On a World Increasingly Ungovernable: Like the weather, ominous in its extremes

 

• An authoritarian prime minister of a country once dominant on the world stage is booed by the crowd at a national mixed martial arts fight. His country is shrinking, due to emigration by its most educated and mobile and a death rate significantly higher than its birth rate.
• In another country the focus of a war for most of a decade, grievous crimes against women are rarely prosecuted.
• In this country... well, there is a lot of disturbing news to be read about problems of governance, cut-backs, and you name it.

Our local newspaper is smaller, but I'm sure its website is bigger -- I just haven't gotten in the habit of going over to it. Despite fewer articles in the hard copy edition, the trend is clear. "the world is becoming increasingly ungovernable," and, like the weather, ominous in its extremes.

 

...progress is achieved through the development of three participants—the individual, the institutions, and the community. Throughout human history, interactions among these three have been fraught with difficulties at every turn, with the individual clamouring for freedom, the institution demanding submission, and the community claiming precedence. Every society has defined, in one way or another, the relationships that bind the three, giving rise to periods of stability, interwoven with turmoil. Today, in this age of transition, as humanity struggles to attain its collective maturity, such relationships—nay, the very conception of the individual, of social institutions, and of the community—continue to be assailed by crises too numerous to count. The worldwide crisis of authority provides proof enough. So grievous have been its abuses, and so deep the suspicion and resentment it now arouses, that the world is becoming increasingly ungovernable—a situation made all the more perilous by the weakening of community ties.

 

Universal House of Justice, 28 December 2010

 

 

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