Looking at the Sufferings of Mankind

by Barbara Hug, PhD, Psychologist, Switzerland

Young people today frequently face a very uncertain vocational future. Our world is in a cul-de-sac, there is increasing instability and the imponderables in life have rapidly grown in the last few years. Such factors do not facilitate future decisions. The financial opportunities offered by job training need very careful consideration and automatically limit anyone's choice of career. I am speaking here about the brutal vision of the 80-20-society. [Ed.: The 80-20 divide in society, in which 80% of wealth/resources are controlled by 20% of people. The power elite engages in mythmaking, producing oversimplified logics and stories that keep them in power. Chomsky calls this the "manufacture of consent." Elites create the illusions of participation, while keeping the majority of people out of meaningful participation and governance. 80-20 Rule - Chomsky argues that 80% of the populace is side-tracked into fundamentalist, silly, and time-wasting propaganda, so that 20%, the relatively well-educated elite can manage, write, and vote]. This bleak model of the 80:20-society is being resolutely implemented by social technologists. Elitism and suffering are the result, and there is very little else in between. The rich elite have no desire to see the misery they produce, and seek to cut themselves off from the rest of society.

The vision of a place in the sun among the privileged few is seductive for any young person. Young people's suggestibility is exploited, they are manipulated and seduced. Money, cars, prestige, fun, an easy and relaxed life, but not only, because there is also the ruthless competition, and the career at the expense of one's colleague over which one should lose no sleep. Tough, cool, high - the most vulgar methods are glorified. You know what I mean. What can we do about it?

Which decision should a young person take? In my opinion, vocational training should enable young people to alleviate the suffering of mankind. A great deal of room should be given to human values in vocational training. When a young person, for example, studies medicine, he should be enabled to not only concentrate on his specific job as a medical doctor, but also do something about the enormous health problems in the world. He should learn to feel compassion for the permanently sick in Africa, for the children who have been exposed to nuclear contamination and will always remain sick and are doomed to die early, for the poverty-stricken who suffer from poor hygiene and contaminated drinking water, for those with illnesses for whom no remedies are available, and for the mothers ill from long-term hunger and malnutrition with their ill-born babies ... In the heart of the medical student who learns a healing profession there needs to be room for the want and neediness of those people outside his immediate sphere of activity.

When young people study engineering or agronomics, they must be aware of the enormous problems facing the developing countries. Bridges need to be built, not for the convenience of military trucks but to improve the life of the local population. Fields need to be planted with suitable crops, so that those people have enough to eat and not so that a few select companies earn huge profits.

When a young person trains for a job in business, he acquires the ability to handle money. Again, this ability should serve to successfully advise or administrate both small and large lines of business.

The teacher trainee will later have the enormously responsible task of waking and promoting pupils' human capacities. It is well known how formable pupils are. During children's school years a good teacher can help care and consideration for mankind to develop or grow among those where this has been neglected at home. If this opportunity to awaken empathy among school children is ignored, we are perhaps failing to seize the only chance left to sensitize young people to the enormous problems in the world.

Looking at the sufferings of mankind means that all young people should learn to feel responsible. Everyone bears part of the responsibility, the guilt or the obligation. Nobody can escape this ethical obligation, least of all those who have enjoyed the privilege of vocational training. The privilege of those who can learn a profession is a real privilege. In my opinion, it is an obligation to use one's knowledge for the well-being and not to the detriment of mankind.

I chose this subject knowing that in the coming years and decades mankind will be subjected to an increasingly brutal regime which will throttle the countries of this world. People will be consciously kept in poverty and ill health; they will consciously be kept in a condition of starvation, and consciously deprived of their living. A majority of the people will be deprived of even the slightest education, let alone higher education. Houses and fields will be destroyed, parts of the world will be made uninhabitable by wars and contamination. What I am talking about are the wars and the planned wars, but also the perversion of human feelings. The innate ability to feel compassion is being dulled, for example by the commercialisation of the large welfare organizations. Only the "right part" of mankind should have access to aid.

That is the future vision of the social technologists, and its realisation requires military bases in all corners of the world, and most of mankind will be made to bleed for it.

What is it we should work towards? Young people should take the decision to place their feelings, way of thinking and influence on the side of those most in need of his help and knowledge, on the side of those who suffer, they should help to alleviate the problems of mankind, which suffers. If large numbers of young people decide to do so, a change can be brought about. Compassion will triumph, not destruction. Co-operation will triumph, not the lethal rivalry for energy resources. Mankind urgently needs peace.

This paper was presented at the international conference 'Contemplation and Hope' in Budapest earlier this year. The conference was organised by the National Pedagogic Workshop, directed by Dr. Baranyi Karol.