What’s Broken Beyond Repair — And What Isn’t

These days, everyone with a computer or smartphone and a somewhat functional brain wants to be a ‘writer’ or ‘influencer.’ Our society is drowning in a wild maelstrom of uninformed, partisan, and/or commercialized ‘news,’ opinion pieces, podcasts, and videos. We’re all reeling from the constant media/Internet ‘fire-hose to the face,’ as some call it.

In truth, we’re all in shock. We’re overloaded, numb, freaked out, and lost.

Yet, somewhere in this vast cauldron of deception and confusion, ‘the truth is out there,’ as the X-Files put it. This now-famous line has a profound double meaning: it tells us the truth is available and potentially knowable, and that the truth may be far weirder than we imagine.

In this essay, I’ll try to cut through the fog of confusion and fear to examine what is truly broken beyond repair in our society and our world — and also, what isn’t.

The mushrooming failures of modernity

There is a timeless, gorgeous nobility oozing from the souls of most human beings. Rather, our latent nobility is usually suppressed — but it sometimes sneaks out of hiding, usually when people are less defensive or caught up in self-promotion. In my experience, most people are kind, generous, and open-hearted when they’re not pushed to the wall by our infernal, dysfunctional economic and information systems.

That is, the damn broken systems we live under or within — social, economic, educational, mass media, and political — constantly undermine and even attack our inherent human worth. Most modern societies claim to provide increased ‘security,’ yet people everywhere are feeling increasingly INsecure.

Why?

Again, I’d say this is direct evidence that most modern societies have failed to provide basic, necessary ‘common goods’ such as a living wage, excellent healthcare and education, and true social equity for all. Most societies have broken their promise of a ‘better life,’ and instead are focused on providing a much better life for only a tiny minority: the infamous ‘top 1%’.

This is especially true in the US, due to our enslavement to unrestrained capitalism. As a social and economic system, rapacious end-stage capitalism is a miserable failure. It enshrines the very worst aspects of our greedy super-individualism, and greatly rewards the few at the top while ripping off and oppressing the vast majority. Hell, last week Elon Musk’s ‘baby,’ the Tesla corporation, voted to give him the world’s first trillion-dollar pay package. Meanwhile, many Americans are suffering and can’t put food on the table.

That’s utterly c-r-a-z-y. That’s no way to run a successful society.

The US is a destructive, failed state

The US provides the most egregious example of a nation that is SO enmeshed in greed, endless ‘growth,’ and rapacious exploitation of both the natural world and its own citizens that it has totally lost its way. It has lost any semblance of a humane, ‘free’ society that lifts up its citizens and supports their innate goodness and inner strength.

Instead, the US has morphed into a terrorizing monster that bullies, threatens, and even attacks other nations and undermines their economies to prop up our own. Over the past decade, during the ‘reign’ of Donald Trump — and make no mistake, in many ways he still ‘ruled’ during Biden’s presidency from 2021–25 — the US has become one of the most hated and feared nations on the planet. We have become a giant, flaming bully on the world stage.

In addition, the US has utterly failed in its core mission to provide ‘liberty and justice for all.’ For well over a decade, the US has been backtracking on this core mission, and many on the right are working overtime to limit or even steal many citizens’ basic rights and freedoms — such as the rights to personal safety, excellent healthcare, voting, and non-starvation wages.

At this point, it’s safe to say that the US is truly a failed state. And we’re not alone: many other nations are now backsliding into fascism, autocracy, or authoritarianism.

This brings us to the main theme: ‘broken beyond repair.’ Focusing on the US as the prime ‘leading indicator’ for the West, it’s become horribly clear that our US systems of politics, economics, education, and social safety nets are all dysfunctional and are now collapsing.

Every day, the news brings stories of fresh horrors, mass shootings, social atrocities, and ecological devastation. Yet, our primary response is to deny all these problems and double down on our current dysfunction. We deny that global warming and climate change are significant issues (some people even deny they are real at all); we keep expanding gun rights, while overriding all the upset, angry people who object to this rampant insanity; and we keep limiting healthcare and economic equity for the vast majority.

All these issues prove that the US is, indeed, broken beyond repair. And the world’s overall refusal — led by the US — to wean our societies off fossil fuels and support massive, ongoing efforts to develop alternative energy sources shows that modern societies in general cannot cope with the dire realities they’ve instigated and perpetuated. They are just… broken. Shattered.

Our modern systems of economic exploitation of both nature and other people have now proven that they are all broken beyond repair. All around the world, our societies are blithely looking on as the natural world — and increasingly our social worlds as well — collapse around us.

What’s real and NOT ‘broken beyond repair’

Despite all these horrors, I keep returning to a potent realization: true human progress and inner/spiritual growth have always been the province of a few hardy, questing individuals. The New Age dream of ‘mass awakening’ and global enlightenment not only failed to materialize, but today our societies are moving fast toward increased oppression, greed, idiocy, and mass endarkenment.

Still, there are good, conscious people everywhere, doing helpful, aware, conscious things. I have lost all faith in mass evolution and widespread ‘conscious growth,’ but I continue to have strong faith in the growth potential of an inquisitive and determined minority.

. . .

Truly, that is how it has always been. The pipe dream of mass awakening and evolution was just that: a delusional dream. Once again, those of us concerned with ‘awakening’ and deep personal growth are waking up to the fact that only a few human beings currently choose this path. Sadly, the vast majority are unconscious, in denial, and hopelessly ensnared in our many dysfunctional systems — including our failed economic, philosophic, and spiritual systems.

The dream of mass ‘progress’ is now ending… in the midst of fast-growing destruction and dire systemic collapses that we ourselves have caused. Yet oddly, I still have great faith in individual human beings, simply because I’ve witnessed and experienced that deep healing and inner growth are both possible and achievable.

While humanity as a whole seems determined to destroy itself — along with many of the planet’s life forms — the intrepid, questing human spirit still remains. In the midst of dire and worsening collapse, our stupid, heartless social systems are being revealed, in all their brokenness. Most of them are broken beyond repair.

In this situation, the only thing that may help ‘save’ us is deep interpersonal caring, sharing, and healing. It occurs between individuals, and not on the large ‘societal’ level. That’s where our only hope now lies.

That’s what is not ‘broken beyond repair.’

. . .

End note: There’s something else that isn’t broken beyond repair: Earth herself. Humanity may kill off thousands of species, and perhaps even ourselves, but the earth will remain. We will not ‘destroy the earth,’ for our planet is far greater and more powerful than us puny humans, and she will continue to evolve, change, and grow.

Mass extinctions have occurred several times before (we’re now in the sixth extinction), but every time, life rebounded and evolved. Except, perhaps, in the case of all-out global nuclear war, the earth will always survive and repair herself.

—

This post was previously published on Richard Lowenthal’s blog.

***