Gurdjieff had the view that humanity exists in a near-perpetual state of sleep. “Man lives his life in sleep, and in sleep he dies.” On the evidence—climate change, consumerism, ceaseless warring and the wanton destruction of the planet—the Russian mystic wasn’t wrong.
We can’t rely on the smartest guys in the room to save us from anthropogenic climate change. Smart guys are why we’re in this mess. Today our urgent need is for wise men, like the gift-bearing magi who found Jesus in a stall trough.
Observing the global scene, psychonaut Alex Grey said, “I keep thinking that we are on the Titanic headed for the iceberg and instead of correcting our direction we are watching fistfights on the deck of the ship.”
These two slow, powerful movements operate in a strange sort of parallelism. The first movement, climate change, is predicted to become an irreversible crisis by 2050. The second movement, the falling sperm count in men, is walking us toward the possibility of mass sterility.
In an 1861 journal entry, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “Thank God that men cannot as yet fly and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.”
Now we face our own extinction.
Men's Work 