Change starts with you

What is the one thing that links our world's social, environmental, political, and economic problems....?

Yip, that's it, us. Human beings.

Is it conceivable that we are at the heart of all of these problems because we have not come to terms with the issues that we as individuals face within ourselves?

Are the major issues that we face as a species and a planet perhaps the result of individuals' inner problems externalised and compounded one upon another?

The Austrian psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl wrote of the "existential vacuum": the emptiness within the individual. I think that it is as a result of the void within that we have created destruction without. In an attempt to create meaning to fill the existential vacuum we are destroying the people, place and structures (physical and metaphysical) that surround us.

How else could we live in a world of oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico, riots at the G20 in Toronto and a never-ending war in Afghanistan?

Only when we respect ourselves will we be able to treat the rest of our world and its inhabitants with the respect that they deserve.