Sustainability trend is just latest example of society built on sand: Bird Lovegod

Human society is built on sand, increasingly so, literally and metaphorically, and that is the cause of every single problem you will hear of or read about or watch on a screen today, tomorrow, next week, and until the end of the age.

No civilisation lasts for very long, any student of history will confirm that. All have been built on sand of one kind or another. All have been washed away.

Even when we build our own house, our identity, our personality, our reality, and our businesses and relationships on the Rock, trouble will come. Sometimes more trouble, sometimes less, and sometimes troubles of a different variation. Even so, trouble will come regardless of the foundations we have built upon. The difference is how we respond to those troubles. With faith or fear. With correct actions, or with the continuance of foolish ones.

The foundations also provide the blueprint of how to handle the problems.

Individuals and companies who lack a foundational identity and purpose cannot know who they are.

And if the primary purpose is to make money, how can they exist in anything like a moral fashion? All they have to guide them is greed and self interest. And when conditions change they will just exploit those conditions for the purpose of making more money, no matter the consequences. In the 1980s, the tobacco companies could see the change in conditions they would soon face. How did they respond to this?

They diversified, buying major food companies, and using their same inverted moral compass got people hooked on unhealthy addictive foods. I wonder, when those company executives die, what their excuse will be.

A more recent commercial trend has been for disposability. Be it online matches from dating apps or vapes or food piled high in supermarket bins or tools that break after one use or clothes designed to last one wear we are becoming less durable in what we create and less durable in who we are.

Disposability as a foundational principle has spread into our attitudes and relationships with each other, with the natural world, and with life itself. There’s no reverence in disposability, no respect, no care. No foundation at all. Hence the corresponding increase in identity confusion and mental health issues.

The newest trend is sustainability, which foolishly attempts to rectify the crisis by adding further processes to the disposability trend. So rather than make something of quality, or not make it at all, we look at how we can 'recycle' the disposable tat we compulsively mass produce. Rather than changing the foundation, we add another story of foolishness to the tower. A practice which even the most optimistic cannot fail to see as, ironically, unsustainable.

So what’s the answer? You have the answer, it was given to you at the beginning. Build on the Rock. Personally, individually. That’s the only way. And in doing so, you start to become a new foundation of a new civilisation. That, and only that, is the answer.

This is my last weekly column, it’s been a pleasure. if you would like to keep in touch please visit BirdLoveGod.tv

Bird Lovegod is a business consultant and Christian commentator