I’m not going to try and tell you what the truth is, just that there’s a lot more of it out there than we know, and a lot of it effects you.

The trouble is, folk are blind to it.

The inside story of what happened in the hours following the nuclear explosion of Chernobyl got me thinking about this.

Mikhail Gorbachev tells of how he first heard of the real magnitude of the problem from … Sweden.  High radiation readings had set off alarms at the Forsmakr Nuclear Plant more than a 1,000 kilometres away.  Until then, all Gorbachev had been told by local sources, had been, there’s been an accident, a fire – no explosion.

Blindness to nuclear truth is found in two relating stories.  Nuclear experts were given all they needed to work on the problem, but set up their base in a hotel by the Chernobyl plant, even though they should have known better.  Later, Gorbachev realised another blindness.  If radiation from the plant seeped into the groundwater beneath the reactor then there were consequences for all Europe.  It dawned on the regime that the Soviet’s SS-18 nuclear missile was equivalent to 100 Chernobyls, and the Soviet Union possessed 2,700 of them.  Eighteen months after Chernobyl, all missiles with a range of 500 to 5,000 kilometres were retired.

There’s a lot of truth out there and being open to it is critical to life.  That the blindness I’ve just iterated was found in amongst people with keen minds.  It’s a warning for all of us.

I suggest three areas of blindness exist: our relationship to the world in which we find ourselves (ecological blindness), our relationship to one-another as Humans (socio-economic blindness), and to ourselves and the  future Self (spiritual-cultural blindness).  A cameo for each of these: our production of more, faster from finite resources; while it can be said the life of the poor is improving, the gap between the richest and the poorest is increasing across the world and within countries; and, we have never had so much to improve life and never been more despondent as a species.  Three more cameos: we can heal the planet; we can improve the lives of others; and, we can live a life of creativity, enjoyment, and generosity.  (I’ve included some books, below, which spell this hope out better than I can.)

Truth matters, and if we can take it, there is a deeper connectedness to our world, one another, and to our selves coming to us from the future.

Ecological Resources:
The Infinite Resource (Ramez Naam)
Abundance (Peter Diamandis)

Socio-Economic Resources:
The Infinite Resource (Ramez Naam)
The International Bank of Bob (Bob Harris)

Spiritual-Cultural Resources:
The Talent Code (Daniel Coyle)
Mindset (Carol Dweck)