“The future does not belong to those who are most technologically advanced, but to those who remain most fully human.”

Recently I attended the viewing of a wonderful documentary called Young@Heart by the British director Stephen Walker. The film follows a seven-week rehearsal schedule of a vocal chorus from a small Massachusetts community preparing for a new performance. The group of approximately two dozen singers travels around the country performing their own renditions of pop and rock songs from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s to packed halls.

A culture’s measure isn’t how loudly it celebrates youth, but how it treats age. When elders become a cost center, life is reduced to numbers—and neglect suddenly feels “practical.”

What is significant about this particular chorus is that the singers’ average age is 80 years old. The oldest is 92. The film is often hilarious, yet at the same time it captures the pathos of our lives’ fragility. Two of the chorus members pass away during the rehearsal period and the viewer is left feeling a deep sympathy for their loss. As a friend said about the film, it captures the contemporary impasse of a large portion of Americans who are simply waiting to die. Here is a group of seniors, their health ravaged by the adverse effects of the “standard American diet,” who remain full of love, kindness, and a lust for life.

The chorus reminds us that purpose is a nutrient. Even in a world of clever machines, nothing replaces the soul’s need to belong, to be useful, and to be loved.

Watch the Young@Heart chorus trailer below.

As a baby boomer sitting in the audience, I could not help but realize that in 20 years I could be in their situation. In fact, it conveys what my entire generation faces. Nevertheless, how often do we meet senior citizens doing something that is part of life’s rejoicing and celebration, who fill their waiting days with such gusto and passion? Usually when we hear the word “seniors,” we conjure images of old wrinkled people who are no longer productive members in our society. They live quiet, unobtrusive lives tucked away in gated communities somewhere in warmer climates. We are only reminded of their forgotten presence from television ads catering to the illnesses generally associated with our later years. Politically, we may hear their voices raised when Social Security or Medicare is threatened, or when their pensions lose money due to high-risk investment speculations. Otherwise, our seniors remain generally mute and abandoned in the shadows of irrelevancy.

The film also exposes how we’ve medicalized aging while de-socializing it. We treat symptoms, but we neglect meaning. When the calendar empties, the real emergency is often the loss of a reason to rise.

Yet, as I watched Young@Heart, I realized seniors are still relevant. The enthusiastic applause from their audiences makes the singers feel they are individually greater than the composite of an age and illness. There are hidden qualities in each of us that solely want expression for their own sake and want to make the world a more pleasant place, and not in order to prove ourselves best or better than anyone else. These people are manifesting just that. Then I am reminded again of all the seniors who don’t have a chorus to sing in or who don’t have true friends who can share their company. And now we witness greater and greater numbers of seniors without sufficient money to sustain their bodies’ proper nourishment, to pay for inflated drug costs, or to meet the rising fuel prices to keep their homes warm.

Applause restores agency. It says you are more than diagnoses and actuarial tables. No technology can substitute for that simple human recognition: “I see you.”

Parallel to the diminishing health and resources of our elders, I observe a growing segment of individuals among my generation—the children of our seniors’ “Greatest Generation”—who have no sense of knowing when more is enough. Regardless of how far they have climbed on the social ladder or how above average their salaries are, they still take advantage of speculative gambling in hedge funds and quick revenue-generating investments in food commodities, fuel, and housing that have a direct impact on the lives of others. In fact, their exploitation of quick wealth opportunities hinders our seniors from the very things needed to raise them from an austere existence. In the first section of this book, “The Boomer Dilemma,” I map out the historical terrain and the deep psychological underpinnings of the boomer generation that has brought America to the critical juncture we face today. Only by understanding the history of the boomers’ development, their change in values, and what they have become in the 21st century, can we begin to shine a light on the actions necessary to bring about positive change.

Here is the contradiction: unprecedented wealth, yet unmet basic needs. We built systems excellent at producing commodities and increasingly poor at producing character.

Although I am embarrassed by some of the excuses of my generation, I am far more concerned about the future of our children and their children. It is for the benefit of future generations that I devote so much of my work in writing and directing controversial film documentaries about our social and institutional diseases and dis-ease. It is my opinion that we have yet to imagine the dire nightmare that looms ahead for the younger generation when it is their turn to receive the mantle of social and political governance left by the legacy of aging boomers.

This is the boomer dilemma: confusing comfort with entitlement, security with superiority. The tragedy isn’t wanting safety; it’s wanting it without conscience—until society becomes a marketplace of competing fears.

Later that same evening, after watching Young@Heart, I returned to my office and watched the news. There were two horrid stories. One was about a group of 12-year-old girls who filmed themselves beating up a classmate. The other story was about a student who attacked a teacher while the other classmates egged her on. Labeling these children as “monsters” completely misses the urgency of our social crises. It is far more important to realize that our children are the products of our generation’s making. The real monsters are the institutions we have created, such as our failing political, educational, multimedia, medical, and religious systems, and the social values and motivations of the people who build and control them.

Those news stories are symptoms. Children learn what adults reward. If culture rewards spectacle and humiliation, then spectacle and humiliation become the curriculum—long before school begins.

Several of our nation’s courageous social critics, such as Morris Berman and Susan Jacoby, have—against much criticism—poignantly identified the growing anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism ravaging all levels of American society. Our current president and his cabinet are exemplary cases and confirm Mark Twain’s remark, “There are no common people except in the highest spheres of society.”

Berman and Jacoby point to more than ignorance: the loss of inner standards. A society that disrespects reason loses its immune system against manipulation; propaganda need only distract, not persuade.

In 1965 approximately seventy-five percent of students entering college said they were pursuing higher education in order to discover something meaningful in life. In 2005 this same percentage of college students stated their goal was to become wealthy. In her book The Age of American Unreason Susan Jacoby notes that a recent National Science Foundation survey reported that one out of five Americans believe the sun revolves around the Earth. In addition, approximately half of young adults between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four are unable to locate Iraq on a map, and surprisingly, many are unable to find the United States.

This shift from meaning to money is a shift in identity. When the self becomes a brand, life becomes an audition. And when algorithms optimize attention, they can quietly decide what we notice and value.

There is something seriously wrong with this scenario and it forecasts a pending civic disaster on the future horizon. American culture is undergoing a collective, negative learning. The theory that each succeeding generation is actually regressing in its learning can be observed most clearly among today’s college students. A recent study of 14,000 college students, across fifty American campuses, was published under the title “The Coming Crisis in Citizenship” by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. The findings show that today’s students are generally ignorant about American history and the institutions that govern our society. This finding didn’t come as a great surprise to me; however, what I found alarming is that the students from the most elite universities, Yale, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, Brown, UC Berkeley, etc.—performed far below students at lesser-known colleges. In fact, the schools in the top ranking include some I have never heard of: Rhodes College, Grover City College, Calvin College, etc.

Ignorance at scale becomes policy. A public unable to distinguish evidence from opinion is easily led into war, panic, or scapegoating. Civic literacy is not trivia—it is survival.

This study suggests that the principles for rational and spiritual character development, which contribute greatly to the healthy moral development of a society, are less among students raised in privileged families. I believe one of the reasons is that many of our so-called brightest students today believe they are entitled to a prestigious education without having to achieve personal merit through hard work and effort. Yet this goes back to our present “culture of entitlement” that has raised them. Unfortunately, because our elite universities are held in such high esteem, we perpetuate a myth that these are the individuals best suited to run our institutions in the future.

Elite education does not guarantee moral development. Privilege can insulate people from consequences, and insulation breeds numbness. When merit is replaced by entitlement, leadership becomes performance.

On the flip side, faith in doctrinal laws dominates reason, and this is most evident in the continual growth of religious fundamentalist thinking. Our political arena is now one of the most fertile fields for faith-based missionary activity; politically motivated religion’s underlying intention is to impose irrational laws upon human nature, with the ultimate goal to subvert American society at large. We are dressing ourselves in seventeenth-century garb—either as Puritans or Pirates—and charging blindly back to the past under a banner blazoned with “Forward.” When we cease to find pleasure in entertaining our curiosities to learn about ourselves and the planet, the world again becomes flat. “No people,” said Thomas Jefferson, “can be both ignorant and free.”

Fundamentalism offers certainty without inquiry. But certainty is often fear in formal clothing. When ambiguity becomes intolerable, people surrender freedom to anyone promising simple answers.

The pursuit in frivolous, virtual entertainment devoid of any higher purpose offers nothing for authentic character development. Instead, it has increasingly numbed our senses and buried the innate gifts each of us is born with. When the mind and senses are no longer active and vital throughout the majority of a population, life in society is no longer worth living. It becomes abyssus abyssum invocat—“hell calling hell,” which invokes the Dutch painter Bosch’s subjects wallowing gleefully in the chaos and confusion of distorted earthly delights. Until such a time arrives when we can be completely honest about how dysfunctional we have become, how empty of basic wisdom, we will continue our downward spiral.

Entertainment becomes harmful when it is used as anesthesia. Flooded with stimuli, we lose the ability to sit with ourselves. Conscience weakens, because conscience requires silence and honest feeling.

The people who have the wisdom and courage to make the difficult decisions to implement real change, such as Ralph Nader, Ron Paul, and Dennis Kucinich, only received a small fraction of support from American voters. Instead, Democrats and Republicans equally display their support for the leaders most invested in corporate interests with an illusion that these individuals will bring about the real changes our times demand. The public has neither the patience nor vital curiosity to hear truth. Truth today is a sword of Damocles waved above their heads, and it is far easier to satisfy ourselves with blind faith in sound bites, catchy slogans, and the media’s unlearned commentaries than to hear truths that compel us to make dramatic changes in our lives. And there can be no essential change from the current, popular political promises resounding through the air waves, such as additional government subsidies that court the public’s demands for entitlement. While these perks may soothe some of our fears for a little while, they fail to address the fundamental infrastructure that is in dire need of repair.

Courageous voices are marginalized because their solutions demand responsibility. The public is trained to want comfort, not transformation. Media that chases metrics rewards outrage over depth, because depth monetizes poorly.

Today, the infrastructure that most requires mending is the infrastructure of consciousness, an infrastructure that needs to be cleansed of discredited and aging mythologies that continue to be enthroned as ontological and cosmological truths.

Consciousness is infrastructure: it shapes policy, parenting, medicine, and the stories we live by. If the inner life is colonized by fear and greed, no external reform can hold.

How did we reach this point in history when we can no longer discern authentic truth, when reason has been subverted by ignorance, where insecurity, instantaneous pleasures, and the rejection of personal responsibility for uplifting others have become the norm? This book is intended to be a mirror to help answer these questions. I hope we will perceive accurate reflections of what we have become. I hope we can equally observe the signs pointing to our authentic, true nature. This book is not meant to make us feel bad or angry about ourselves; rather its purpose is to bring a spiritual shock and awe that is so desperately needed today.

When truth becomes hard to recognize, it’s often because we prefer comforting narratives. Wisdom takes time—and modern systems try to erase time in the name of efficiency.

The contemporary theologian Matthew Fox outlined succinctly the predicament of our personal responsibility toward ourselves and others. It is no longer sufficient for us to simply say, “Forgive us for we know not what we do.” Rather, the mantra today should be, “Forgive us for we do not do what we know we should do.” It is our apathy, complacency, and deep-seated fear of change that prevents us from taking that initial step forward to act as we ought to act.

Fox’s reframing is a scalpel: we often know what’s right, but postpone it. We call postponement “realism,” when it is fear. Purpose begins when we stop bargaining with what we already know.

No major social issue, such as poverty, the drugging of our nation and children, the war in Iraq and other global conflicts, and all the political, health, and educational crises, can change for the better until we as individuals change. Our systems for social and environmental sustainability are collapsing. We are utterly bankrupt, borrowing more than we actually have.

It is tempting to hope solutions will arrive from above. But systems are made of people, and people are made by values. Until we practice integrity and restraint, institutions will mirror our inner disorder.

Brutal reality television programs have become postmodern gladiatorial sports, sanctioned by our culture because they provide us with a means to escape our hectic, busy lives and to give us an excuse for not awakening from our cultural dream.

Reality TV is instructive: it teaches humiliation as entertainment and empathy as weakness. When attention becomes currency, people will trade dignity for visibility—and call it normal.

The addict with collapsed veins who has no money to get his next fix is at a moment of great opportunity to allow healing to begin. But the needle and drug must go. And just like the addict, we must free ourselves from our addictions and face this road to recovery. It will not be pleasant. Contrary to the dictates of many popular pundits of supercilious, materialist spirituality—packaged as if lost secrets—it will not be an easy journey. Indeed, it will test us to the very core of our being.

The addict metaphor removes illusions. An addict cannot negotiate with the substance; it must go. A culture addicted to distraction cannot “balance” its addiction—it must confront it.

I have attempted to outline clearly to everyone, regardless of the generation a person finds him or herself born into, all of the tools that are needed to reclaim our dignity and return as spiritually realized members of the human race. Each of us possesses qualities that are universal—love and compassion, kindness and nurturance—and these can generate harmony throughout the human community when they are brought to consciousness and acted upon. This book, therefore, is intended to provide and strengthen us with essential insights that will enable us to personally transform ourselves and thereby allow us to experience remarkable realizations of how extraordinary we really are.

These tools are tools of remembrance—of our capacities and responsibilities. In an age of intelligent machines, purpose is the discipline of living from conscience rather than convenience.

We are living in a moment when external power is rising alongside a quiet internal decline. Artificial intelligence is not a moral force; it is a multiplier. It enlarges whatever values already dominate a culture. So the defining question of this era is not what machines will be able to do, but what we will choose to become.

If we restore meaning—through community, disciplined attention, ethical restraint, and reverence for life—then powerful tools can serve creative ends. If we do not, no amount of innovation will save us from ourselves, because the failure will not be technical. It will be a failure of conscience.

“Technology can amplify intelligence, but it cannot supply wisdom. Only a conscious human being can do that.”

Action Steps

• Set a daily appointment with silence: ten to 20 minutes without screens, news, or input—just reflection.
• Choose one act of contribution each week that is not transactional: mentor, volunteer, help a neighbor, support an elder.
• Audit your media diet the way you would audit food: reduce what numbs; increase what strengthens discernment and empathy.
• Practice “enough”: one concrete simplification in consumption, spending, or status-seeking that frees energy for meaning.
• Strengthen civic literacy: read primary sources, study history, and resist slogans that replace thought.

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Dr. Gary Null is host of the nation’s longest running public radio program on alternative and nutritional health and a multi-award-winning documentary film director, including his recent Last Call to Tomorrow. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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