It is February, 2009, and I've decided to start blogging my progress in the development of Curing the Human Disease.
This story goes back a few months - to early November of last year, when the idea for this book first came to me. The United States was deeply immersed in the election cycle and just about everyone I knew was tuning into the news for hours each day. It was an amazingly dramatic showdown between Barack Obama with Joe Biden and John McCain with Sarah Palin - I was as enthralled as the media.
I've always been fascinated by politics but this was the first time I felt inspired to truly think beyond myself to the problems affecting the U.S. and the world. So, I was thinking deeply about stuff...how do we fix these issues that plague us? Terrorism and violence; poverty and the economic crisis; executive compensation and corporate crime; pollution and global warming. I was thinking - all of these issues we face have human behaviors at their core. We all have the capacity for greed, jealousy, hatred, etc. That means in order to truly fix the challenges we face, we have to address the human issues that we all face, which actually align fairly well with the 7 deadly sins.
And thus came the idea for Curing the Human Disease, which started as a set of questions: Why are we all born with the capacity to do great harm? What does society do about it? How can we "cure" people of these flaws, or at least mitigate them? I started conducting interviews and doing research and thus far it's been a fascinating journey.
I decided to start this blog because as I am traveling on this journey I keep uncovering such interesting bits of knowledge and hearing amazing stories that may or may not make it into the book. I just wanted to talk about some of what I am seeing and hearing here and maybe get a few people interested in tagging along with me.
After this first post I might do a bit of catching up from what I've been doing over the past three months or so - so the timeline may be out of whack until I catch up a bit!
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Dax,
ReplyDeleteOne of the best explanations for understanding the human dilemma can be found in the work of Ernest Becker-- and Otto Rank, but he's difficult to read. I'm currently immersed in the Denial of Death and its implications are fascinating. Here is a link to a lecture that breaks down some of the main concepts of Becker's work: http://www.ernestbecker.org/orange/hidden/solomonsound.htm
Thanks so much Shane - I am definitely going to check that out.
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