Decaying into Camazotz

This has been said:

Evidence is mounting that that the world is no longer fascinated with Silicon Valley: It’s disturbed by its callous behavior. But it will take a massive shift to introduce self-awareness to an industry that has always assumed it was changing the world for the better.

This has also been said:

John Adams famously said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Lesser known is the line he penned two sentences before this one: “[W]e have no government, armed with power, capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and religion.” My takeaway from these lines isn’t that only a Christian or Bible-believing society can enjoy the blessings of liberty, but that a society which depends on big-G “Government” as its only governance is doomed to failure. A society without the rigors of standards, of mores, of ethical integrity not just as an abstract concept but as a foundation of a worthy character, will find itself growing an overarching external scaffolding to provide a poor substitute for the skeleton it no longer has.

As has this:

[Elder Dallin H. Oaks] asked, “What has caused the current public and legal climate of mounting threats to religious freedom? I believe the cause is not legal but cultural and religious. I believe the diminished value being attached to religious freedom stems from the ascendency of moral relativism.

“More and more of our citizens support the idea that all authority and all rules of behavior are man-made and can be accepted or rejected as one chooses. Each person is free to decide for himself or herself what is right and wrong. Our children face the challenge of living in an increasingly godless and amoral society.”

We keep looking for guidance in technology and government and sneer at guidance from religion – forgetting that these are not one or the other choices – that we can work with the three – and more – and HAVE to work with the three and more in order for this world to do anything but decay into Camazotz.

There is not one thing alone on this Earth that man has created that will “save” us, either in the moral, religious, ethical or governmental sense. There exist combinations of things that may do a better job.

Self-governance. If we want our institutions to succeed, we need more of it, and fast. Self-governance does not equal “My way or the highway.” There can be no selfishness in self-governance. Such a thing must be built on moral and ethical standards that consider the needs of those outside of our own skulls.

In other words – no matter what guidance we seek, we have to be willing to put in at least half the effort, or more. We can’t turn to technology or government or religion and say, “Hey, this is YOUR problem, you deal with it so I don’t have to.” This is where we fail – when we abdicate responsibility to someone else and take it for granted they’ll do the right thing.