A civilisation can achieve extraordinary success in technology, science, wealth, and exploration, yet still move closer to conflict, ecological crisis, and inner dissatisfaction. The missing piece is understanding the human being who creates, chooses, invents, and consumes. Technology and policy can improve efficiency, but they cannot resolve the endless psychological drive for more. Climate change, overconsumption, and misuse of innovation arise from an unexamined human center. Lasting solutions require large-scale self-education, honesty, and deeper awareness of human motives, because the root of global problems lies not only in systems and tools, but in the consciousness that operates them.
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Questioner: Cambridge Union has witnessed discussions and debates that shaped empires, ended wars, and reimagined societies. Every great speaker who has stood in this chamber, Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, Stephen Hawking, came with a vision for the world. Standing in the Union right now, what is it that you most want the world to hear?
Acharya Prashant: See, the world has been trying everything, everything, and has done that very successfully over, especially, the last 200 years. What have these attempts been for? The attempts have been in the direction of technology, geographical expansion, space exploration, prosperity, and the West has been especially successful. The question today that we were dealing with was: what more do we need to do if where we stand seems to be a place of explosion, if all that we have done seems to have brought us just closer to extinction and eventual annihilation?
So, what more do we need to do? And it was glad that we could see that mass-based education of the self remains probably the only thing we have not yet tried. And that's where the solution lies. All else that we have done is not wasteful, not unnecessary, but just not sufficient. Right?
