Following last week's podcast on what makes you successful we had one person ask us how that related to having a successful life. This is totally different. The first is being materially successful in the society in which we find ourselves. However the ultimate aim in life is peace of mind. The more pleasure we seek and potentially the more we seek to achieve to acquire pleasure and happiness the less peace of mind we have. Peace of mind comes form functioning as nature intended ,by reproducing and focusing on family and community. Work and career needs to fall into the 'good enough without deal breakers' category otherwise it will consume everything else and it is no wonder CEOs are often psychopaths who don't care about other people. Some people will seek immortality for peace of mind by changing the pages of history. The rest of us must settle for having families. The problem is that our instant gratification society of materialism atomises structure and encourages introspection and vapourises family, social, cultural , religious values and as a result no one knows what to think and need more artificial regulation such as laws to make up for it while we become more and more unhappy so that depression has risen to the biggest cause of illness world wide. What we need therefore is proper leadership with common identity and structure however democracy has increasingly failed to do this becoming an ever increasing hot bed for political correctness. Evolution has already given us the answer with the development of religion which has been so successful it ironically spawned the instrument of its own destruction ie materialism. We need to work out how to bring back the principles of religion so that we can focus on family and community while celebrating differences amongst individuals. Communism and neo Marxists make the fundamental error that we are all the same, all opinions are equally valid, therefore those ahead in life have taken advantage of others and need to be deposed and change must be rapid. We are ofcourse different with different attributes and abilities but we have the same rights. Unless we can bring back some of our religious values the only other viable alternative would be benevolent dictatorship but that is a very hard balance to achieve as it is a facsimile of religion without allowing for the power of the abstract in causing fear based compliance. Dictatorship has to make it real. Unless us humans get out act together then we will go the same way all civilisations have gone before us. Everything has a sigmoidal life span and Apple Microsoft and our current civilisation have already enjoyed our rapid acceleration phases. The danger is now we are at our plateau and unless we developed insight and ability to change we will drop off the edge and then another civilisation or indeed species will have a go.