Is There No Hope For Hawaii?

"Speeding has nothing to do with traffic safety...The colleges need more remedial courses...Eating has nothing to do with obesity...The Islands are messed up because of the Republicans in control...Kailua only wants failing businesses and not successful ones...We need to build a rail to nowhere..."

The list of nonsense is endless, and dutifully reported in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, where now, the less sense an article makes, the more likely it is to be published as vetted fact. It is the final chapter of a society in decline -- drifting into anomie.

Goethe said, "Heaven is where everything is related and connected to everything else; Hell is where nothing is related and connected to anything else." Humankind can ascend but also descend, as the people in Haiti and Somalia can attest. Societies don't all have to succeed, just as in nature, not all animals are guaranteed long lives and prosperity.

Those are the realities and facts of life. Not everyone and every society can be guaranteed success; a few will succeed spectacularly, while many others will fail as spectacularly -- as they always have. That's why the great Roman Empire is no longer so great and dominant, just as the British also were at one time.

Societies and cultures rise and fall -- and so the question one asks, is this where the story of success will be written, or is this one of the many that will be plunged into endless and utter confusion -- and nobody can tell any difference anymore, or cares to? "Who is John Galt?," ask the characters of Ayn Rand's epitome of the novel Atlas Shrugged, which is intended to be a meaningless question for which no answer is expected, because nothing makes sense any longer.

Many familiar with the novel, would not be amazed at how it seems to be the story of where Hawaii at this time is -- even to its central story about a railroad as the metaphor for how life is going, and where it is headed. Nowhere.

The successful people who make a society work, finally realize their efforts are in vain, and even when they persist in their desire to better the lives of their fellow citizens, they are merely regarded as fools for thinking so, and the more they do, the less everyone else will do. So it doesn't matter how much they do -- the others will always do less, until they wake up and realize, they don't have to do all the work, for everyone else's benefit.

That is a great awakening -- much like the buddhahood, or epiphany. One awakens and sees things as they really are -- and it is that right understanding and perception, that leads to right action, and not any amount of greater effort and struggle, with the wrong perception and understanding. In thinking one was doing good, one was actually doing harm -- because the others merely learned to do less, and become more dependent on them, which is a disservice, rather than a service they thought they undertook for the benefit of society.

We also recognize that as a paradigm shift or inflection point -- at which things that have been going along in one direction, suddenly changes, disrupting that continuity and progression -- for a quantum leap into another realm of consciousness and reality. That is what the true leaders of any society ultimately must do -- and not like the many, who merely win elections and office, because they know how to play that game.

But when the name of the game is change, then only those who really are such leaders will know what to do, while those merely pretending to be so, will be lost.