The 21st Century Global Crisis: Laying out the Foundations for a New World Civilization - Jorge Armand

A set of new epistemological insights is outlined that would be needed to understand and to act upon the root causes of this crisis, such as the oneness of Reality, the diversity within the oneness of Reality, the impermanency of all phenomena and the relativity of time and space. [...] In the first place, these academic milieu and institutions would have to abandon modernity’s foundational myth, which was named the Myth of Eternal Progress (Armand, 2014), and the modern practice of over-emphasizing the economic and technological variables of human existence to the detriment of fundamental values, which is the origin of both the disruption of that existential system and the curre. [...] If the permanent creation of ever greater variety of needs leads to a chronic feeling of emptiness and anxiety in the majority of modern individuals, especially in the comfortable and well-to- 87 Journal of Bhutan Studies, Vol.47, Winter 2022 do classes, among economically and socially marginalized individuals, the same leads to frustration and violence, one of the causes of the steadily increasin. [...] The fact that roughly 86% of world’s goods is consumed by scarcely a fifth of the world’s population, and the well-known fact that a large part of these goods is produced using raw materials and labor from the poorest nations of the world (Credit Suisse, 2012), proves that the origin of world hunger and poverty are not to be found in the population explosion. [...] 90 The 21st Century Global Crisis Self-development, on the other hand, implies - apart from building the material structures for the satisfaction of the actual material needs of the people - preserving the national culture and the natural environment.