might see smartphones, I Pads with shining, colorful screen, all data-driven by unseeing algorithms, trapping us in corsets of addiction, for-profit sake.

The word is ubiquitous in the present-day discourse of Climate change -COVID -19 -inequality, ongoing wars, all global problems.

It is — to cite only one example among many — important to know that a particular person “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” And yet there is something wrong with the term “values,” at least as that plural noun has come to be used in our culture.

What is wrong, I believe, is this:

“Values” functions as a catchall term to cover many different sorts of things that we would do well to keep distinct. “Values” covers and includes things ranging from the basest sort of self-interest to minimal moral scruples to the noblest ideals. As such, “values” can include anything — indeed everything — from personal preferences or tastes, unexamined prejudices, individual aims, and group goals, to religious convictions and moral principles.

Present value is the concept that states an amount of money today is worth more than that same amount in the future. In other words, money received in the future is not worth as much as an equal amount received today.

They are having little and less influence on how we see the world. 

Why?

Because we are becoming less and less connected with surrounding influences and conditioners, either they are absent or because they are countered and controlled by other forces like the personalized advertising industry. 

Now, of course, we have global organizations, countries governments, both to take a broader view of the problems.

And it’s true to say that vision is a complex process. The brain has to do a lot of work to take a picture and all brains see things differently.

Since our current technologies are advance exponentially ever few years our future habitat on earth will look entirely different. 

Against the present backdrop, our current concerns about the world are therefore nieve, of no value put on anything is able to shed individualism.

There is one six-letter word that we can and should do without. That word is “values.”

On the other hand, there is nothing wrong with the word “value” — the verb and the noun — nor with its cognates “valuable,” “evaluate,” “evaluation,” etc.

We would be pretty well lost without them. 

The present Pandemic hopefully will reshape what we need to value – Freshwater /Air/ Nature/ Life in all its forms, color. 

We cannot hope that consumerism profit generosity will save the children, donkeys, ecosystems to climate change.  

We must make it so by applying a world Aid commission of 0.05% on all activities within the global economy that operate for profit sake.

( See previous posts)  

If the present Corna virus pandemic is teaching us anything it is that our present-day values are worthless. 

Your data, your cookies are not your future. 

You might have started out 100% human but by the time you die you are 95.5% alien.  Another word only 0.25% human. 

 

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.