Sometimes we are superior and arrogant. Other times we are riddled with self-criticism, self-hatred and long for the destruction of our civilization. We feel proud of our successes and guilty for our past misdeeds. We lack a sense of direction. We have disconnected from nature including our own instinct. We are riddled with victim mentality. Many young people can’t see a positive future. Too many of our organisations are soul-destroying bureaucracies, treating people like cogs in a machine. While we focus on the next press conference and the next quarterly figures, our competitors have their eyes firmly fixed on the horizon. In our desire to protect minorities, we have lost our sense of togetherness. We have suppressed some forms of racism while promoting others. We have lost control of our borders and can’t agree how to manage immigration. We lack the self-confidence to assert basic truths, values and authority, or to make judgements without tying ourselves up in knots. We allow a narrow elite to define what we are and aren’t allowed to think. Many of us live in a spiritual vacuum. Multiculturalism has provided the perfect conditions for religious fascism to take hold.

Birth rates are so low that we are dependent on immigration to provide the generations of the future. We have devalued the feminine and vilified masculinity. We treat women as sex objects. We no longer teach boys to be men and girls to be women through tried and tested rites of passage. The innocence and magic of childhood is fast disappearing. We factory farm our old people, not as elders but as bodies to be kept alive by strangers in industrial care homes. We pretend that we can cheat death by not talking about it and putting our trust in technical medicine. Our education system bores our children stiff. Many of us don’t know our neighbours. We are alienated from the community. We’ve undermined the value of love, care, family and community – anything we can’t reduce to a number on a spreadsheet. Every time you fill your car with petrol, you are haemorrhaging the life force of our creative civilization into religious extremism, terrorism, militarism, corruption and dictatorships.

Our food is unhealthy and cruel to animals. We are wealthier than ever but more and more stressed. Medicine and nursing have neglected care, healing and compassion. Our courts lack democratic accountability. Our governments are becoming more and more controlling and intrusive. We continually vote for more rights and more benefits but choke on the associated responsibilities and taxes. The media pump out a diet of fear, negativity, materialism and bias. We waste energy on a culture war between liberals and conservatives. We treat politicians with contempt and are then upset that they are defensive and insincere. Social mobility is declining. We have a long way to go before the legacy of slavery is history. Welfare has disempowered many of those it should have enabled.

The gap between rich and poor is growing. Our welfare and health systems are financially unsustainable. Multinational corporations and the rich evade taxation. Cabals of vested interests manipulate markets to serve their own interests. We are drowning in debt, mortgaging our future. We have exported much of our industry to Asia. We are squandering the earth’s resources, especially oil and gas. We are polluting our air, land, sea and food. The climate is changing. We have made thousands of species extinct. Our food supply is precarious. We have conquered, invaded and dominated much of the world, imposing our culture with arrogance, racism and self-interest. We are responsible for the genocide of the Native Americans, Aborigines and Jews. More than a hundred million people died in the First and Second World Wars.

We created weapons of mass destruction that could destroy all life. The same weapons make us all vulnerable to nuclear, biological and chemical terrorism. Religious fascists are taking control of our schools and using our media and law to subvert democracy. We preach democracy, freedom and tolerance while imposing our culture, values and interests upon others. America is fast losing its position as the dominant global power. Many welcome that fact, heedless of the chaos and insecurity that will follow. Our brave military has been led by ideologues, narcissists and naive nobodies into counter-productive wars that have lessened our security, harmed our reputation and weakened us.