Humanity will need more mental resilience, more readiness to accept change, reform, betterment, or sacrifice, and less of the inveterate idolatry of custom. It will need more imagination, intelligence, and intuition if it is to understand the pattern which the coming period is certain to assume. Those who suffer from stiffened mental arteries, who are incapable of profiting by past failures, of re-adjusting themselves to these changes and of meeting the new problems, will blunder badly. Whether they like it or not, whether it be for better or for worse, the fact stares them in the face that they are witnessing tremendous disruptive forces at work. They must understand what is happening and be courageous enough to accept intellectually that this is really a period of dramatic upheaval. To scrap old ideas which can have no place in the coming age will prove more profitable in the end. Those who remain foolishly purblind or selfishly prejudiced against what is happening all around them during this critical and swift transition cause themselves unnecessary suffering. They persist at their own peril in the delusion that the old materialistic ways which seemed to suffice before will continue to suffice in the future. For if a sufficient number of people do not accept a readiness to change, sufficient to influence the general social condition, then the entire fabric of society will bring down upon itself the terrible nemesis of violent destruction. Modern civilization as we know it will come to an end, self-liquidated by its own blindness. But its disappearance will be only to clear the ground for the arisal of a new and better one. Thus the coming era will assuredly bring mankind a better world. But whether it arrives at this happy goal through disaster and depopulation or through reason and peace is an unpredictable matter at the moment. It depends on the factor of free will which exists in a man's make-up. The time grows shorter for a conscious selection of the higher concerns of life.
-- Notebooks Category 13: Human Experience > Chapter 4 : World Crisis > # 248
