“Civic Ventures has opened nominations for the 2008 Purpose Prize. The Prize provides five $100,000 and ten $10,000 awards to U.S. residents over 60 who are creating innovation solutions to address society’s most pressing problems – domestically and abroad.
We’re looking for adults in the second half of life who are combining their creativity and experience to tackle some of the world’s biggest challenges.”
I subscribe to this non-profit list serv where members post any grants, scholarships, jobs, volunteerships, etc. related to the non-profit world. Saw a interesting post where youth would be rewarded for creative social engineering.
On one level this is certainly empowering for those who wish to open pathways for the socially disenfranchised where only roadblocks exists. The poor, the minorities, the women, the diseased all have a social burden to carry in civilizations around the world. It is human nature and the soul’s nature to extend ourselves and our advantages to others less fortunate.
On another level I understood that this kind of encouragement is dangerous and all too pervasive in modern society. Many times in the form of altruistic activist movements. The danger lies not only in the potential harm that can be done in producing the wrong solution (see Third Reich and Communism), but the assumptions on which they are founded can cause tremendous spiritual damage – more specifically leading us to major identity crisis.
The assumptions that these modern altruistic endevours encourage are:
- Successful social and life is a product of human ingenuity
- We in modern society are qualified to institute social change
- There is no relationship between the spiritual and social
- There is no benchmark for social progress or lack thereof (i.e., there is no ideal social system)
- Social problems can be solved through patchwork and don’t require major transformation of value systems
These are just some thoughts rattling in my head on this subject for quite some time. I believe the Vedas or that body of knowledge and science manifested in Indo-Aryan civilization provides a completely alternative and time-tested means to understand social problems, the assumptions and qualifications required to implement a healthy social body and the values required of citizens to sustain it. Maybe sometime later I will get into that a bit more.
That being said, I don’t proclaim at all that there is no place for social change and entrepreneurship in Vedic culture. Every principle has to be applied to time, place and circumstance. However the underlying assumptions and ultimate purpose must be immutable and perfect and must always be at the forefront of social adjustments otherwise our solutions will only serve to agitate the problems or ‘engineer’ new ones.
