Walkie-Talkie #11 ‘What Is Wrong With Our World View? Everything, Pretty Much!’
- filipvk
- Feb 26
- 2 min read
Updated: Feb 27
Dear friends,
During this walk, I will delve a little deeper into our current worldview and the reasons why our worldview is not really of great help us to be in a better relation to our living world, our biosphere.
In Walkie-Talkie #10, I gave a few examples of worldviews and their connection to underlying ideas about consciousness and ‘mind’.
I tried to clarify to what degree a worldview or paradigm can have a decisive influence on the relationship between a civilization and the natural world, something that has been emphasized repeatedly by people such as Donella Meadows.
Our current worldview or paradigm, at least in secular industrial societies, is defined by what is called ‘materialism’ in philosophy and science. Materialism is the proposition that the only things that truly exist in this universe are matter (electrons, protons, neutrons, etc.) and the observable and measurable elementary forces (strong and weak nuclear forces, gravity, electromagnetic force).
From this point of view, everything else is just an illusion, something we project onto the world in order to make life in a meaningless universe bearable.
This idea of materialism permeates just about everything in our society, from mainstream science, education, economics, and theoretical frameworks for just about all of our cognitive interpretations of the world.
The ubiquity of this idea is one of the reasons we are barely aware of this paradigm: it is below the radar of our own consciousness.
I will return to this dogma of materialism often (because it has all the characteristics of a religious dogma), as well as to the reasons why this idea is not based on scientific method at all, contrary to what is commonly believed.
Our current materialistic worldview is extremely nihilistic, because it denies the reality of just about everything of value: first and foremost our consciousness itself, which is only an illusion within this paradigm, but also things like love, meaning, purpose, and value.
So it is not surprising that things are not going so well for us and for the world, and that we seek salvation in, for example, the accumulation of possessions and money, as a line of defense against the nihilism that defines our “civilization.”
Thank you for joining me on this walk, and until the next episode!
All the best,
Filip
