A few weeks ago, we travelled to North Nottinghamshire to visit family and friends. We knew the first few miles would be on our pot-hole infested lanes, but then thought our journey would proceed seamlessly via the M50, M5 M42 M1 and A38.
All went well until Junction 5a of the M42. We were warned of closure but not that there were no diversion signs. They simply took us off on the east side of Birmingham amidst a four-thousand-acre construction site for a railway which aims to cut the travelling time from London to Birmingham by (latest estimate) eight minutes.
So here was I, lost amongst hundreds of other drivers all of us rapidly re-programming our brains’ trying to find another route. It was mayhem on wheels. Despite my sixty-five years of driving around Britain it took me an hour to find the southern end of the M69 and eventually the M1. As I relaxed, I thought there is a lesson of life here: I knew my ultimate destination but for a while I had lost my way towards it.
On the way back I used a phone Ap called ‘Way’s which took me another way around Birmingham, thus proving that not all technology is the work of the Devil.
Talking about losing my way however, made me ask was this chaos my responsibility, or that of the folks who closed a motorway and did not put out diversion signs.
It was always common to play the Blame Game. The first book in the Bible has Adam blaming Eve, who then blamed the Snake. After that and for thousands of years, it was assumed that a person was responsible for their own actions, but that if they got away with serious ‘sins’ in this life, Justice would be meted out in the next.
However, once man accepted the idea that only the material world exists, and that humans evolved from a pond and that everything came about as a result of physical natural forces and blind random events: Logic then led us to presume we had little or no control or responsibility for anything.
That thinking was reinforced through the language of psychology. This then paved the way for psychiatrists and drug companies to provide a modern variety of exorcism. From a priest freeing the mind from unknown devils, was now replaced by a psychiatrist and a pill freeing the mind from disorders occasioned by unknown random evolutionary forces.
This medicalisation of human behaviour, though apparently rational is not leading us in a good direction. Take for example the defendant who claims to have no responsibility for his actions when it suits him, but would take full responsibility were he being praised and awarded honours for other actions. When we pick and choose in this way, we make it harder for a true victim to have their situation addressed.
I conclude by saying thank you to every reader who stayed with me to the end. You are a person who clearly understands that there is an order within life and consciousness.
I have a hope that you also feel you are a spiritual being with a material body, so that when we each answer to God, we do so aware of also knowing of our Social Stewardship responsibilities to others. After all there can be no society if no one is responsible for their own actions.
In that world everybody becomes a victim and then there will be no-one to blame. Not even oneself.
