on Intangibles

I look back on the monumental achievements of the past with awe. Achievements such as the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, Gothic Cathedrals, and incalculable other ancient structures that somehow manage to endure for dozens of centuries.  I wonder how and why humanity no longer seems capable of accomplishing such feats. Modern structures no longer last a hundred years, let alone a thousand. What has changed? What have we lost? I think I have the answer.

Perhaps the things people value are changing, it certainly seems like they are. In general today’s people seem to favor the tangible more than the intangible.

Love, family, friendship, compassion, dignity, freedom etc are all intangible.

A big screen TV, a smartphone, designer clothes, fancy cars, big houses etc are all tangible, and they are what people nowadays seem to value.

Unfortunately without love, family, friendship, compassion, dignity, freedom and all the other difficult to grasp things that make life worth living none of those tangible material things matter.  How much money you have and how many tangible material things you can buy with that money doesn’t matter if you have no one with whom to share them.  If you don’t have love, everything you have is worth nothing.

The breakdown of the family unit into discrete, commercially accessible and individually exploitable units will be the downfall of society as we know it. But honestly I don’t think I care very much anymore. Society as we know it is nothing but a shallow yet insistent lie that tells us as long as we’re doing okay individually the rest of the world doesn’t matter. It does. Individuals matter far more than society encourages us to think.

Earlier I claimed to have the answer, and now I’ll reveal what I think that answer is. It’s a simple little word. Unity. The emphasis on material, tangible things has come at enormous cost. That cost is the loss of unity. Individuals are encouraged to value things they can hold in their hands more than people they can hold in their hearts. That single change in emphasis means the sole unit of concern becomes the self. When the self is more important than the family from which the self springs, how can the society in which the family dwells matter?

Unity is the cost of the tangible.

Unity is not a sense of “me”, it is an understanding of “us”.

Sadly I think the collective of humanity has lost unity.

About C.G.Ayling

Musing misuser of words, lover of lyrical literature, author, occasional contrary thoughts. An honorable man’s name, in memoriam.
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