Are We Willing to Change or Have We Lost the Will to Live?

While I know we human beings have everything we need to transform ourselves as a global society and am on the record for saying this, I do not know with anywhere near the same certainty whether or not we have the collective will. So when I watched this video the speaker caught my ear immediately.

Former editor-in-chief of Discover magazine Stephen Petranek spoke at the annual TED conference in 2002 on “Ten Ways the World Could End.” The video of his talk was just recented posted on the TED website (September 2007). In a segment of his talk titled “We Lose the Will to Survive” Petranek says that according to the World Health Organization “depression is the biggest epidemic facing humanity today.” Watch the entire talk here:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/167

The evidence would suggest that as a species we aren’t willing to change even though we know we need to transform ourselves if we are to survive. Many of us have been serving as evangelists for social transformation for twenty or more years and my own experience would suggest mass unwillingness. What do you think?