Karen Armstrong, in her book Transformations had introduced me to the concept of RECIPROCITY.

"Fukiyama states that “If the institutions of democracy and capitalism are to work properly, they must coexist within certain premodern cultural habits that ensure their proper functioning” (p. 11). He goes on to say “Law, contract, and economic rationality and prosperity…. must as well be leavened with reciprocity, moral obligation, duty toward community, and trust…. The latter are not anachronisms in a modern society but rather the sine qua non of the latter’s success” (p. 11) According to the sociologist Alvin Gouldner (1960), this norm is nearly universal, and only a few members of society—the very young, the sick, or the old—are exempt from it."

IT IS UNBELIEVABLE to me that our interdependence has seemed to have been lost in the great quest for power and wealth. As we evolved from small groups of hunter-gatherers to villages and empires, and despite a pretence to religious love, we have continued to yearn for wealth and power and to war on each other for thousands of years. And it has not changed, except that the stakes have grown to the habitability of the earth itself.

I have wondered again and again if we are somehow condemned to this although who or whatever created us I could not imagine could be so cruel. But we still are selling coal and oil as hard as we can with a president that cannot even concieve of the issue.

My life has become a constant wondering of how and why this could be.

As an engineer I have an irresistable urge to do what I have learned to do all my life, take the bull by the horns and fix the damn thing, but I cannot find anything to take hold of except to draw attention to the concept of reciprocity and the words, above, by Fukiyama.