Ubuntu Can Make the World a Better Place- But What is it?

North Korea will strike South Korea if they perform their live-fire drill.  This statement scares me.  In a world full of greed, poverty, disease, and war, is there a way to make it better?  The answer is: yes.  There is hope for humanity.  And the key is empathy.  Ubuntu is a traditional African Philosophy that offers us an understanding of ourselves in relation with the world.  There is a common bond that exists between us, according to Ubuntu, and through this bond, through our interaction with our fellow human beings, that we discover our own human qualities.  A person is a person through other persons, according to the philosophy, which means we become human when we sense how another person is feeling, in other words, it is empathy.  This idea ties directly into what Jeremy Rifkin explains in this video.  He says that we evolve as a society because we acknowledge other humans due to empathy.

What this means to me, is that Ubuntu and empathy and make the world a better place.  We, as humans, already do this.  When the earthquake hit in Haiti, millions of people came to aid for those people.  I want to know how to make the world a better place.  And some people do not believe that this is possible.  But there is hope for humanity.  Through Ubuntu and empathy, the world will be a better place.  What is your idea of a perfect world, a utopia? Well, as I have learned, if human beings can extend their empathy to the entire human race, as one big extended family (seeing how we all come, genetically from the same lady) that would be the greatest Utopia of all.  Jeremy Rifkin's video was a real eye opener to show that the world can be a better place, it's not impossible. 

 

Look At All the Lonely People

The internet.  Is it just an extension of the human mind, spanning a global network?  Or is the internet a virtual world, where people come to escape their real life problems?  Erza Klein wrote an article, called "Being 'Fully' Human Online", where he explains that the internet is basically a world that humans have created where we can interact.  Interacting with others is what makes us uniquely human.  Socializing is what we yearn for and the internet is a place where those characteristics are exemplified.  I feel as if this is a great definition for what it means to be human.  This seems to be one part of the puzzle: Human beings are social creatures.  

However, Roger Ebert has a slightly different take on the internet, which sheds some light on a different part of humanity.  In "All the Lonely People", it talks about how if someone is lonely, what they will do in this day and age: go on the internet.  Some people might jump to a conclusion about anyone who spends all of their time on the internet, replacing reality for a virtual world.  However, there are stories behind those people that caused them to become lonely.  "Companionship. Love. Recognition." That is what human begins long for, as Ebert stated.  It seems to be the more advanced human beings become, the more those three things become necessary.  Just like how the body needs food, the mind needs satisfaction of those three things.  If somehow, they aren't felt by a human, they sometimes become lonely.

The internet.  Is it just an extension of the human mind, spanning a global network?  Or is the internet a virtual world, where people come to escape their real life problems?  I think it is a great example of what makes us humans: being social creatures.