Perhaps the world is not so much spinning out of control but that it was never really within our control anyway. The former days of Empire gave the illusion of global control, and while our colonial masters of old were efficacious through a sheer Nietzschean will to rule combined with a sense of manifest destiny, even they could not hold onto their Empire for long.

We once believed that we could take God’s point of view, manage the affairs of the world and pass righteous judgement upon its actions. Today we are learning that we do not possess the mental bandwidth or information processing capacity to cast our minds upon upon the whole. The illusion of the immateriality of the mind arrogates us to believe that we can transcend the limitation of our locality through thought and thereby pass righteous judgement upon the world. We are now forced to reckon that the act of knowing itself is confined by all too material limitations. No sooner does one plane crash than does another army invade. The globe’s vision blurs as the buzz of events prove elusive to catch. Too much chatter and arguments reduces to white noise, we find ourselves drowned in a sea of endless information, which to sift through would be as pointless as attempting to drain the sea of its water by teaspoon scoops.

The knowledge of good and evil was the fruit of Original Sin, perhaps our original sin is to seek to be like god and to claim a knowledge of global good and evil. Yet knowledge only gives the illusion of divinity, and all it has created are pockets of Cassandras, ineffectually prophesying into the storm of chatters.

Perhaps it is enough to turn our limited bandwidth to that portion of this world which it is given to us to manage, and leave the world to divine providence.

The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.

T.S. Eliot, “The Rock”