It is 2012. We did not establish human life on the moon, in space, or on mars. We did not stabilize the geopolitical arena. We not only failed to understand or preserve our environment, we rapaciously assaulted it in nearly every way we could think of. We have detonated over 2000 nuclear weapons. Our educational systems and the paradigms that they enforce are draconic and ineffective. Our prisons are swollen and contagious, like those who ‘enforce’ what passes for law in our time.

Not only did technology fail to solve our problems, it magnified them far out of proportion, just as it continues to. We are serving machines, and competing directly with them for attention and survival. Everywhere.

Our work does not result in the acquisition of protection, comfort, health care, or education. It is squandered on bizarre wars involving corporate profiteers and computer-controlled assassins. It disappears into the purses of individuals capable of acquiring it directly. It nourishes the machinery of privilege and the rampant embodiments of national power.

Diseases of every kind run rampant in our populations.

We have failed entirely to even act skillfully, let alone intelligently. We are continuing to fail, more severely, each passing day. Human intelligence is hemorrhaging and no one has been paying any attention. As this process proceeds, we are making more severe and consequential mistakes, serially, and in parallel. We need to understand what is destroying our capacity for insight and problem-solving.

There is no paradisiacal future being brought on a platter from on high. We and our children are going to inherit precisely what we are assembling as nations and a species; our fantasies of omnipotent luxury empowered and provided by machines are going the way of the passenger pigeon.

If we do not pay the most intense sort of attention to these matters, and actually develop and demonstrate some degree of the intelligence we boast so endlessly (to ourselves) of, I suspect we may soon follow them.